DigitalOcean

“I have no idea how anyone's gonna make any money ever. Right. I just don't get it. You know, the only one I think makes money on this is like, I spend a lot on digital ocean because now that my data is more valuable, I use even more data.”

“My bot is running about three grand a month of infrastructure, database, App servers, et cetera.”

“The answer is it's Postgres. My Postgres bill is the thing that's gone up the most. It's databases.”

“DigitalOcean was built entirely on SEO farm. So was Zapier and others.”

“Not every product must be a painkiller to be successful. Candy sells really well. A good example of this is gaming, right? Video games, mobile games on your phone. That's candy, right? It's giving you a quick dopamine hit. Like, you can make a lot of money sel…”

“To understand if you are building candy vitamins or painkillers, you need to take a design first approach where you're out, engaged in market, talking with customers, ideally before you write a line of code.”

“The 600,000 customers I mentioned earlier, that really doesn't even sound like a lot. So we even at DO with that 600,000 customer base, even have a long way to go.”

“Our customers that spend over 50 dollars, just 50 dollars, right? We're not talking about any comments here, et cetera. A month, you know, outpace our company growth.”

“So you see like they, you know, their NRR, their NDR, if you will is, is a factor higher than our lower spending customers.”

“If an SMB, it's that conversion of the FTO or free trial offer to pay that creates an uplift in, in overall customer value. And that, that point is a very key inflection where we expand via sales assisted, if you will, motion with more use cases, Multi-product…”

“We bring over 30,000 customers a month. In via self-serve, you know, think about that, you know, and sometimes I think about it like portfolio companies, which they had 30,000 customers total, you know, and this is what we're doing in a month.”

“The difference though, is we enrich with data every single customer that comes through that funnel. To determine propensity and if they would benefit from a human touch, right? And if you will, sales assisted”

“Support as a lead source is, is incredibly valuable. Our support function talks to more customers than anyone in our business.”

“This customer went from 276 dollars to spend to over two to about 200,000 a month over the course of about a year and a half, right? Maybe two years.”

“The automated way is, okay, this customer is growing, right? Like this customer has bought one product, they've been five dollars or 50 dollars for three months, and now there's a hundred dollars, a 120 dollars. It's a very simple and easy trigger to say, this…”

“We use a number of different things. I would say the three major ones are LinkedIn sales nav. Zoom info. Crunchbase. So those are really the three major Yeah. Three major tech and tools.”

“We have a team of 30 or so, you know, again, they're also doing that data enrichment, by the way.”

“It's like, Hey, I noticed you're growing. What else can I sell you? Versus I noticed you're growing. Tell me why and tell me how that's inflecting your business. And there's a mutual understanding and appreciation for, Caring about their business and why they'…”

“Unequivocally, it's, it, the biggest mistake is just a lack of orchestration and communication around the customer journey.”

“And the practical reality is, if the process at some point does not exceed the rate of change in the business, the burn rate's gonna go up, the growth rate for revenue's gonna go down. It's just an axiom. It will happen.”

“So the things that make you successful to get product market fit and get the ball rolling in that first million dollars of revenue and the first few customers and the first ten million actually are going to be the enemy as you get to series B, get the 30,000,0…”

“You know, this most recent company that I've been a part of, we went public very early because of this issue.”

“If you actually don't delegate to them, and have them execute the strategy, and they have them build a team, it's going to get bogged down. The growth rate will slow, and the burn rate will go up.”

“But by far, I'd say the one in two that I've seen are AWS, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. And then there's, you know, Heroku, DigitalOcean, and Azure that I see as kind of a second tier.”

“I think it was around 31 dollars. It was enough to cover our two, I guess, like, five dollar a month DigitalOcean instances.”

“Last year we did over two hundred million in revenue, and that's seven years since we started.”

“We've had over a million all-time customers, over 500,000 that are active every single month”

“Some of our largest accounts are spending over a million dollars a year with us.”

“We've written a couple thousand tutorials on how to leverage open source, and chances are you've read some of these articles, ah, searching for different solutions, and we write about databases, we write about different data storage, ah, engines, but we also w…”

“And so we have a really high NPS score of nearly 70, which means that people really love this service, and so they do a great job of introducing it to a friend.”

“I think we had a good run in terms of we spoke to about 10 to 15 investors in each of our rounds”

“We've raised one hundred and twenty three million. And I think we've raised roughly like three hundred million in debt”

“We still to this day use debt to buy all of our servers and storage and networking equipment, all the capex for the business because it just, it's that much cheaper rather than taking on the dilution and bringing on an equity investor.”

“The virtual machine, which was essentially the start of DigitalOcean, is now starting to slowly begin to kind of phase, you know, phase out, and you're starting to see containerized applications become much more dominant.”

“Kelsey Hightower, one of the core contributors to Kubernetes and over at Google, our friendly company, actually surveyed a bunch of different providers delivering Kubernetes services and said that DigitalOcean provides the best developer experience And is the …”

“Our remote employees are just one or two points more engaged than our in-office employees.”

“I think for us in our roadmap, we have to deliver a GPU based solution first, and we're working on that right now.”

“That roadmap has taken a lot longer to deliver than I expected. I thought it was a one-year roadmap. It took us more like five”

“So, to date, we've published 1500 tutorials that talk about how to leverage open source software. We're educating developers worldwide on how to write code, how to deploy applications, And we're drawing in four million unique visitors a month to this community…”

“And even to this day, over half of our customer signups come through a word of mouth recommendation, keeping our cost of acquisition really low and essentially creating a viral component to our business, which is really unheard of to think about, you know, a u…”

“The virtual machines that run on our cloud the majority of the software that's loaded on them is also open source.”

“In the majority of the servers that we use, we don't own directly either, and, you know, the banks actually own those physical assets”

“So, we're actually the fastest growing cloud provider on the planet today, and that's because we've built an experience that looks like nothing else that's out there.”

“It's the interaction that a user has that really, ah, reigns supreme here, and that's what each one of our companies actually owns is that touch point with the user. As far as they're concerned, you know, it's DigitalOcean, it's Airbnb you know, it's local, lo…”

“And the community that we've created, it draws nearly three million, ah, visitors per month at this point.”

“There are two or three popular ones. And it's kind of like, you know, Silicon used to build processors. No one has a substantially faster CPU than anyone else you know, today. And the same thing happens in virtualization. Everyone's virtualization engine is, i…”

“So we have cloud credits from Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean and maybe some others and then every company that comes through will be able to incorporate and create a bank account with, through Stripe Atlas.”

“Moisey is the co-founder and chief product officer at DigitalOcean, the second largest and fastest-growing cloud computing platform, with more than 700,000 developers, having deployed more than twenty million cloud servers.”

“Every single cloud provider was, you know, a bit clunky. It wasn't really elegant. It wasn't something that you enjoyed using”

“We remember, you know, having one of our Series A, You know, potential investors come by and had like our technical due diligence and this person had this huge technical background and we're sitting there shitting our pants thinking, oh my God, he's going to l…”

“Most great companies start off with bad ideas. Otherwise, everybody would be doing it, and there wouldn't be any space for you.”

“A crowded market space means lots of customers, so I think there's always an opportunity to look at those spaces, especially if you firmly believe that The product that they'built is not one that you personally want to use.”

“We finally sent an update after we hit product market fit, said, hey, we hit 500 K in annual revenue, and then basically, at that At that point, it took him three weeks to get back to me, which was unusual. And by the time we came into the office, we said, yea…”

“The two investors that we loved the most was Jerry Chan from Greylock and Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz.”

“First of all, I mean, those are both top tier VC firms. They have tremendous portfolio companies and a great reputation. So all of that was kind of table stakes. So it really was about the personal relationship with that individual, how well they understood th…”

“I mean, because that's the one that as a startup you have to read because that's going to give you the secret to big, to beat out those big incumbent companies. Everything else is Kind of structures into that. That's the one that you need to really understand …”

“Any relationship that you have prior to founding a company, whether it's brother or husband and wife, best friends, whatever that relationship looks like before the company, it will look like that during the company, except it's like pouring fuel on the fire. …”

“I think the biggest unexpected challenge is one that continues is how your personal relationship to the company and your role continues to evolve and change and how it's really difficult to guess what it's going to look like in the future. And then when you fi…”