Ben Uretsky
Co-founder & Former CEO, DigitalOcean. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@benuretsky ↗LinkedIn ↗digitalocean.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Ben Uretsky co-founded DigitalOcean in 2011 alongside his brother Moisey Uretsky and led the cloud infrastructure provider as CEO from inception through rapid global growth and a Techstars accelerator stint. Prior to DigitalOcean, he co-founded the managed hosting company ServerStack.
2shows
4appearances
29statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
Everything Ben Uretsky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Uretsky: Kelsey Hightower rated DigitalOcean's Kubernetes UX superior to Google's
“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 …”
Ben Yuretsky: DigitalOcean Is World's Fastest Growing Cloud Provider
“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.”
Uretsky: AWS is difficult to use and has a steep learning curve
“While AWS is a great tool, there's a pretty big steep learning curve. It's difficult to use, as I said.”
Ben Uretsky: DigitalOcean finances all capex with debt to avoid equity dilution
“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.”
Uretsky: Virtual machines are phasing out as containers become dominant
“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.”
Uretsky: Cloud providers will struggle with multi-tenancy in serverless architectures
“In order for that transformation to happen, I think the cloud providers, Are gonna have a hard time trying to figure out the multi-tenancy, ah, part of the equation, but that's certainly where the world is headed, and in functions, you can already begin to see…”
Uretsky: Over half of DigitalOcean's signups come from word-of-mouth recommendations
“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…”
Uretsky: VMware's vCloud failed to gain traction due to its proprietary nature
“If we were running a VMware cloud, it wouldn't make sense to run open source, ah, on top of it, which is why I think VMware's, like, vCloud initiative hasn't necessarily hid the traction that they wanted to see.”
Uretsky: Open-source community fails at user onboarding and best practices
“And one thing that the open source community hasn't really done a great job of just yet is giving you a primer and getting you started on best practice implementation from day one.”
Uretsky: All Major Cloud Virtualization Engines Possess Equivalent Performance
“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…”
Ben Uretsky: Linux containers will win over virtualization in public cloud
“Linux containers will win.”
Ben Uretsky: Intel will maintain its advantage over ARM in servers
“Intel. I wouldn't bet against them.”
DigitalOcean generated over $200 million in revenue in 2018
“Last year we did over two hundred million in revenue, and that's seven years since we started.”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean's largest customer accounts spend over $1 million annually
“Some of our largest accounts are spending over a million dollars a year with us.”
Ben Uretsky: DigitalOcean raised $123M in venture capital and ~$300M in debt
“We've raised one hundred and twenty three million. And I think we've raised roughly like three hundred million in debt”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean's remote staff show slightly higher engagement than in-office workers
“Our remote employees are just one or two points more engaged than our in-office employees.”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean attracts 4 million monthly visitors via 1,500 developer tutorials
“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…”
Yuretsky: Banks Own the Majority of DigitalOcean's Physical Servers
“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”
Yuretsky: Consumers attribute product experience to platforms, not asset owners
“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…”
Ben Uretsky: Flash will replace spinning disks for primary storage
“Well, flash. I think that's a no-brainer.”
DigitalOcean has over 500,000 monthly active customers
“We've had over a million all-time customers, over 500,000 that are active every single month”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean gets about 3 million monthly visitors to tutorials
“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…”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean maintains an NPS score of nearly 70
“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.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ben's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Co-founder & Former CEO, DigitalOcean | 1 | 15 | 50% 1/2 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & Former CEO, DigitalOcean | 3 | 14 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |