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Ben Uretsky

Co-founder & Former CEO, DigitalOcean · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

15statements → 9claims → 2claims resolved → 3.8/5average certainty → 1.67/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources →

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 7 assertions · 1 opinion · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ben argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
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.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 1:35 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
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 Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 22:48 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
0% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.7

redirected or did not address 1 of 9 assessed questions (11%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

209 words/min while actually speaking · 32.7 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,502 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ben Uretsky said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Contradicted
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 Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 22:48 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
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 Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 5:08 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
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.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 17:36 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 21:51 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 23:37 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
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.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 1:35 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
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 Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 6:30 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
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”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 17:28 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 24:58 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 1:47 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 12:06 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 12:34 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Ben Uretsky: DigitalOcean spoke to 10 to 15 investors per fundraising round
“I think we had a good run in terms of we spoke to about 10 to 15 investors in each of our rounds”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 15:42 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
DigitalOcean is currently developing a GPU-based solution
“I think for us in our roadmap, we have to deliver a GPU based solution first, and we're working on that right now.”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 27:58 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Uretsky: DigitalOcean's core primitives roadmap took five years instead of one
“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”
Ben Uretsky Mar 19, 2019 ▶ 29:24 Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Fireside Chat: Ben Uretsky, Founder of DigitalOcean (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC) Mar 19, 2019 24m
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