Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewdevault | Hacker News Reader

Elastic's losses are a classic story of VC-funded promises of infinite, unsustainable growth. Success for Elastic is defined by the classic impossible measure of becoming a monopoloy so you can raise prices every year and cite growth indefinitely. They had everything they needed to reach a sustainable business model, and the problem was not in their licenses but rather that they set impossible goals for themselves.

View on HN

You have literally just 180'd your argument from "they're rich and greedy they didnt need any more money" to "Im glad they are dying they squandered their opportunities".

May Amazon feast on their rotting open and free corpse, eh?

I haven't 180'd anything. The throughline is the same: they have more than enough money and they had many opportunities to use it effectively, but the tied their ankles together with their infinite-growth business model.

> You have literally just 180'd your argument from "they're rich and greedy they didnt need any more money" to "Im glad they are dying they squandered their opportunities".

I don't read Drew's comment that way at all. He's pointing out correctly that they were well resourced, and had built a $.628 Billion revenue business (at the time). Well done.

Incidentally Since the change, they've grown to just north of $800M, so Elastic is still growing, but that growth is significantly slower than in years prior, so evidence supports Drew's assertion. Had Elastic done something different, they may have had more or less success.

>I don't read Drew's comment that way at all.

Perhaps you missed the part where he tried to imply that they were swimming in profit by stating their revenue and sweeping the cost of paying for the development of this software under the carpet.

You're missing the fact that the spending is not inherently required - if they pared back their ambitions their costs would be lower, at the cost of potentially losing out on future 10x revenue.

Chasing 10x is a choice, not a force of nature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com