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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be overly dismissive or anything, but what does Docker make that customers will pay for? This is an awful lot of money to throw at a company that doesn't have a business plan, let alone technology that can't be readily replicated.

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Customers will pay for Docker Hub potentially. The type of customer who would pay them for Docker Hub is roughly the type of customer who would pay for Github (with market size constrained by Docker adoption.) That is, customers who are willing to pay a bit for private hosting of some part of their development or deployment process and are willing to do that using SaaS.

My tiny company pays them for private repositories as part of our deployment process. (Push to Github, Docker Hub makes automated build, built Docker image gets sent to AWS ElasticBeanstalk). It's worth the $7 a month for the convenience of not doing the builds and hosting the images ourselves.

Not saying it's going to turn into a business model that will justify that valuation, just that it does at minimum provide a value I'm willing to pay a small amount for.

From the article: "Among the respondents, Docker recorded the strongest buying intention score the researchers recorded in the six years they’ve run this survey. Messina also noted that about 50 percent of the companies in the current Docker Hub beta are Fortune 100 companies."

Are those Fortune 100 companies purchasers of the Docker Hub service, or mere users? If such a company downloaded even a single Docker image from the Hub, does that count?

I assume by the "current Docker Hub beta" they're referring to Docker Hub Enterprise, so they'll have set up their own registries.

This reminds me of Steve Klabnik's article, "Is npm worth $2.6MM?" [1]. Even if the company is barely able to create a sustainable business model, or generate any significant profits, will it help in creating an ecosystem, that helps in creating billion dollar companies?

[1]: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm

Yes, but over $100M on that sort of bet is very different than $3M. $3M is frequently like 1% of the money raised on a billion dollar company and could be done as a bet to sustain the ecosystem it depends on.

Betting $100M+ needs real return. xD

No worries. NPM just raised another $8MM today, too.

The point was you can't compare things that are an order of magnitude of difference like that. $11M vs. Docker's raise is still in that category.

Docker Hub is basically a compile farm and software distribution mechanism. It's not that hard to see Docker moving towards providing continuous integration, containerized cluster hosting, app store like stuff, and so on. With expertise and funding, they could become a very interesting platform.

I read a few months ago about a startup I'd not even heard of that was valued in the Billion dollar range. Snapchat. I was like, they let you take a picture and upload it while chatting and that's worth Billions? So yeah, Docker should be worth some decent cash.

For me it seems to fall into the same sort of setup as Mongo or MySQL in the long term, and MySQL did alright ($1bn).

Though Docker's current valuation wasn't disclosed, it was rumored at $400m for the Series C round, and has probably at least doubled since then, given the amount of capital raised right now and the fact that they haven't spent all of the Series B. I seriously doubt that a $1bn exit would make Docker's investors happy

I fail to see how they are in any way comparable. MySQL and Mongo both have made a lot of money selling into the enterprise with the decades old per server licensing model. Now Mongo is starting to make inroads into the data warehouse space with their partnerships with Teradata, SAP etc. They aren't selling a PaaS or web application that will just be used by a development team here and there.

Docker seems to be much closer to Atlassian. Which could well be their biggest competitor one day.

It seems that Docker could follow a very similar path as MongoDB -- be the preeminent supporter for docker and supplier for turnkey + validated solutions. Building an ecosystem of add-ons (closed or open source) around the core product puts them in an even more central role

MySQL was installed at virtually every hosting provider and was 1/4 of the stack for a massive number of developers. I'm not even sure what Docker does.

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