Ask HN: What Happened to Digital Ocean?

49 points

6 years ago

Not too long ago DO was touted as the #2 cloud behind Amazon [1]. I'll grant that was always a little suspect but it really seems like things have gone off the rails in recent years:

- in 2016 Moisey Uretskey literally Q&Aing on "What happened to DigitalOcean?" on Quora [2]

- in 2018 Ben Uretskey handing off to Mark Templeton [3]

- in 2019 replaced by Yancey Spruill [4]

- in 2020 laying off 10% of the company [5]

How do you go from one of the most hyped IaaS companies to suddenly losing steam? If it worked for them from 10m - 100m ARR, how do they lose steam from 200-275m? Its not like the market for their stuff is that small, Azure and even GCP have proved that. I'd love for some perspectives from people who know this market, because it's baffling to me.

1: https://a16z.com/2016/01/06/a16z-podcast-what-software-developers-and-therefore-every-company-need-2/

2: https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-DigitalOcean

3: https://blog.digitalocean.com/the-next-wave-digitaloceans-new-ceo/

4: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/30/digitalocean-gets-a-new-ceo-and-cfo/

5: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/17/digitalocean-layoffs/

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