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DigitalOcean gets a new CEO
Source: https://blog.digitalocean.com/introducing-digitaloceans-new-ceo-why-im-so-excited-to-join-do/
Hi, my name is Yancey, and as the incoming CEO of DigitalOcean, I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself to all of you – the developer community who helped make DigitalOcean what it is today.
[...]
Later on I spent a number of years as an investment banker focusing on mergers and acquisitions to help technology, media, healthcare, and energy companies with their inorganic growth strategies to meet the needs of their customers.
Makes one wonder how this relates to DigitalOcean's decision to make the $40 droplet the default-selected one, and to hide the cheaper plans behind a button.
I smell a sell-out coming... I guess the VCs want to see some more ROI.
Comments
Poor investment bankers. They all have to seek new jobs.
Poor IT industry. They get those mothertruckers as new CEOs.
Not touching Digitalocean anymore.
People have been smelling a sell-out since day one. Here we are years later still waiting. I am sure it will come but in any event, it is the most reliable of any service I have used and I have been using them without break since 2013.
A new CEO at a company changes everything huh?
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!
DEVSECOPS DEVSECOPS DEVSECOPS
Last time I checked, DigitalOcean was a business, so they do want money. What's wrong with the default selection? It's just a UI change and it is not changing the fact that they still offer cheaper plans. Also, the cheaper plans are still available and not disabled (hint: Vultr's $2.5 plan)
On a funny note, is it because you saw a communist movie recently which has impacted your mind that you're pissed at DO for just highlighting (default selecting) the $40 package? (btw, communism is a failed concept
)
And rightly so, because that's basically how venture capital works. However...
... yes, actually. It's not uncommon to introduce a new CEO to the company when it is being prepared for acquisition; specifically a CEO with experience in the field, who can manage the transition.
What's wrong is that defaults are not 'suggestions' or 'highlights', they're where you pick the thing that you, as a service operator want customers to use/buy the most, because you're banking on people not paying attention or not caring and therefore not changing the defaults. This is a widely used (and recognized) marketing strategy.
What the hell are you even going on about?
Indeed it is & that's why DigitalOcean is a business. If they would have disabled the cheaper packages then it'd be a dick move like how Vultr did.
So you want DO to make people not spend more?
Time to vultr
Just noticed, the $2.5 is available but without IPv4
Ignoring the usual "soooo exited" bla bla and BS some contours become visible it seems to me.
My translation: he "linked" old style industry and modern tech with the clear goal of optimizing profit.
Thanks for the confirmation, Mr. Spruill
If I'm not mistaken, NO that is your goal, Mr. Spruill, not DO's (as we knew it).
I had a quick look at Mr. Spruill and his career and I saw a man who is smart but who is also strongly focussed on two things: profit, profit, profit and linking business and "high-tech" - the former being his single goal and the latter being but a means.
I might be completely wrong but my take is that that man sees the DO community as a resource, probably one that should be treated halfway decently, but anyway just a resource. He'll do what he basically always did throughout his career; he'll make that resource create a lot more profit by linking it to businesses, by "modernizing" businesses.
As a company higher up I'd look closely and be interested. But as a developer - which I happen to be - I'd leave DO. Being a customer is desirable but becoming part of a product and sales scheme is not. And all his talk about "DO love" doesn't fool me, quite the contrary.
2.50 is like le wild Pokemon.
New high frequencies are good
Perhaps, but there is nothing to say it will change the product just because they are going to float or sell.
Ok then.
The CEO is picked by investors, in this case venture capitalists who want to see a huge return on their investments. So the CEO's job is literally to maximize profits. The only question is whether they focus on long-term or short-term profits. I'm sure the previous CEO Mark Templeton also saw the DO community and everything else as a resource to maximize profits. That's not to say DO's developer-friendly attitude was fake in any way -- they simply saw a path to explode in the market by getting developers on board.
But now, perhaps that strategy has reached its limits and their sales team will focus more on onboarding companies, and getting companies that can afford it to pay for the larger instances (which might be for their own good, because then they don't have to worry about violating vague excessive CPU usage policies).
Having a backup option that you can quickly switch to is always smart, you never know when a company will go BurstNET. But I don't see any immediate reason to get off of DigitalOcean and you didn't mention a concrete reason. If your reason is worry that they'll soon only offer big plans, then I doubt they'll get rid of the smaller plans any time soon because that would alienate developers whose support they are banking on.
At any rate, DO was always a "product and sales scheme", they used to have a page with all the employees which showed how large the sales team was. The sales team is what made DO popular, they pumped a ton of that investor money into advertising (including the guides that lots of new users look at).
Edit: also, the only thing surprising about the DO love talk is how honest he is. He's saying that their sales strategy to focus on developers, including creating guides/tutorials for a wide range of software and having an easy-to-use API, is what made DO so successful (profitable), and they'd be morons to change things in any way that alienates developers.
Luckily there's 100's of other providers to pick from if you feel capitalism or capitalist-hat-wearing folks in charge are not your cup of tea.
If there's a USP to DO or any other then it might be interesting.
Still, good to plan for ahead eh.
Looking at their investors, no huge surprise they'd flip the company.
I doubt they've seen a single cent yet, they want either huge ROI or zero ROI and the way to make it most likely that they'll get huge ROI is to cash out only after the company is huge (so that profits in the meantime can be re-invested into growth).
With such a focus on growth, from the beginning the only two possibilities were acquisition or IPO. There are quite a few companies who I think could benefit from acquiring DO (including Microsoft/Google since Amazon already has Lightsail, but also other players like IBM/RedHat) so that path might be more likely.
This isn't like tiny hosting companies where pricing and other stuff suddenly changes after an acquisition though. The acquirer here is going to want the developers on DO to stay so that they can market other products to the businesses that the developers work for. I predict they'll keep the pricing the same but integrate it more tightly with their own products in a way that ends up being similar to AWS Lightsail.
"thrilled"
"magical"
"loved"
"excited"
"incredibly excited"
I use those verbs to describe sex, not about a freakin' job.
This makes absolutely no sense.
Damn communist movies.
https://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/mba/alumni-stories/yancey-spruill
Spruill started his career at Corning. The work was at the cutting edge of process engineering and Spruill was good at it, but he soon realized his true passion wasn’t engineering. It was business. He decided to take a less sexy engineering job with Clorox that allowed him to work closely with the company’s product development and marketing teams, and began applying to business schools.
Stupid sexy Stalin
Someone just spruilled some Clorox in the DigitalOcean.
Ben is still the chairman of the board, and he hand picked the last CEO. I would highly doubt if he wasn't the driving force behind any pick for the role. The company is still very much his vision.
It is a very healthy business. That's all I'm going to say.
Your speculations, while I understand them, do not accurately portray the company that I just left. I have no obligation to say that either, I just don't like to see off the wall wild speculation about something I actually know without chiming in. No one needs them to fail to succeed, there's no need to viciously/openly/condescendingly speculate about your competitors. You have a lot going for you without that
No, you completely misunderstood, I'm saying the investors probably haven't seen a single cent because they want the company to continue growing so that in the end they can get an even bigger ROI. I have no doubt that DO is turning a decent profit at this point.
Literally both my comments were arguing that DO is unlikely to change substantially, I don't know what interpretation you came to but I doubt you really read them
(I don't blame you though, I kept adding more text). tl;dr, regardless of whether DO actually cares about developers (whatever it means for a company to care about something), their whole sales strategy has and will continue to rely on attracting developers, both with a nice API and cool offerings, and with well-written guides/tutorials. So they won't change that.Honestly though it's kind of crazy that you quoted the one person in the thread who's arguing something closer to what you're saying.
Edit: no yeah I do blame you, you're doing this intentionally and it'd be in your interest to stop twisting people's words and being an asshole.
Seriously though it makes me really mad when people take tiny snippets of quotes and make them mean the exact opposite. Like, really, "no need to visciously/openly/condescendingly speculating"? My first two comments in this thread were basically praising DO. I mean, everyone else in this thread is talking about how this CEO is going to make DO shit for developers, and I say DO will continue to be attractive to developers. Then this guy comes along and decides to quote me as if I was saying DO sucks. Really fucked up, twisting up words and making up BS.
If it was some rando then I wouldn't care but I thought jarland was better than this shit.
And yeah I changed my mind I do blame you, I'm pretty sure you have some grievance given that you took two phrases (not even complete sentences) and made them sound the opposite of what they meant. And selected my comments despite me being the only one defending the new CEO.
What do you expect from the ex employer?
OK. Let me rephrase it again:
@jar is always looking to jump from one host to another so it makes sense to publicly say "good" things while trying to keep "almost" zero reputation except running email service on cPanel software?
Yeah but the thing is, I don't care about him saying good things about DigitalOcean. I myself like DigitalOcean and as I said I doubt the new CEO will change things. Their sales strategy to attract developers via their tutorials/guides was ingenious, and in addition to helping to grow the company, these guides also help developers setup servers.
What's surprising (and infuriating to me) is that he extracted phrases from the comments of basically the only person who was defending the new CEO, and twisted them to make it sound like I was saying that DO sucks.
Edit: I mean tutorials aren't new but DO maintained them very well and got guides for a bunch of different software.