Somewhat surprised to see this. When Yancey took over from Mark, he seemed like someone who really understood the developer focus of DO was not only what brought the company to the door of the public markets, but would probably be what kept it growing once it was out there. With Gabe coming in having built Deis, it felt double good.
That said, what worked for DO in the early days may not be what will work for it in the future. The main thing we banked on in the early days of DigitalOcean was the explosion of web SWE as a relatively new concentration, remember, we hit our stride in the angular vs ember days, docker was still getting it's footing, coding bootcamps where the hottest new thing. Tutorials, hackathons, OSS made a lot of sense as a go to market for hyper growth. We often talked about the business as b2c not b2b. That's the DO that grew up on HN (something I was personally eternally grateful for). The market has shifted a lot over the past 10 years, the abstractions are way more defined, and web engineering just isn't what it was. It's been a long long long time since I've talked to anyone at DO, but I can can guess that market conditions have changed drastically and continuing a growth push just looks very different from the DigitalOcean we knew when I was selling it. I think Yancey is a smart guy though, and I think he cares about developers, so I still believe in them figuring it out.
Still sad to see a move like this, it feels disrespectful, not just to Geoff, but to the community he and Chris built.
> what worked for DO in the early days may not be what will work for it in the future
Last year I made the pitch at my previous employer to migrate to DO. It made sense, the company was almost entirely on VMs and DO has much better support and offerings for VMs. I was the manager of Operations. I only needed my CIO to approve. The response was "they're amateur, we need Azure of AWS."
I could see a bigger DO changing their image as their main customer goes from in the trenches to in the boardroom.
That said, what worked for DO in the early days may not be what will work for it in the future. The main thing we banked on in the early days of DigitalOcean was the explosion of web SWE as a relatively new concentration, remember, we hit our stride in the angular vs ember days, docker was still getting it's footing, coding bootcamps where the hottest new thing. Tutorials, hackathons, OSS made a lot of sense as a go to market for hyper growth. We often talked about the business as b2c not b2b. That's the DO that grew up on HN (something I was personally eternally grateful for). The market has shifted a lot over the past 10 years, the abstractions are way more defined, and web engineering just isn't what it was. It's been a long long long time since I've talked to anyone at DO, but I can can guess that market conditions have changed drastically and continuing a growth push just looks very different from the DigitalOcean we knew when I was selling it. I think Yancey is a smart guy though, and I think he cares about developers, so I still believe in them figuring it out.
Still sad to see a move like this, it feels disrespectful, not just to Geoff, but to the community he and Chris built.