

Cloudkick’s (YC W09) simple cloud management gets $750K - siong1987
http://deals.venturebeat.com/2009/09/14/cloudkicks-simple-cloud-management-gets-750k/

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lsb
Here's something I'd like to know: EC2's dashboard looks really friendly, much
better than their suggestion of downloading some java programs to fiddle on
with. Amazon's the cheapest, so what's the benefit of going with Cloudkick vs
straight EC2?

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bmelton
I suspect that it has less to do with CloudKick's current capabilities and
more to do with its potential. As soon as I get a chance, I'm going to sit
down with melito to get more of a tour of Sliceapp.

The potential possibility for me to stage apps and deployment necessities
SOMEWHERE and spool that up across any number of servers / datacenters /
hosting providers is a VERY tempting idea indeed.

That I could potentially change hosting providers for my app without downtime
is an idea I think a LOT of people could get behind.

CloudKick and Sliceapp are in-roads to that level of capability, and if
executed well enough, could literally change the way we think of hosting
forever.

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tlb
Great work, guys. There's a huge opportunity for cross-vendor cloud
infrastructure and I think you're in a great position to own the market.

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ujjwalg
why do people just upvote anything if it is YC related? at least someone can
congratulate the team or someone from YC can share an anecdote related to the
company. Why just upvote?

BTW, Congratulations, guys.

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vaksel
I wonder if the people that do it, think there is some conspiracy, where pg
secretly monitors all upvote history, and if he sees you didn't upvote a YC
story, or one of his comments, then you get disqualified from getting into YC.

Nah something like that is stupid....

...he probably wrote a script to do it for him.

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jacquesm
Well played, pity the downvoters can't tell a joke from a serious posting.

On second thought, there might actually be people that think like that.

PG is on the record stating that your posting history on HN is a factor in YC
acceptance, maybe they extrapolate that to voting history ?

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maxklein
I don't really get what cloudkick does, likely because I don't use the
"cloud", but it seems to me that cloudkick can correct a few things:

1\. Free is good, but asking for money will teach you early in the game what
people will pay for and what not. A small amount like 750k does not allow you
expand, it just allows you more time before you can discover what part of your
service people will pay for - and that is bad

2\. The first person they hired seems overqualified.

3\. Their blog and overall message seems very distant. "Team Cloudkick", "We"
and the quasi-corporate speak is exactly the wrong tone to use to approach the
developer crowd - who are the core audience for this tool

4\. Screenshot on their frontpage does not convey anything to me.

I'm sure that the idea they have is good, but I have a feeling that the people
behind cloudkick are not too competent, and that they will bungle their
opportunity.

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jacquesm
In todays market 750K is not 'a small amount', especially not for a company
that launched less than 6 months ago.

> I have a feeling that the people behind cloudkick are not too competent, and
> that they will bungle their opportunity.

Why do you have that feeling ?

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maxklein
Run the numbers. 750K basically pays salaries for a while, pays your rent, but
it's not "investment". It's what you need to keep the average small tech
company alive for a while.

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jacquesm
So, what would qualify as an investment in your opinion ?

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picasso81
congrats guys!

