
Are you building an R&D lab or a business - mmaunder
http://markmaunder.com/2010/r-and-d-lab-or-business/
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javanix
Wow, from the title I thought that article was going to take the opposite tact
(ie, you should be building a business, not an R&D lab).

Very interesting though.

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adamilardi
Without investors or a nice endowment it's hard to work the years needed to
create a nice "r&d" product. If I launched twitter the first server bill would
have put me out of business. There is a balance between making something cool
and something "uncool" that people might pay for today.

~~~
lsc
really? Servers are cheaper than you think, if you don't use the cloud.

I got a quote from one of my vendors the other day... fifteen hundred bucks a
month for a full gigabit of traffic and 15 amps of power. (now, I haven't
bought from this guy, so I dono... but he is reselling he.net bandwidth, which
is fine stuff. I got another quote direct from he.net at a /much/ better data
center for just the gigabit, and they wanted two grand a month, before
negotiation. Now, for me, power is a big deal and bandwidth is less so... but
both are pretty cheap when you get down to it.)

that's enough power to run 9 single-socket 8 core 32GiB ram opterons, give or
take. each one of those puppies is about two grand in parts, give or take,
before disk. And a gigabit is a ridiculous amount of bandwidth, especially if
you mostly push text and thumbnails.

Now, I don't know how much ram/cpu/disk per user twitter uses. But you can
push rather a lot of text with that much cpu/ram, and a grand and a half a
month is pretty reasonable 'hacker with a job' sustaining money... hell, the
18 grand for the servers isn't any more than you'd pay for a low-end new car.

Now, obviously, working full time and running a startup is /hard/ - but my
point is that you don't need VC level money to do this... just about any fully
employed hacker has the means to support a ridiculous amount of
infrastructure.

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teisho
> Servers are cheaper than you think, if you don't use the cloud

I'm confused why the cloud is viewed as expensive. For managed hosting on a
big name provider perhaps, but there are dozens of virtualization providers
who are capable of providing power and bandwidth for unbelievably small
amounts of money.

Sure you don't get the uptime, reliability, and support of a big name host,
but it's usually good enough. From what I've gathered, twitter's growth has
not been severely hampered by the fail whale, especially in the beginning.

Once you've reached critical mass, you can move on to a larger host. I think
it makes sense to rent rather than own, especially if you're just starting
out.

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waivej
I priced out some servers and cloud providers. It appears that the "cloud"
servers are about 30% more expensive. Though the gap widens when you start
building bigger machines (32G RAM, latest processors, etc.) EDIT: I'm looking
at 2-16G machines.

On the other hand, in my case the extra capacity would sit idle for a while.
(I replace servers every 3 years.) Going with a cloud platform, I would have
likely upgraded a few times and taken on less risk.

The cool thing about cloud hosting is that you can always switch to owning
your own hardware if it will save you money. It's much harder to go the other
way.

Also, once you try to shore up risks and add things like drive snapshots, the
costs get much closer. (ie: start using all of the features offered by Amazon
AWS.)

~~~
lsc
how much do you pay for servers? 'cause I'd be out of business if the
difference between amortised hardware cost and what i charged you was 30%

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JangoSteve
_And every one of them is focused on generating cash in their business. The
road they’ve chosen is a longer, harder road with a lower chance of success
but a much higher reward (think Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison) if
they succeed._

Wait, so generating cash in your business has a lower chance of success than
getting acquired? Maybe it's because I'm not on the west coast, but I know at
least 20X more people with cashflow-positive companies than people whose
companies have been acquired.

Or maybe he just means they have a lower chance of becoming as successful as
Dell and Gates and Ellison, than others have of being acquired. But he seems
to imply that if these people don't generate as much cash as those super-
companies, that they've somehow failed.

...which reminds me of the thread on here not long ago on when exactly a
startup can be considered successful:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383566>

