Comment by bcantrill
5 years ago
Yes. Anyone who wants to relive an early ignition of one bridge should read the HN thread on the Rocket announcement.[0] No one is sympathetic with respect to the Rocket/Docker spat; both companies behaved poorly -- and it was increasingly clear that the energy at Docker, Inc. was going to spent fighting others rather than building a business.
Speaking personally, the fate of Docker, Inc. was clear to me when they took their $40M Series C round in 2014. I had met with Solomon in April 2014 (after their $15M Series B) and tried to tell him what I had learned at Joyent: that raising a ton of money without having a concrete and repeatable business would almost inevitably lead to poor decision making. I could see that I was being too abstract, so I distilled it -- and I more or less begged him to not take any more money. (Sadly, Silicon Valley's superlative, must-watch "Sand Hill Shuffle" episode[1] would not air until 2015, or I would have pointed him to it.) When they took the $40M round -- which was an absolutely outrageous amount of capital to take into a company that didn't even have a conception of what they would possibly sell -- the future was clear to me. I wasn't at all surprised when the SVP washouts from the likes of VMware and IBM landed at Docker -- though still somehow disappointed when they behaved predictably, accelerating the demise of the company. May Docker, Inc. at least become a business school case study to warn future generations of an avoidable fate!
[0] https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley/season-02/1-sand-hill-shu...
I worked at A Thinking Ape (another YC alumni), and for the longest time we had people beating down our door to invest, but the founders always told us why they weren't going to take it: we didn't need money. We had money to run the business, but we didn't have a handle on what we would do with $10m or $100m. What do we need to do to get more users that stick around and generate profit? More and better advertising? Sponsoring YouTube content creators? Hiring 50 more developers? Acquiring other companies?
Without a clear idea of what specifically you need to spend money on, and how specifically you are going to spend that money to generate growth and value, taking money is a bad idea. And if the answer to that question is "so that we can keep paying our developers", then you're probably already doomed.
I remember having a ton of sympathy for CoreOS, Docker really was hard to integrate with as someone doing sysadmin automation stuff.
Docker went to war with the standard Linux init system and the kernel developers who maintained cgroups, their core system primitive. I don't really understand how that was supposed to work out.
I honestly feel that they were both pretty unsympathetic. In particular, CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014. It was very petty -- to say nothing of the petty naming (clearly a play on "Docker") or the generally antagonistic approach. None of this is to forgive Docker, who was equally petty in their response -- and a sign of much more pettiness to come, sadly...
> CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014
Would that be the conference where Jessie Frazelle wore this telling gem of a troll badge? [0] If so, the parent article [1] says it was 2015.
I was actually present at CoreOS during this period, and played a significant role in the early rkt releases. There's no prominent memory of timing the announcement to coincide with Docker people being on a plane, I think we were just rushing to get it out by dockercon and the en route thing is a coincidence. Rkt didn't just appear out of nowhere overnight, we had to build it and making something like that actually work reliably as a standalone executable without installing a daemon on arbitrary distros is a bit of a chore.
[0] https://static.lwn.net/images/2016/devconf-badge.jpg
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/
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> raising a ton of money without having a concrete and repeatable business would almost inevitably lead to poor decision making
This for me is one of those "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills" lessons. It seems so obvious to me, and I hesitate to even estimate the vast amount of cash wasted in the last decade like this. But it's a lesson that an awful lot of people seem to insist on learning for themselves. Or not!