should start early Pursuing a single-cloud, multi-cloud, or on-premises strategy when you’re just getting started?
Well, the simple answer to this question is only one cloudbut after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, redundancy is sexy again: who wants to rely on a single supplier for any mission-critical activity?
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But according to a TechCrunch+ survey of several startup founders and CTOs, the main consideration doesn’t seem to be redundancy — it’s actually what kind of computing load a startup has to handle. It’s worth noting that the founders we heard were generally bullish on a single cloud for young startups, with an important caveat: If a young tech company is simply hosting software, a single cloud will suffice initially, but if the company is For AI-related tasks such as training models, it may require more.
Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation, describes when it might make sense to use something other than the cloud:
If your company needs a lot of infrastructure to begin with (say, you’re training your next big language model), it might make sense to buy hardware. Typically, the early days of a company are filled with experimentation, and the flexibility the cloud offers was a huge benefit at the time.
At this moment, a good question is how many “AI-first” startups are training their own models, rather than remixing or restructuring the UI layer of existing LLMs, eg. We don’t think it will be too high.
Anyway, after parsing the answer to the first question, the next time we ask a related question, we’ll modify the prompt to read: When should a startup move to a multi-cloud setup?
For now, read on for answers to our questions: Should early-stage startups pursue multi-cloud or on-premises when they are first starting out?
We interviewed:
- Tobi Knaup, Founder CEO, wxya
- Mang-Git Ng, Founder and CEO, anvil
- Infrastructure Director Joe Mainwaring, work tango
- Vikas Bhatia, Co-Founder, CEO and Chief Risk Officer, just protection
- Satyen Sangani, Co-Founder and CEO, alarm
- Steve Mullaney, President and Chief Executive Officer, trapeze
- Ed Thompson, Chief Technology Officer, Matillon
- Adrian Estala, Vice President, Site CDO, starburst
- President and CEO Shane Buckley super beast
Tobi Knaup, Founder and CEO, D2iQ: As always, it depends. But most software startups should start with one cloud and be careful not to create too much lock-in by using proprietary services so that optimization and migration can be done more easily later.
If your company needs a lot of infrastructure to begin with (say, you’re training your next big language model), it might make sense to buy hardware. Typically, the early days of a company are filled with experimentation, and the flexibility the cloud offers was a huge benefit at the time.
