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Tailscale raises $100M

(tailscale.com)
854 points gmemstr | 1 comments | 04 May 22 13:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 14:29 UTC] No.31260955[source]▶
Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work.

The biggest risk that this company has is that Cloudflare (in all reality) should just buy them or reimplement it. It’s the type of product cloudflare would make, that’s for sure. Being based on open source wireguard, and being just a STUN/TURN server at its core… I’m sure that Tailscale will be the first but maybe not the best.

I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.

Web3 happens when people can host stuff on their phones, and Tailscale is something that lets you host things on your phone.

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mnkmnk ◴[04 May 22 14:38 UTC] No.31261078[source]▶
Cloudflare already has a competing product https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/lp/ppc/cloudflare-for-teams...
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nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 14:48 UTC] No.31261223[source]▶
It’s not really a competing product until they relaunch it with a heavy consumer focus and with some of the properties that Tailscale has, ie: avoiding going through the cloudflare CDN. But more to my point, cloudflare is definitely in a position to outcompete Tailscale, it’s just a couple tweaks and a marketing shift.
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ThePhysicist ◴[04 May 22 15:06 UTC] No.31261535[source]▶
I don't think Tailscale will focus on the consumer market, I'd be very surprised at least if they did. I think they built a developer-friendly product to get mindshare and early adoptors, but eventually the real market for such such products is in the B2B space, i.e. implementing the "BeyondCorp" model of zero-trust networking. There's also a market for building cloud mesh services but I'm not sure if Tailscale is well positioned for that as there are good open-source solutions available for that already.
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1. nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 15:11 UTC] No.31261602[source]▶
It costs them so little to provide their free consumer service (iirc: they fall-back to providing transit, but it’s very rare and only occurs when UDP is completely blocked) that it benefits them to keep their focus on consumers because if everyone is using Tailscale, the business customers are inevitable.