We have a bunch of Microsofties at YC today, but reach out to Steve or me directly at (founders@microsoft.com) if you're a Winter 2015 batch company and for some reason not at YC today.
It's also worth pointing out that our $60k offer for YC companies is still around, if you're in one of the older batches.
This reminds me of the old joke:
Nietzsche: God is dead.
God (couple of years later): Nietzsche is dead.
pg: Microsoft is dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Microsoft (couple of years later): Here's some gift* for your startups. :)
(*: please don't start explaining that it is not a gift, etc. -- I know. :) )
Just FYI - the $60k/year Azure offer is technically available for any startup just willing to ask nicely (not limited to just incubators). My company, http://trippeo.com just qualified for it last month (we get $5k/mo free hosting).
Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.
Great offer.
I was accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program last year so I get $150/month free Azure credit. Azure is very nice to use. So far, I have just been using Ubuntu Linux VPS instances (similar to AWS EC2) and everything works similarly to other providers I use like AWS, IBM BlueMix, Digital Ocean, and Google's cloud services. Really, these are all very good services, so use the one you can get for free or at a low cost.
I used to be pretty much down on Microsoft, but now they are doing a lot of stuff right in my opinion: providing solid Linux support on Azure and providing an unbelievably good deal on the family edition of Office365. It seems like they are buying themselves into the cloud market, but with all of their cash on hand, that seems like a good strategy!
Anyway, if you have a business idea you want to try then look into BizSpark.
Free stuff is great but I wonder if there'll be any subtle nudges to use this for the next badges. "Your hosting estimates seem high, why don't you just use Azure"? "Well we considered it but long term we'd rather use another hoster for reasons X,Y,Z"..."Well yeah but 500k more runway is a lot."
I'm probably worried over nothing since YC investors are smart and tend to leave tech choices to the founders but I'd like to hear some feedback on this from people that pitch in the future.
Either way Microsoft seems to make pretty good decisions lately (from my humble POV). Seems like they are essentially playing the same power law as (other) investors, hoping that the next XXX will be run on Azure.
On a somewhat realted note...I worked in IT in Africa for a bit and it was pretty strange how locked into Microsoft server stuff they (Africa is big but it was true for all countires I had work relations in) are. I naively assumed that Linux/BSD would be more wide spread there but my very subjective conclusion is that MSxx-certificates are really widespread there and piracy is kind of tolerated so it's easy to learn. It was a little bit harder than expected to find Linux admins for example. I've always wondered if this was active corporate policy or just an "accident".
Azure has been great for our start-up (http://iactionable.com). We've been with them for over 4 years. There have been ups and downs but we're fans of C#/.NET and it was a great fit for our team. We store and crunch a lot of real-time data with ServiceBus Queues and SQL Server. It has scaled well so far. We also went through the BizSpark program which REALLY helped jump start things.
We were invited up to Redmond in the past to meet with teams from various Azure services and participate in private previews of some cool features. They're really working hard to make a great platform.
Satya, please don't have them mess things up with the next portal release! The whole sideways scrolling gives me a headache.
I read somewhere that Satya Nadella is an active reader of Hacker News.
How long do companies have to utilize the $500K?
In the BizSpark Plus days, your company would receive $60K of hosting but could only use it to pay 100% of your bill in the first year of BS+. In the second year, you could use it to pay 50% and then in the third year you were paying full price for Azure. It was a pretty good deal, but if you are already spending $30-60K (or $250-$500 K) on infra in your first year or two, you're in a select breed of companies.
I hope all startups are made aware of Microsoft BizSpark. You get a pretty spectacular line up of freebies. And freebies that stay free even after you graduate. Free copes of Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, etc. It's damn near everything. A++++ would recommend.
That is some serious credit... I should share that having access to Azure MFA (formerly PhoneFactor) alone has been worth the R&D time. Their support, although a little tough to nail down 1-on-1 time with, is very friendly. I chose that word carefully, it's not super professional, but I actually had a good time going through a migration with them, for what's it's worth.
May be helpful to clarify/reword - sounded like $500k total from the headline, but is actually $500k per company. Sweet deal...
If Microsoft truly wants to transform they need to launch an intensive secret project. Let's call it "Project Redmond". The goal of the project would be to develop "Quantum", the next Microsoft OS. Quantum aligns MS with Linux by effectively building Windows on top of Linux as well as all the tools necessary to, as automatically as possible, migrate existing Windows code into Quantum.
With a move like this Microsoft becomes THE Linux company as the millions of non-tech and tech businesses who are Windows based migrate to Quantum over time. They could make the underlying souped-up Linux OS FOSS and sell the Quantum OS layer (or whatever works).
I am thinking in terms of the next 50 years, not 5. In the long term I just don't see how the existing MS model can prevail. A move like this Quantum OS concept would instantly align them with web development and provide a solid alternative to Apple on developers desktops and perhaps even Ubuntu at the server level.
Is there anything in the fineprint to stop the startups from reselling those credits?
Passing them on at a 20% discount would make for a sweet ~$400k runway extension.
This is incredible! 500k is a big amount. Realistically speaking most startups would get free hosting for ~3 years out of this.
For the future YC batches - depending on what your company is going to be doing, it would make very little financial sense to NOT host on Azure.
How is this any different than their previous "free" access to server products for a few years? The idea being build it at low cost, then flip the company?
Azure also offers a small business "BizSpark" program. http://www.devfactor.net is hosted on Azure thanks to BizSpark, where it gets $150/mo for three years. It was enough to handle the front page of Reddit.
Might help to compete against Amazon as they and Akamai have the lions share of YCombinator sites - http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-reports/Y-Combinator/hostin...
This is pretty cool but I'd still prefer to use Google Apps and Gmail. The MS office web apps are pretty poor in comparison and unless you're a dedicated windows shop or have a lot of ex-finance people there is little benefit to the office suite.
This is huge for Microsoft, because this is how Azure is finally starting to get accepted by the startup/VC community. They never had difficulty selling Azure to the enterprise, but for startups - AWS had always been the default choice.
Wow amazing, I am not the biggest Microsoft fan & I would never have what it takes to be part of a YC startup, yet just reading this got me all excited. This is truly great for those startups that qualify!
Makes the 1-year $100K credit by Google look not so good now.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.
Our Startup is part of BizSpark and I have no doubts in saying that its great ! . Big win for MS and Equally a good deal for YC Startups.
WOW that is a lot of credit. How does Azure stack up "in the real world" compared to Amazon, Rackspace, Google?
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.
Ms has a terrible records of abandoning Ms-related tech followers by technology renewal: vb->.net，wp7 !-> wp8. To many developers,ms is irrelevant. And after using onedrive/Office365 for a long time, the experience is poor:sometimes even on a wp/lumia,bugs like file loss and page broken is usual。
This would be against the spirit of the offer, but I wonder if there is any easy way to arbitrage that credit into cold hard cash with low effort.
E.g., boot up a bitcoin mining cluster (though this particular idea would obviously yield low return since it would be running on off the shelf hardware)
This seems like a Catch-22. If a startup is successful enough to get into YC, wouldn't they have a stable tech infrastructure already?
This would only benefit YC startups who already use Azure. (Unless the switching cost from AWS/Rackspace/Google is low enough nowadays.)
Ahh suddenly it all makes sense.
I wondered why my company after 18 months of effort to get going on AWS with certain apps has had a shift to get on Azure 'without compromise' in 2 months.
I doubt these sort of offers are only going to start ups, Microsoft is taking on web services hard core.
In case anyone here missed this, Microsoft gives a bunch of free stuff (including an MSDN subscription) to any new startup through their BizSpark program: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark
I wonder if Azure competitors will increase their free offerings to YC companies as a result of this.
The PaaS front is of particular interest. For example, it's not immediately evident that Heroku even offers anything similar, beyond a small free tier available to anyone.
Reach out to me if you need help with the PaaS side of things for Azure. I am currently a DevOps lead at my company and we deploy approximately 35+ micro-services to Azure about a few hundred times a day. I'd love to talk!
I'm not sure how Azure intends to compete in this space. I've used Amazon, Rackspace, Google Cloud, Azure, and a bunch more.
Professionally, for simplicity I'd choose Rackspace or Google. For Scalability and price I'd choose Amazon. For personal projects I love Digital Ocean.
I dislike Azure's control panel and VM setup, and find their VMs slow. I'd only really consider them if I planned to implement a project that required leveraging the entirety of the Microsoft technology stack.
I can't see technology companies embracing Virtual Windows Server RTs and MSSQL Servers. Startups enjoy technologies that are easy to manage and scale with smaller teams. Enterprise level companies still need inhouse dedicated hardware for security.
Azure is kind of an oddball in the virtual hosting space.
Any idea on the LCV for Azure of the average YC startup? I know the average YC startup is going to be a cut above, but are a large percentage of them going to break the $500k in an early stage?
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.
The fact that HN doesn't view Microsoft's known complicity with NSA programs (partner of PRISM data collection since before 2007, _NSAKEY[1] before that) as a human rights violation is troubling, to say the least, but it's absolutely unnerving that anyone would trust them (including YC members) to store sensitive data post-Snowden.
Does anyone actually trust cloud services in Five-eyes jurisdictions anymore? Is there a company in those jurisdictions that people could use that is more dangerous to trust than Microsoft?
Company scrip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
"The relentless nagging from partners to grow faster we throw in for free."
Is this sentence constructed poorly or did a private comment slip in?
I'm applying to YC next year. My startup is offering Azure hosting at a discount.
Not sure how long we will last though...
If you have the money, it's a great way to prevent being voted off of the front page of hacker news.
That's a pretty impressive offer. As an AWS user, it would get me to look at Azure at least.
I'm surprised Dropbox or someone similar hasn't tried this already
Bitcoin mining startups?
Does Azure offer Linux images nowadays?
This is a smart move for Microsoft. Most companies will not utilize the credit, a few will use some but not all of the credit, and there will probably be one or two breakout companies from the batch with huge computing costs. If they snag one of these breakout unicorns, $500K in free computing is a reasonable expense.
May be helpful to clarify/reword - sounded like $500k total from the headline, but is actually $500k per company. Sweet deal...
mucrosoft goin ham
When a free HoloLens?
This smells like desperation from 100 miles away
How do you call a startup running on Windows? A shutdown. LOL!
Figures that the HN server would die at the same time of an Azure announcement. Azure isn't exactly best known for its uptime.
"ITS A TRAP!"
Microsoft is also giving YC startups three years of Office 365, access to Microsoft developer staff, and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services.
Free Office365 and CloudFlare are probably the best part of this announcement, since they are "easily migrate-able" by most startups. Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive. Even though they are negligible (in terms of money and value) they are the easiest "sticky" points for early stage startups.
That being said - for DevOps people with experience across AWS/DO/Linode and Azure, this would be a good time to start the cold calls and sell your services to YC companies. Paying someone $5-10k on high ($2k/month) AWS bills to free services is a no-brainer.
EDIT: On that note, if any DevOps people want me to do the hustling (aka sales, lead generation) for them, let me know.
EDIT2: Anyone know if the $500k goes for 3-years? If it's only 1-year, then this may not beat the 1-2 years and ~$10k you get from Amazon via their platform: http://aws.amazon.com/activate/portfolio-detail/