Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO
Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO
Company achieves $2 billion CAD valuation after doubling customer base in 10 months.
Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Just came here to say that the guy looks like a creep!
I'm unsure if it has been mentioned, but a similar tool which is open source (you can run the backend unlike tailscale), netbird
I think I'll just keep using tailscale until they start enshittifying, and then set up a Headscale instance on a VPS - no need to take this step ahead of time, right?
I mean, all the people saying they can avoid any issues by doing the above - what's to stop Tailscale dropping support for Headscale in future if they're serious about enshitification? Their Linux & Android clients are open source, but not IOS or Windows so they could easily block access for them.
My point being - I'll worry when there is something substantial to worry about, til then they can know I'm using like 3 devices and a github account to authenticate. MagicDNS and the reliability of the clients is just too good for me to switch over mild funding concerns.
Nerds stop recommending corporate crap: challenge: impossible
Am I totally off-base in thinking that MagicDNS and pluggable DNS nameserver overrides are a huge feature of tailscale?
I love that I can refer to my tailnet devices just via their machine name. I use it everywhere. And also that I can just slot in my NextDNS ID so that any device running tailscale now automatically uses that, and I don’t have to mess with my shared router settings or per device settings. Is all that actually really easy to set up outside of tailscale? Cuz if it is and I just somehow missed that when doing all my research, I’ll happily give plain wireguard or other mesh orchestrators like NetBird a go.
And I already know that mDNS is not the answer. That protocol is simply not reliable enough.
pre-emptive pikachu face strike
Headscale is great if you like networking fun, but that aside I'm not understanding why VC funding is such a black mark to the poster. Tailscale doesn't generate meaningful revenue streams as its early-stage, so it has to secure funding to continue operations until they achieve high enough revenue to go public. That's pretty standard in a business life-cycle, though. It seems like the main complaint is that Tailscale is a business. And what about the Linux Foundation? They are funded through private equity. Should you consider switching away because of that?
I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising --- if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you'll bring in business by advocating for it at work.
Of course it could go either way, and I don't rely on TailScale (it's my "backup" VPN to my home network)... we'll see, I guess.
become profitable when needed
By what, laying off all QA and support staff and half your developers the moment a single quarterly earnings report isn't spotlessly gilded?
They also had a major ass security issue that a security company should not be able to get away with the other day: assuming everyone with access to an email domain trusts each other unless it's a known-to-them freemail address. And it was by design "to reduce friction".
I don't think a security company where an intentional decision like that can pass through design, development and review can make security products that are fit for purpose. This extends to their published client tooling as used by Headscale, and to some extent the Headscale maintainer hours contributed by Tailscale (which are significant and probably also the first thing to go if the company falls down the usual IPO enshittification).
So glad my router supports WireGuard/OVPN server hosting, doing it this way also relieves resources off your homelab and for whatever reason your homelab shuts off or loses network access you can at least rely on your router to re-establish the VPN server without further intervention.
I always knew it was too nice to stay non-shitty forever.
Guess it's time for me to pester my ISP to let me open some portsMeh. I will keep using it
Question: if I setup Headscale on my network, I would have to open a port on my router to connect to it right? And also if I setup Headscale with some cloud provider, could they theoretically go and use the setup to get to my home network? I know its unlikely, I just mean if the technology is like e2e from clients to my home network, or if the cloud headscale 'centre' would be also an unguarded entry point (from the perspective of cloud admins). I hope I am clear 😀 Thanks (btw you probably guess why I currently use Tailscale 😀)
What is even the point of tailscale? What can it do that other VPN solutions don't? I feel like this is a problem that was solved like 20 years ago and still we're coming up with novel solutions for some reason. At my company they want to start using tailscale and I don't see why we don't just set up wireguard on a node in our k8s cluster instead
Ok and?
Was listening to some computer podcast a while ago and the co-host and ex- hacker was saying that more and more VPNs are getting targeted and it’s just a matter of time we see quite a bit of them owned. (I think he was talking about implementation of VPNs for remote workers, rather than actual VPN providers. Sorry, it was some time ago)
Anyway, the host asked „What about wireguard?“
And the co-host: „Oh yeah, wireguard is solid! But all the services building up on wireguard? … They’ll get popped.“
Doesn’t have to be true, but something to keep in mind.
is this some kind of furry porn CDN