> AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today
What does this mean? They are competing with regular legacy VPNs for sure. Despite tailscale existing for the last 4 years, none of the large corporate clients even got closed to it. They were all on junk from Cisco, Palo Alto, to connect employees to corp net. A “cutting edge” one might use cloudflare warp.
You might be right that there isn’t much competition for pure distributed, but it turns out the market for that is actually quite small and it’s for people who can’t afford dedicated IPs or cloud instances.
Raising money here is a bad sign IMO unless it’s for a completely new product that requires servers at exchanges to eat CDNs like cloudflare’s lunch.
Their is tons of competition depending on how you want to attack the problem. Tailscale's problem imho is that their product does not scale well as required by large enterprises. One could argue nor do traditional VPNs, but they are already in place and workking so that product config already works, no need for change. The market is massive, but you need to be at a high abstration layer in my opinion, so that you can replace far more than just the VPN.
What does this mean? They are competing with regular legacy VPNs for sure. Despite tailscale existing for the last 4 years, none of the large corporate clients even got closed to it. They were all on junk from Cisco, Palo Alto, to connect employees to corp net. A “cutting edge” one might use cloudflare warp.
You might be right that there isn’t much competition for pure distributed, but it turns out the market for that is actually quite small and it’s for people who can’t afford dedicated IPs or cloud instances.
Raising money here is a bad sign IMO unless it’s for a completely new product that requires servers at exchanges to eat CDNs like cloudflare’s lunch.