Ask HN: What in Digital Ocean's business plan convinced top VCs to invest?

[ritwikt]

They sure have 1. An awesome team 2. An amazing growth story

but they are primarily differentiated by price in a highly capital intensive market [building out DCs is not cheap]. They are going against 3 giants[AMZN, MSFT, GOOG] each with:

1. Constantly slashed prices 2. A bigger ecosystem/more value add services to further subsidize the infrastructure -- eg. buy Sharepoint licenses, get compute free 3. Native advantage of needing big clouds for their internal infrastructure 4. Deep pockets

What positioning moat beyond price am I missing?

[xytop]

I dont think they are going against listed giants. Giants offer too much. Im still losing myself in amazon's services and pricing model, they are difficult to understand and entrance level is relatively high.. DO - fixed price, minimalistic newbie-type interface where you can relax and just do your things with ease.

[ritwikt]

The point to discuss not really looking for a perfect answer :)