Hi, Temporal employee here. Just want to confirm that Temporal Cloud can and does handle this scale, well beyond it, in fact.

As our CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas stated in the keynote at this year's Replay conference (https://youtu.be/BxEB7Y2U9oU?t=532), Temporal Cloud is currently handling 35 billion workflows per day. If you assume that each Workflow averages 10 actions, that translates to more than 10 trillion actions per month.

Later in that keynote, a VP from OpenAI talks about the scale at which they are using Temporal Cloud. That'll give you a sense of the volume for a single customer (obviously a very large one).

After those are used up, it moves to Devanagari, Hangul, Katakana, Hiragana, and then Kanji.

It's semantics, but the latest raise might have been a follow-on to Series M, not a new round (to be clear, I know nothing about their finances, just speaking from experience at another company).

What happens when you make it to Z do they then start doing Z1 rounds or does it reset to AA like excel (though that would be confusing)? Hex?

The AA scheme has already been used for "down round", so they might have to get creative.

Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar.

Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.

Dead capital. There's no need for public funding until they are reasy to cash out at the top, if ever.

How do investors cash out? Do they sell to new round investors?

Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?

If investor pool becomes too loose the company becomes de facto public, subject to all SEC-enforced regulations.

The judgment is subjective though, so pushing the boundaries could be a calculated risk.

Correct. There is also a secondary market.

> There's no need for public funding

You're assuming private liquidity to be infinite and private credit (that fuels VCs) to always have favorable rates.

When you have companies like SpaceX and Anthropic raising billions, it is hard to believe that private credit isn't virtually infinite.

so how do stripe employees get liquidity? can anyone sell their secondary shares?

I can't speak for the specific case of Stripe, but it's fairly common for private companies to have a "tender offer" in which employees have the opportunity to sell some portion of their equity. This is often done in conjunction with a new investment round.

Outside of big tech, it's also fairly common for private companies to simply not offer equity to employees.

Tender offers.

https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tender_offer

https://carta.com/learn/equity/liquidity-events/tender-offer...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(secondary markets are sometimes an option, depending on stock transfer restrictions)

Bankruptcy court?

FTX bought 8% of Anthropic for $500m in 2021.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/18/ftx-owne...

Company I worked for had a deal where I could sell back to the company at any time.

The price was determined by a formula based on revenue and such, so I always knew what they were worth.

I was not allowed to sell to anyone else though.

There's a newish term for this: RLO, Recurring Liquidity Opportunity. These are tender offers at some recurring interval. Even some companies that have a shorter lifespan (say 7 years) offer this.

Stripe might buy back the shares at a good price. They might be able to sell on secondary markets.

Private/secondary markets.

regular tender offers

As evidence, search for "How do I disable the 'beautify this slide' widget that keeps appearing in Google Slides?" The top results are a bunch of pages in support.google.com in which the weary support person says "You can't disable this" and closes the thread.

Here's one such example: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/416641585/how-to-hide...

> the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming

I'd speculate that the number of people who own these outnumber the people who have actually read them by a pretty wide margin.

True, for me it was a read-on-demand.

Aside from any downward trend attributable to LLMs, technical book sales were always lower than most people would have imagined.

I've known a few authors who published with O'Reilly and other major publishers and most told me that they made less than minimum wage in the end. There were other benefits, such as increased name recognition and credibility that let them charge more as consultants, but the direct proceeds from writing a technical book seldom paid off even two decades ago.

In general I get that, but O'Reilly has enough prestige/recognition that I assumed they'd be the top outliers, if they don't break the thousands, I assume basically no one does in the field (Barring books for beginners, that have a significantly larger potential buyer pool)

I can confirm this is true for Acura. I owned an Acura Legend and the same car was sold in Japan (well, the right-hand drive version) as the Honda Legend. I had seen pictures of them online in the 90s, but happened to see a Honda Legend in person when I was in Tokyo some years later.

One that doesn't seem to be listed is "overconfident fork" in which someone forks an existing project out of anger or hubris, but that fork never gains critical mass and eventually withers away.

The opposite is what happened with OpenSSH, Jenkins, and LibreOffice, in which the original project (SSH, Hudson, and OpenOffice) had the hubris but was quickly forgotten when the community moved on.

Occasionally though, rather than petering out, you get a rage-fork that does something good.

The io.js fork from node back in 2014 or 2015 springs to mind. IIRC there were a bunch of changes/improvements that needed to be made to move node forward and Joyent were dragging their heels (a V8 upgrade might have been one of them but it's been so long I can't remember for sure). Some of the core devs were getting fed up with how long all of this was taking.

So a group of them forked off io.js from node, did the upgrade and a bunch of other improvements, and eventually all of that was folded back into core node, and everyone was happy with the final result.

But I think we could have found ourselves in a world where we'd all be using io.js rather than node had it turned out slightly differently.

Also the EGCS fork of GCC. That one ended happily, as, IIRC, the EGCS maintainers were assigned (by the GNU project) to be the new official GCC maintainers.

Beryl forked from Compiz and even though Compiz was the name people knew, Beryl was more popular for a while because it had like 10-20x more functionality out of the box. At some point they merged back together into Compiz Fusion and lost almost all that additional functionality, as well as most of the momentum it had, then was later renamed back to Compiz.

Yeah, when I was a kid you had to go to the AT&T store to get a phone.