It is my pleasure to announce that I have acquired 100% of shares of nulled LLC from Jade. 50% of these shares will be distributed to Mori of nulled by the end of 2026, who is officially CEO at this time. I remain its COO. The paperwork has now been signed. Jade will have no further part in the development and operation of nulled, nor will anyone else until announced otherwise.
This was bittersweet. Let it be known that the acquisition was, in some ways, a hostile takeover. In the past, Jade and I were romantically involved, but that is no longer the case. During those times however, I financed a significant portion of Jade's life, including nulled, with no planning on how that would reasonably be paid back. Love makes you do stupid things, I suppose. Recently, Jade was no longer financially able to sustain her share of the operating expenses of nulled, but Mori and I were (barely). We took over financing 100% of nulled's operating expenses because we believe in nulled and didn't want to screw over our customers. However, our prevailing argument was that if Jade was no longer paying into nulled to keep it afloat, then this was no longer a collaborative effort, and we looked for ways to rectify this unfair situation. After discussion, it was agreed that this prior debt to me would be fully discharged through the transfer of nulled to my custody in full, and I would relinquish all her obligations of financing the company permanently. Then (at a later date when I figure out how to do a multi-member company) transfer 50% of nulled to Mori for working so damn hard with me to keep the lights on. I enjoyed the hell out of my time with Jade on nulled and got to do a million things I never thought I'd get to do. Jade took me to see my first DC (nulled in Nebraska), and then my second, third, and fourth, among countless other things I look back on fondly and still, to this day, get choked up about. I didn't want to strong-arm her pride and joy out from under her, but nulled didn't deserve to die a slow death, and neither did the customers who put their trust in nulled, so I took action on their behalf and to ensure the company's survival and success and crafted this agreement that satisfied all parties and all concerns. Here we are now, out of the ashes, anew, and my hope is to make nulled bigger and better than ever before. I wish Jade the absolute best on her future endeavors.
With that out of the way, I want to talk about what the plan is for nulled in the future to achieve that goal. One of the secret reasons I am ditching Pomf for right now is because I want to focus on nulled. Not because I want money or power, but because a company such as this is a stronger vehicle for the things I want to do my with spare time, and the skills I've accumulated over at least 15 years of screwing around with computers, servers, and software. Pomf pushed nulled to acquire 10Gb networking to migrate off of BuyVM as an example, but good customers can push our goals much further. My expectation is to never really break even with nulled, so it is just as much a charity as the entirety of Lain.la is, despite there being paid products (and I very well may just make a real non-profit. Who knows.) Trust me, if by some miracle we make $10,000 a month in revenue, we'll make sure we're spending $12,000 a month doing really cool shit. There is no shortage of wonderful things I want to do and all of them exceed the original vision and scope of what Lain.la is. It will still exist as the "truly free as in beer" arm of my efforts, but I think I can do a little disruption in the space of server hosting for the better, by doing things nobody really thought about doing.
How would you like $30/mo/U colo in my custom log-cabin-turned-datacenter? How would you like me to buy you servers and lease them back to you over 6-24 months so you can play with some REAL firepower without needing a giant amount of cash up front? How would you like a tour of a data center and see your server (we'll just call you a contractor and get you in the door, don't worry, it's mostly not against policy.)? How would you like straight up free servers in exchange for colo'ing at regular price? And that's just the colo stuff, we still have VPSes and S3 and backups and other things to get going and do cool stuff and promotions with. Custom management panels. Fancy ass infrastructure. Rube Goldberg machines of gigantic proportions. Blog posts that leak the secret sauce of how we do things. Yeah. I think all those ideas are fun and new and novel and most importantly puts computing back into the hands of people. And it's just nice to do! Look for our backups service coming soon this year, and give us a little time to update the website.
Did you know that our backups service will put your data in a cave? An actual cave!
In Jade's vision, nulled was always about breaking away from how big hyperscalers or dime-a-dozen WHMCS slop shops or the middle of the road Hetzners and OVHs do things, putting *you* way above a profit motive, and we're going to preserve that. I firmly believe that companies that go into business not to have fun or do good things but because they want to turn a profit are doomed to turn against its customers at some point in the business development process, going from benevolent to rent-seeking. My commitment to lose money should be a strong indicator this is not the case. This also frees us to be as opinionated as we want because we are not beholden to the almighty dollar. Hey, here's one big statement I can say right now:
FUCK AI. WE ARE NOT SELLING AI CRAP, EVER.
Maybe I'll do GPU rentals for local models or something, but that's on the customer to utilize in that fashion. GPUs can be used for Hashcat too, you know. We're not gonna sit here and parrot AI as some revolutionary deus ex machina that will save business and the world. People said the same shit about blockchains too, and I don't want these same slop hucksters and grifters anywhere near our datacenters. It's a tool. It's fine to use (responsibly), but not idolize, and certainly not to force upon an unwilling customer base. If you're gonna do some AI techbro crap with us, I don't want your money.
See how easy that is to say without being bound by greed? Gosh, imagine if Satya Nadella or Sam Altman said that. Anyway, here's some quick operating guidelines I wrote for the company that we'll stick to.
- Do things really well, and scare people with how we do them and how well we do them.
- Don't do the shitty things other companies have done to you.
- Always prefer open source or doing things ourselves, and publish what we do when it might be helpful for others.
- Stay the hell away from proprietary software dependencies where possible, especially around SaaS crap. Windows? Hell no. Server firmware? Well, that's fine, not much we can do there, but at least we can run it without interacting with Dell or HP or whoever.
- Forget how other people do things. Standards and interoperability is fine, but just because AWS charges by the gigabyte for bandwidth doesn't mean we have to, and just because everyone uses a certain platform or tool doesn't mean we have to. You just wait until I run an entire company on Bash.
- Do not squeeze the customer for every dime they have. No upselling crap. Each product must stand on its own but also mesh well with everything else.
- Focus on real people, not businesses. This is not a B2B operation unless those businesses are run by real people with hearts and blood and soul and not white collar MBA jackasses.
- (This is a weird one but hear me out) No OpEx where possible. OpEx defined as recurring charges. OpEx means vendors. Vendors mean third party dependencies. Third party dependencies means dealing with other people screwing up and taking nulled down. If I had it my way, I'd build my own datacenter entirely, but I don't have $10 million spare so my log cabin is as close as I'll get to that for right now, and even then I'm still dependent on fiber. Spending money to avoid OpEx is encouraged at all times and to cut down on vendors, except where the alternative is exceedingly worse (Mail servers...). I hate relying on others who don't work with or for me.
Most of what you're reading here would make an MBA burst into flames. Good. That's what they deserve. Now I have the gargantuan challenge to prove to those leeches that I can run a business on unorthodox (but ultimately morally correct) principles and make it work, and I hope you'll help me do so and stick it to them and modern business as a whole. Come be our customer, or ask a question, or suggest something cool, or when I have some money to throw around, come be our contractor even. I'll take all the help I can get, and ultimately I'd like nulled to be a mechanism to give back to people, whether it be a beacon for sane corporate practices, or giving jobs to people who have great skills but haven't been noticed yet, or publishing tools and scripts and projects we made for everyone to use and fostering open source, or just being a damn good hosting company.
And if I am too abrasive for you and you don't want to reach out to me, that's okay too, you can reach out to Mori instead. We have this weird duality thing going on where people who like Mori probably don't like me, and people who like me probably don't like Mori, but the two of us work together fine, and you can absolutely choose who you want to interact with. Best of both worlds? You decide.
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Lain.la / nulled LLC