> I wish I didn’t know who Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are. As you no doubt know by now…
You have a choice to not write the article, and thereby not spread it.
In a Slack someone posted the statement from Astronomer, and I had no idea what the statement was referring to. Now I can’t get away from hearing about the story.
It’s true you can’t build giant video editors or even photo editors. But, if you reestablish your expectations and think 8-bit retro, you’ll be reminded that very few things didn’t exist in some form in the 80s… just at a smaller scale. Spreadsheet? Check. Paint programs? Check. Music composition? Check.
Yeah, instead of relooking at this, we went off and built a new paradigm “serverless functions.” Obviously, serverless functions, like those via Lambda, have some other safety mechanisms in place (eg micro vms), but you could probably get pretty far with CGI and adjusting capabilities and such, with far less complexity.
> I see that bootstrapping involves some bizarre wasm hack instead of the tried and true bootstrapping approach of writing a simple first pass compiler in c (or some other language) and I am reminded again why I would never choose this language.
The hack allows the compiler to be maintained in Zig, compiled to WASM (a supported backend), and then bootstrapped with only a wasm interpreter… and one is provided in a single C file (I believe… but haven’t looked in a while).
This is a much nicer situation than most other bootstrap scenarios. All the SMLs, for instance, require you to have a whole other SML! MoscowML bootstraps with an included Caml interpreter… but it’s not sufficient to compile MLton.
Mashup Context Protocol, of course! There was a post the other day comparing MCP tools to the mashups of web 2.0. It’s a much better acronym expansion.
Which I don't feel great about because I do not like to use LLMs for writing blog posts. I just really wanted to explore if I can write a blog post on my bike commute :)
The section of the population that needs to think about the Inconvenient Truth didn’t watch the movie, because they don’t watch documentaries unless it’s about a Poop Cruise, or a celebrity.
But then this analogy doesn’t hold… Has there ever been a startup in history where it’s break even everywhere? Investors don’t get their money back, customers (hopefully!) are made whole, and the founders and employees are now out of a job and _perhaps_ didn’t get their final pay check depending on how bad it is.
Yeah, you're missing my point. Given most startups fail, the question isn't "at the end of the day do you still get a paycheck for your failed startup", it's "how much of your life did you burn on that failed startup".
Since we're talking about a specific startup whose founders are participants here, I think we can do without the ghoulish stuff about them not making payroll or whatever; "winding down" implies they're failing in an orderly way.
I got your point (after the Free Parking clarification).
(To be clear, my comment wasn’t on Double specifically. No clue how strapped for cash they are while winding down. They seem to be doing right be people (paying fees and such), and that’s great.)
Finally, maybe it’s unintentional, but you seem to be implying that “it’s not worth burning your life on a failed startup,” which seems like a bad take.
If you spend 5 years on a startup that shows promise but ultimately doesn’t pan out, is that always worse than spending 6 months on a startup that fails fast? First, this would be wildly hard to prove, and second, there are obviously counter examples.
In that 5 years, I’ve identified a shit ton of stuff that works, doesn’t work, and made relationships along the way. I’d bet money on the founder of the 5 yr startup being successful over the 6 months founder.
You do that stuff in every job. Meanwhile, people with careers in startups do multiple startups. You get a finite number of them. You are literally better off working at somebody else's successful startup than you are spending 5 years on a doomed startup. The most valuable asset you have is time.
I really don't think I need to cite a study that 5 years of time is a lot to give up on a company that goes nowhere. It happens! It's normal! And very painful. Which is why getting to a decisive resolution in 6 months is often a gift.
You will make more money, and probably work on equivalently interesting problems, working any other job than at a startup you cofounded that limps for years before winding down. It's really hard to see what upside you're finding here. I don't say this often, but this isn't a place I see leaving at "reasonable disagreement".
> I really don't think I need to cite a study that 5 years of time is a lot to give up on a company that goes nowhere.
I think your problem is that you have one definition of success for a startup and that’s to become a unicorn.
> working any other job than at a startup you cofounded that limps for years before winding down.
Not everyone starts a startup to become a billionaire, and not everyone seeks to _make more money_.
But aside from that, the way you’re going to _make more money_ in another job is by working at a large company that can pay you more money. That large company has lots of people and lots of jobs that are specialized… because? Lots of people are there to do them. If I work on a team in a large company, I very likely have a narrow focus and I am not “solving interesting problems” on average.
You keep saying stuff like this, but I'm asking a simple question. How have you personally benefited from spending years at a startup that failed, so much so that you were better off at the doomed startup than in any other place in the industry? I'm looking for some kind of relatable experience.
I’ve worked at a few “unsuccessful,” but long term startups. Bought, but kind of for parts. The 2 yo startup I closed down was the most enjoyable and most rewarding from a learning perspective. The longer term, but unsuccessful, ones were also enjoyable and great learning experiences.
The two larger company experiences had me much more pigeonholed, even as a principal engineer / architect, and exposed me to far less of the important aspects of running a company or product, generally, but I made money. Often it was not enjoyable, and certainly leadership did not always enjoy my questioning of their actions and decisions.
During what "era" did these startups wind down? Pre- or post- first Internet bubble? How old were you at the time? Maybe a failed startup is a great experience when you're 23, and not so much when you're 38?
(I've worked in startups my entire career, and been a founder of five, one serious acquisition, two going concerns, and two failures, one fast one slow; the long failure, circa 2001, was not a valuable experience in any way.)
I started working at startups in 2009… in my late 20s.
If you’re not already financially stable at 60 and hoping to win the startup lottery to retire… well…
So yeah, obviously age plays some role here.
I didn’t go work at startups because I thought I was gonna get rich. I worked at startups because I expected to learn waaaaay more than at Big Co, and have wayyyy more fun while doing it. This panned out.
Money has never been my motivation in computing—interesting problems are.
It wasn’t until I turned 42 that I realized I did it all backwards, though. I should have started by working at Big Co and saved/invested every penny to seek early retirement, and then do whatever I wanted with no financial pressure, later.
I could have stayed at a Big Co for 4+ more years and racked up more RSUs, and bonuses, but my job became boring, and I started to resent it. What can I say?
Curious about the 2001 failure… but am guessing the amount of free money in the dotcom boom led to you trying to build something not well thought out or with ang real hope for viability. (not throwing shade, but lots of mud was thrown and very little stuck)
I don't understand this "startup lottery" stuff. I've been on HN since roughly 2007 and for most of those 18 years I've been a bootstrapping evangelist. My most successful exit to date was a bootstrapped company. I'm just saying: there's no romance or great reward to working in a failing startup. If you have a clear signal that your startup is failing, you've been given a gift from the heavens: the ability to see into the future, see yourself wasting years, and then navigate around those years.
2001 was the beginning of the "nuclear winter" for startups. I think part of this is that I'm just older than you? (I have no idea how old you are, but "how did your startup fail in 2001" is an odd question).
Were you a founder at any of these startups you're talking about? If you're just talking about being an employee, that's totally different. It's often (maybe even usually) reasonable for employees to value their equity at ε. That being the case: you can absolutely choose roles based solely on base comp, how interesting the work is, and how it looks on your resume.
Finally: if you try to factor money out of entrepreneurship discussions, you get to very funny places. We're in one of them now! It is strictly better for a startup to fail at 6 months in than it is for it to fail at 5 years in.
> I don't understand this "startup lottery" stuff.
What’s not to understand? There’s a whole class of people that start a startup hoping for it to be the next big thing and they get their golden ticket to billionairedom. There’s also a whole class of non-founders that will join early stage companies at their riskiest stage hoping for the lottery payout. I’m not sure what there is to misunderstand about this?
> I'm just saying: there's no romance or great reward to working in a failing startup. If you have a clear signal that your startup is failing, you've been given a gift from the heavens: the ability to see into the future, see yourself wasting years, and then navigate around those years.
I don’t think I’ve said anything that negates this statement? If after 6 months you have absolutely no customers and you’ve tried everything, then clearly you don’t stick around for 5 years trying. I’ve never said that. This is way different than “we’ve found some success and after 5 years, hired people, just never figured out how to take it to the next level and so we’re shutting down.”
But you can’t make a general statement that there’s no “romance or reward” because people have a whole lot of reasons for doing what they’re doing. That’s been my big disagreement here. As always the answer is “it depends.” You’ve not cited some study that says differently… so… shrug.
> (I have no idea how old you are, but "how did your startup fail in 2001" is an odd question).
I _guess_ I asked that question, but not really. I asked what your startup was, and made an assumption that the amount of “free money” available may have doomed it from the start. Maybe VCs bet on something that obviously (in retrospect) couldn’t succeed … like Pets.com, or the wide variety of “we’ll just burn all this cash paying people to drive a pack of gum from the upper east side to wall st… in the middle of rush hour… and hope we figure out a way to scale it later!!!!!” startups that existed.
> Were you a founder …
I’m not sure why this actually matters? There are plenty of founders who start a company… almost accidentally… because a project they built became bigger than side-project, who aren’t necessarily motivated by a potential unicorn status. The people who benefit most from “try something for 3mo and hope it fails fast!!!” are (I’m going to make a guess because I doubt there’s a citable study out there!) the people most likely looking to win the startup lottery. In that case, the more chances to “scratch off the ticket” the better.
But, I still maintain that it’d be better for those people to have the experience of being a longer term founder for 5 years to gain more experience, see and adapt to more problems… etc, than to start and kill, start and kill, over and over again. In a fast cycles, you can test one or two hypotheses against a very targetted customer base. But you could totally be looking for a great white shark in a lake, which makes absolutely no sense.
> Finally: if you try to factor money out of entrepreneurship discussions, you get to very funny places.
Funny, when I brought money into it before:
> Yeah, you're missing my point. Given most startups fail, the question isn't "at the end of the day do you still get a paycheck for your failed startup", it's "how much of your life did you burn on that failed startup".
This will be my last reply. We don’t agree, and that’s fine. :)
And some of the most ridiculous songs. I remember (vaguely) a Bootie show at DNA Lounge back in the early 2000s that was entirely mashups. It was hilarious. Lady Gaga mashes up with Eurythmics, Coldplay and Metallica, Robert Palmer and Radiohead.
Is this the core reason that we have a proliferation of packages, arguably doing the same thing, slightly differently, in some ecosystems… We’ve become this impatient?
This space is too hot and the author behind OpenAuth (Dax) is awesome and fast, so this is not his usual tempo. You're free to read the tea leaves, but I wouldn't bet on this one.
There is a sibling post describing this particular project as known dead from the author.
However, my comment is a larger commentary. Imagine if a scientist went off and did research for 2 months and didn’t provide any updates about what they were doing? Would we assume their project was dead? Or a writer who publishes a short story and says “I will turn this into a 500 page novel.” 2 months later… no novel… must be dead!
Why can’t we, instead, assume that people who work on open source are sometimes taking a break? Why can’t we create more fluidity around software… fork it… try to integrate it later? The git model was literally designed around this, but we’ve instead decided to live in a centralized shithole where only the original author is smart enough to make useful contributions… and when they don’t… for whatever reason, we shit can the project and start from scratch.
No activity for nearly 3 months with 67 open issues, 32 open PRs (many as simple as "fix typo") might signify that not a lot of time is being put into the project.
You have a choice to not write the article, and thereby not spread it.
In a Slack someone posted the statement from Astronomer, and I had no idea what the statement was referring to. Now I can’t get away from hearing about the story.
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