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Famous never should have been funded. Not because of lack of talent on the team, but because it's an inherently unprofitable idea. The responsibility of knowing
by stevebmark 11y ago
Famous never should have been funded. Not because of lack of talent on the team, but because it's an inherently unprofitable idea. The responsibility of knowing that should fall on the team, not the investors. I think it was disingenuous to seek funding for this idea. GitTip or another OSS funding model would have been far more appropriate. A cross platform animation library should not have paid employees, and was an unfortunate choice for investors. (They burned 30 MILLION working on an open source animation library?!). It sounds like a few dozen people were lucky enough to get Bay Area salaries to meander around a broken idea. I don't think an investor would have the technical experience to realize the technology both would not work well, not solve the right problems, and not be marketable. They fired a dozen people? How many more are left?! Anything built by the remaining team should not be done under the Famous brand. It was disingenuous of the founder to pitch it as a fundable, profitable idea and use techno-speak to wow investors for something that many developers in the industry could see right through.
- Eridrus 11y agoNot really sure why investors shouldn't be expected to be able to do due diligence on the startups they invest in.
- stevebmark 11y agoUI development is so specialized now that I bet you could sell enough snake oil to lots of investors who would have a hard time verifying if your idea has profit potential or not. I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into paying employees. It's one thing to sell snake oil, it's another not to even try to build a working snake oil prototype on your own time without taking someone else's money and burning it.
- argonaut 11y agoDo you have inside information we don't know about? You know for sure he didn't put his own money into the venture?
- stevebmark 11y agoNo, I have no more information than is in the article, but I have no reason to believe otherwise.
- argonaut 11y agoIf you don't know whether or not the founder put his own money into it, then don't say things like: "I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into paying employees."
- Eridrus 11y agoYou could say that about literally anything, at these prices investors should be able to find their own experts in the field to evaluate these kinds of things. Almost none of the comments I saw on HN were positive about this, which should be more of a red flag than usual given that developers are their target audience. But whatever, I have no sympathy for VCs who have no idea what they're doing.
- argonaut 11y ago1) They did not burn 30M (as stated in the article, most of it is still there). 2) You are conflating difficult to monetize with inherently impossible to monetize. They are not the same thing. Just because it's challenging and failure-prone, doesn't mean it's impossible.