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I regret not taking it. Hummer-Winblad really wanted to give us some money but I couldn't figure out what they brought to the table. In retrospect, it was mar

I regret not taking it. Hummer-Winblad really wanted to give us some money but I couldn't figure out what they brought to the table. In retrospect, it was marketing, the money could have paid for marketing. And because they were invested they would have insisted on marketing. Did I mention we needed some marketing? We really needed some marketing. So, while it's very common to ask about taking investment, also look hard at the whole picture and see if there is a part of it that you'll (perhaps secretly) admit that you don't want to do. If you are in complete control you can kid yourself that you'll get to that part and never do it. Or, in our case, not do it until it is too late. Investment can be viewed as adding some adult supervision. I screwed up by not taking it, I was so worried about the dreaded VC's screwing up my company that I didn't consider the possibility that they could also help. Well I did, but was too stupid to value the marketing part (I'm a hard core engineer at heart).

chubot 9y ago
Interesting -- what company was this for? Maybe you can market it on HN :)
- luckydude 9y ago
  BitMover/BitKeeper. Nice idea but too late, the market has gone to git. Which chaps my hide, git is an awful design, it's a tarball server pretending to be a source management system. Source management is basically an accounting program for programmers, it's suppose to faithfully log what you do. How does git do that when it has no concept of a file? Answer: it guesses about renames. And blame is slow because there are no file create or file delete events. It was trivial for us to create a bk fast-export command and make it work incrementally. It's next to impossible to do it the other way incrementally because git doesn't have a versioned file object. It's like a file system that has no inodes. To me, it makes no sense. But it won. Yeah. Not.
  - chubot 9y ago
    Thanks for the background. There are indeed awful things about git's design, but I think it would have been very hard to out-market git. Git is both free AND viral. It's viral because if you want to use someone else's code, you have to use their source control system. Linux using git is a big deal in that respect (and yes I realize the kernel used BitKeeper :) ). Also, Github as company and git the open source project are pretty complementary. It's hard to house both entities under the same roof, and you need that for ecosystem to succeed. Github is basically a UI/app company, and git is systems plumbing. It's analogous to some PaaS companies wanting to make their own web framework. No actually that's a huge amount of work and you underestimated it. For all its faults, rewriting Rails is not something anyone can do. Heroku ended up being one of the early success stories because they just took your rails app and ran it. Likewise everyone thinks they can rewrite Github, but that's pretty hard. It's at least 10x more work than you think, and you can get it wrong. If a tool isn't open source, there's much less incentive for a company like Github to come around and "popularize" it. It seems like it's very hard to make money in developer tools in general, because so much is open source. And honestly they should be -- I would be a hypocrite if I said I didn't choose tools because they are open source. I guess Github and Atlassian are the outliers. Anyway, my overall point is that I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to marketing :) I do think open source got much bigger in the last decade, and it's hard for me to imagine that it wouldn't be built around an open source VCS.
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      >Git is both free AND viral. It's viral because if you want to use someone else's code, you have to use their source control system. Linux using git is a big deal in that respect (and yes I realize the kernel used BitKeeper :) ). And BK is (was, until last year [too late]) closed software that requires a paid commercial license to use. Pretty much a show stopper for open source contributors donating their free time.
      - luckydude 9y ago
        Yeah, too late. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. There's some nice code in there though, I wish people would steal our libc stuff. Some really nice ideas in there. And a pleasant license so you can use it where ever you want.
  - iamacynic 9y ago
    you probably could have captured a significant commercial marketshare but i highly doubt you could have beaten git in the open source world, since it was created by your highest profile customer who also happens to be the highest profile open source author (linus torvalds) in direct response to your licensing situation.
    - luckydude 9y ago
      Yeah, well. We did what we could. I've been beat up about the licensing and eventually saw the light, the whole thing is open source under the Apache v2 license. As to the "direct response" stuff, so do you have that straight from Linus? Because that's not what he said to me and we were very close at the time, emailed or got on the phone daily. I'm a little tired of the licensing stuff. It wasn't as bad as people made it out to be but I get it, it's a more fun story when someone is the bad guy. Can I ask you to let it go or is that too much?
      - iamacynic 9y ago
        no, of course not. i'm a nobody. but that's the impression that's out there. i don't really care, tbh, it seems like it was just bad timing. anyway, glad to hear you are retired by the sea in norcal, that's not exactly a sob story, which is why i feel comfortable commenting about it (and you're on a public forum).
        luckydude 9y ago
        I was a nobody and am again. Don't sell yourself short, if you are hanging here and you know the licensing stuff you are paying attention. With that much energy my feeling is you can do stuff. Go do it. If I can help let me know.
ascendantlogic 9y ago
This is a problem that a lot of engineering types fall into. We as technical people think that the best technology will win, but that's not true. The best technology that the most people have heard of for the most reasonable price will win.
- meric 9y ago
  The best technology where "best" means it actually does something useful for people, rather than whatever we, engineering types, think it is.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  I used to think the best product was key. Over the years I've realised I'd prefer a standard product with a brilliant distribution channel than a brilliant product with a standard distribution channel. Obviously the goal is to develop both!
0verc00ked 9y ago
I find it interesting that this is the first answer, so I started an alternate Ask HN: Do you regret not taking investment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14258278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14258278
brilliantcode 9y ago
What I wrote is going to be super harsh but I'm being purely analytical and this is not to be taken personally: You definitely don't sound confident at all and I feel like your problem is much deeper one where taking VC money or not isn't the issue. It's clear from reading you would've spent the money on non-marketing as the hindsight speaks for itself. Marketing is a small part of the equation but shouldn't be most of the funding goes. Depending on your business and industry, it will vary greatly. I really don't see any negative impact on you. It might feel that you missed out but maybe it was never a good fit. Of course, today, you are wiser and know exactly what to do with it, so consider it a lesson that can't be taught in schools.
- luckydude 9y ago
  I'm plenty confident, in fact, too much perhaps. After all, I founded a company that has lasted 19 years (and technically still exists, we have some money in the bank). That company changed the world. No, we didn't win, but all the distributed source management systems came after us, we were first, they are copies of our model. We invented that space, clone/pull/push/commit are our verbs. We invented, in effect [1], the concept of a changeset. Before us, there was CVS. No binding of a set of related files in a commit. I'm good with that, we changed the world for the better. If you are a programmer your world is better on a daily basis because of us. As for "my problem being much deeper", not sure where you get that from. I'm retired, I'm fine. Do I have some regrets? You bet. - I wish Git, since it won, was a pure clone of our stuff, we have a much better architecture, both for accuracy and for performance (try running Git on NFS, then try our stuff. Try running Git with a 4GB repo and then try our stuff.) - I wish I had made enough money that my team could also retire. Other than that, I'm good. I've got 4 dogs that I love, live in the Santa Cruz mountains with an awesome family that I also love, I've got nothing to complain about. Well, maybe some health stuff but I'm old so that is par for the course. [1] One of my guys, Rick Smith, knows way more about this stuff than I do, and he tells me that Aide-de-camp had some sort of changeset concept. So perhaps we were not first. But nobody knew about it. Back when dejanews was a thing you could search usenet in a time range. I remember searching going backwards from the time that we introduced the changeset concept, there either 6 or 9 hits in over 2 decades of Usenet posts. The fact that everyone knows what a changeset is traceable to us far more than Aide-de-camp. Edit: formatting

chubot 9y ago

Interesting -- what company was this for? Maybe you can market it on HN :)

luckydude 9y ago
BitMover/BitKeeper. Nice idea but too late, the market has gone to git. Which chaps my hide, git is an awful design, it's a tarball server pretending to be a source management system. Source management is basically an accounting program for programmers, it's suppose to faithfully log what you do. How does git do that when it has no concept of a file? Answer: it guesses about renames. And blame is slow because there are no file create or file delete events. It was trivial for us to create a bk fast-export command and make it work incrementally. It's next to impossible to do it the other way incrementally because git doesn't have a versioned file object. It's like a file system that has no inodes. To me, it makes no sense. But it won. Yeah. Not.
- chubot 9y ago
  Thanks for the background. There are indeed awful things about git's design, but I think it would have been very hard to out-market git. Git is both free AND viral. It's viral because if you want to use someone else's code, you have to use their source control system. Linux using git is a big deal in that respect (and yes I realize the kernel used BitKeeper :) ). Also, Github as company and git the open source project are pretty complementary. It's hard to house both entities under the same roof, and you need that for ecosystem to succeed. Github is basically a UI/app company, and git is systems plumbing. It's analogous to some PaaS companies wanting to make their own web framework. No actually that's a huge amount of work and you underestimated it. For all its faults, rewriting Rails is not something anyone can do. Heroku ended up being one of the early success stories because they just took your rails app and ran it. Likewise everyone thinks they can rewrite Github, but that's pretty hard. It's at least 10x more work than you think, and you can get it wrong. If a tool isn't open source, there's much less incentive for a company like Github to come around and "popularize" it. It seems like it's very hard to make money in developer tools in general, because so much is open source. And honestly they should be -- I would be a hypocrite if I said I didn't choose tools because they are open source. I guess Github and Atlassian are the outliers. Anyway, my overall point is that I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to marketing :) I do think open source got much bigger in the last decade, and it's hard for me to imagine that it wouldn't be built around an open source VCS.
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    >Git is both free AND viral. It's viral because if you want to use someone else's code, you have to use their source control system. Linux using git is a big deal in that respect (and yes I realize the kernel used BitKeeper :) ). And BK is (was, until last year [too late]) closed software that requires a paid commercial license to use. Pretty much a show stopper for open source contributors donating their free time.
    - luckydude 9y ago
      Yeah, too late. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. There's some nice code in there though, I wish people would steal our libc stuff. Some really nice ideas in there. And a pleasant license so you can use it where ever you want.
- iamacynic 9y ago
  you probably could have captured a significant commercial marketshare but i highly doubt you could have beaten git in the open source world, since it was created by your highest profile customer who also happens to be the highest profile open source author (linus torvalds) in direct response to your licensing situation.
  - luckydude 9y ago
    Yeah, well. We did what we could. I've been beat up about the licensing and eventually saw the light, the whole thing is open source under the Apache v2 license. As to the "direct response" stuff, so do you have that straight from Linus? Because that's not what he said to me and we were very close at the time, emailed or got on the phone daily. I'm a little tired of the licensing stuff. It wasn't as bad as people made it out to be but I get it, it's a more fun story when someone is the bad guy. Can I ask you to let it go or is that too much?
    - iamacynic 9y ago
      no, of course not. i'm a nobody. but that's the impression that's out there. i don't really care, tbh, it seems like it was just bad timing. anyway, glad to hear you are retired by the sea in norcal, that's not exactly a sob story, which is why i feel comfortable commenting about it (and you're on a public forum).
      - luckydude 9y ago
        I was a nobody and am again. Don't sell yourself short, if you are hanging here and you know the licensing stuff you are paying attention. With that much energy my feeling is you can do stuff. Go do it. If I can help let me know.

ascendantlogic 9y ago

This is a problem that a lot of engineering types fall into. We as technical people think that the best technology will win, but that's not true. The best technology that the most people have heard of for the most reasonable price will win.

meric 9y ago
The best technology where "best" means it actually does something useful for people, rather than whatever we, engineering types, think it is.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
I used to think the best product was key. Over the years I've realised I'd prefer a standard product with a brilliant distribution channel than a brilliant product with a standard distribution channel. Obviously the goal is to develop both!

0verc00ked 9y ago

I find it interesting that this is the first answer, so I started an alternate Ask HN: Do you regret not taking investment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14258278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14258278

brilliantcode 9y ago

What I wrote is going to be super harsh but I'm being purely analytical and this is not to be taken personally: You definitely don't sound confident at all and I feel like your problem is much deeper one where taking VC money or not isn't the issue. It's clear from reading you would've spent the money on non-marketing as the hindsight speaks for itself. Marketing is a small part of the equation but shouldn't be most of the funding goes. Depending on your business and industry, it will vary greatly. I really don't see any negative impact on you. It might feel that you missed out but maybe it was never a good fit. Of course, today, you are wiser and know exactly what to do with it, so consider it a lesson that can't be taught in schools.

luckydude 9y ago
I'm plenty confident, in fact, too much perhaps. After all, I founded a company that has lasted 19 years (and technically still exists, we have some money in the bank). That company changed the world. No, we didn't win, but all the distributed source management systems came after us, we were first, they are copies of our model. We invented that space, clone/pull/push/commit are our verbs. We invented, in effect [1], the concept of a changeset. Before us, there was CVS. No binding of a set of related files in a commit. I'm good with that, we changed the world for the better. If you are a programmer your world is better on a daily basis because of us. As for "my problem being much deeper", not sure where you get that from. I'm retired, I'm fine. Do I have some regrets? You bet. - I wish Git, since it won, was a pure clone of our stuff, we have a much better architecture, both for accuracy and for performance (try running Git on NFS, then try our stuff. Try running Git with a 4GB repo and then try our stuff.) - I wish I had made enough money that my team could also retire. Other than that, I'm good. I've got 4 dogs that I love, live in the Santa Cruz mountains with an awesome family that I also love, I've got nothing to complain about. Well, maybe some health stuff but I'm old so that is par for the course. [1] One of my guys, Rick Smith, knows way more about this stuff than I do, and he tells me that Aide-de-camp had some sort of changeset concept. So perhaps we were not first. But nobody knew about it. Back when dejanews was a thing you could search usenet in a time range. I remember searching going backwards from the time that we introduced the changeset concept, there either 6 or 9 hits in over 2 decades of Usenet posts. The fact that everyone knows what a changeset is traceable to us far more than Aide-de-camp. Edit: formatting