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> 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out? > 3. Requirement of email. > 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by other
by zumu 5y ago
> 2. Less trust in you as a YC startup. What if you fail? What if you sell out?
> 3. Requirement of email.
> 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others.
Dovetailing on these...
Like why is a CLI tool VC backed? Is the business model just selling our data? Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing?
- dvt 5y agoJust adding, from their website: > Investors: We've raised several million dollars from amazing VCs like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, and angels like Jason Warner, Adam Gross, Olivier Pomel, Scott Belsky, Will Gaybrick and a handful of other impressive dev tool founders and executives. The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also kind of a wtf moment to me, but what do I know.
- meowkit 5y agoEh money is trying to park itself somewhere. Maybe the founders sold this as a way to get dev telemetry data + a subscription.
- H8crilA 5y agoYeah but if there's dev telemetry involved it's a no-go from me. Definitely a no-go, the terminal is sensitive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arcturus17 5y agoWTF indeed. There has to be some grand vision behind this, presumably large-scale data capture. At the end of the day, the terminal is is to the dev what Google is to the internet user: the point of entry where many journeys begin, with dozens or hundreds of interactions every day. And while devs are a niche market compared to Google's userbase, they are a lucrative and strategic one nonetheless. Casting aside the environment of low-interest rates and massive inflow of investment in startups, how does a product like this otherwise raise several millions? The pitch sounds like something that a competent indie dev studio could sell on the Mac App Store...
- marlor 5y agoYes, but when you’re Googling, you’re searching for public information. When you’re using the terminal, you’re mostly manipulating your own data, often in ways that would reveal sensitive information if your terminal history was leaked. Any attempt to collect data from users’ terminal interactions is indistinguishable from keylogging.
- meowface 5y agoThey could rationalize it as only capturing the commands and not the arguments, or something. (If that's indeed the long-term plan. No clue; for all I know data collection isn't intended as the business strategy whatsoever.)
- samblr 5y agoI just wanted be a fly on the wall when Fig founders were pitching to these investors on how they are gonna make money. Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ? When I get a compilation error - how quickly it gets to compiling state again ? Was the compilation error a trivial mistake ? How much time is spent between each commands ? How productive I am keying in command one after another ? Also can NOT Fig figure out current apps Im running on my machine ? What is the current app in foreground ? How long I run each app ? When I log off ? How many times I log off ? It is getting interesting! Can anybody help with more usecases.
- fnord77 5y agopretty dystopian
- azinman2 5y agoThat’s one theoretical way to make money, except not only do few companies do this now, but few devs would accept that. There are other ways to support developers thru honest tooling (eg IntelliJ).
- qbasic_forever 5y agoYour employer's group policy controls, management agents, etc. that control access to their internal network can (and are) already telling them all of that information. They're basically rootkits that run anything they want on computers that access their network. Usually they just distribute certs, keys, etc. or remotely wipe a lost/stolen machine, but the capability is there to do anything.
- Spivak 5y agoI think you misunderstand how tools like this sell, the enterprise offering will be fully supported integration of tools that are enterprisey (Cisco gear, Netapp, Fortinet, Xen, VMware, Veeam) and a hosted offering so teams can collaborate on scripts and snippets á la postman.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
- ttt0 5y agoWith millions of dollars you could probably just write a shell that does this sort of completion inside the terminal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hnlmorg 5y agoI did exactly that for free ;)
- ttt0 5y agoCool! Was it a one man project, and if so then how long did it took to get it to a reasonably functional state?
- hnlmorg 5y agoIt's about 6(ish) years old and went through various states of reinvention before I landed on the current design and it's been my primary shell for the last 4 years now.
- Hammershaft 5y agoCan we check it out! :D
- f6v 5y ago> The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also kind of a wtf moment to me, but what do I know. There's probably more money than people know what to do with. So they might be investing in completely crazy ideas hoping that the founders figure it out along the way.
- Grustaf 5y agoI mean, I agree, why is a cli tool YC backed, sure. But “several million dollars” is literally nothing in the VC space.
- smoldesu 5y agoIt strikes me as a pretty disgusting waste of "millions of dollars" to develop a Mac-exclusive app that does the same thing that your shell does, but slower.
- Spivak 5y agoI mean they’re trying to be JetBrains but for Bash so it makes total sense to me why it would be a many many millions of dollars effort. I think people forget that IDEs (which is essentially what this is) are a stupid amount of work. Then you have to add the rest of the business: sales, leadership, support, hr, ops. I mean a 25 person company $200k average total comp is 5mil annual burned cash just on salary.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- version_five 5y agoCLI is a relatively "pristine" environment, where a lot of people's time is spent and nothing competes for our attention (or data as was pointed out). Any business model that could plausibly exploit this environment for financial gain would be an easy sell to investors. I don't know anything about this product's intentions, but it's easy to imagine the possibilities once you start getting permission to pop something up in someone's terminal window.
- Grustaf 5y agoWell, it’s even easier to imagine that they will start charging money for it. If it makes life easier for developers they can easily charge 20 bucks a month for it.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> once you start getting permission to pop something up in someone's terminal window. Canonical already does this.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> Like why is a CLI tool VC backed? Is the business model just selling our data? Agreed. Take a look at Nabu Casa, the developers of Home Assistant and Home Assistant Cloud. They are 100% self-funded by their revenue from HA Cloud and the hardware they sell. Because of this, I don't have to worry about investors demanding a return on investment by any means necessary and potentially generating revenue from users' private data.
- mschrage 5y ago> Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing? Autocomplete is our first product. The bigger vision that Fig can enable an ecosystem of terminal extensions. Here are some early prototypes we built [0] and here is the discussion from when we were posted on HN last summer [1]. > Is the business model just selling our data? We will never sell data. That just isn't the business we want to build - Brendan and I like hacking on the terminal because it's interesting and we get to solve our own problems. We've been lucky enough to find investors, most of whom have an engineering background, who understand how important the terminal and believe there is a lot of room for improvement. Obviously, we would like Fig to become a sustainable business. We plan to monetize in the short term by offering autocomplete for internal CLI tools and scripts. Longer term, we think that there is a lot of stuff that developers do in the browser that make more sense in the terminal. Fig's autocomplete product is powered by an API that lets anyone build graphical extensions that are connected to the terminal. [0] https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4 https://fig.io/videos/old-sizzle-reel.mp4 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23766980
- lasfter 5y ago> We will never sell data. That just isn't the business we want to build These are just words from strangers on the internet. You're offering a free and auto-updating app. You don't give me a contract guaranteeing anything. Most terms of use/privacy policies have a clause stating it can be updated without notice and when you do have actual policies on your site I'm sure they will be similar. At any point you can decide that actually, you do want to share my data, or share access to it through one of your products. Maybe you won't call it "selling" (the same way Zuckerberg can tell Congress that Facebook doesn't sell anyone's data). Maybe you don't decide to share my data, but Fig gets acquired and the new management decides to. Maybe an attacker gains access to the data and shares it. Maybe an attacker compromises an update, turning all Fig instances into keyloggers, and paired with the required email addresses uses it to compromise other data.
- qzw 5y agoGood points. I'll add that the "disclosure by ransomware" risk is definitely not just theoretical anymore.