5 ms·

So their competitors are just Google docs PiratePad collabedit.com primarypad.com TypeWith.me Sync.in EtherPad Foundation iEthe

by rorrr 15y ago

So their competitors are just Google docs PiratePad collabedit.com primarypad.com TypeWith.me Sync.in EtherPad Foundation iEtherPad.com titanpad.com etherpad.tugraz.at etherpad.mozilla.org:9000 sketchpad.cc okfnpad.org pad.telecomix.org twiddla.com ... Now the real question that I'd love to be be answered is - why would anybody fund this?

tptacek 15y ago
Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list, the VC firm gets a stake in whatever Stypi decides to build with the huge number of users that implies? Not to put too fine a point on it, but, it's easy to see why you wouldn't invest in it: because you can't afford to put that much money behind a 1:10 or 1:15 risk. But that's exactly the problem every VC firm in the world has: finding the right set of 1:10 bets to put their money behind. I feel like, if you're going to complain about people funding stuff like this, you're really complaining about the whole VC model. And sure, I don't like it either. So go build a company without it. Plenty of us here have or are doing exactly that.
- jessedhillon 15y ago
  Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list... The question is why do you or anyone else believe that this is a distinct possibility -- i.e. given this team, this product and this vision, why does someone with money believe that this represents a good bet? I agree with your assessment of the VC's challenge. However, VCs don't put money into every long bet that comes their way. The different between a 1:2 bet and a 1:10 bet is obvious -- distinguishing a 1:10 bet and a 1:10000 bet is where the art comes in. (That is distinguishing a long but feasible proposition from bullshit.)
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Sure. The point is just the naivete implied by being surprised that someone would invest in an Etherpad clone, as if anyone was likely to have simply invested in an Etherpad clone.
    - jessedhillon 15y ago
      I see people all the time on HN who think that the logic of a situation inescapably reduces to a single, simple statement or set of axioms which coincidentally agree with their own viewpoint. They are genuinely shocked and bewildered that a large segment of the population would fail to reach the same, simple-to-reach conclusion, and from this they conclude that everyone who does not arrive at that conclusion is defective. Even if 50%+ of the opinion-holding population disagrees. Because they are unmitigated narcissists, it never enters their mind that perhaps there are factors unseen to them that make the analysis more complicated for those other people. I think this is related to what Nassim Taleb calls "epistemological arrogance" -- refusing to question the validity of one's own knowledge, despite significant evidence that one's knowledge may be insufficient or invalid, e.g. 50%+ of the population has a different opinion, or people with a compelling need for high-quality knowledge (VCs, in this case) are arriving at different conclusions. For concrete examples of this, see the comments on HN article which involves a discussion of race or gender relations.
      - nitrogen 15y ago
        You do raise the important point that one should never assume one knows everything, but 50%+ of the opinion-holding population is wrong about a very large set of ideas (though which 50%+ varies from idea to idea). As such, the fact alone that the majority of a population disagrees with an idea should carry little weight when deciding whether to keep or abandon an idea.
        jessedhillon 15y ago
        Agreed. However, that fact should give you pause, and if you reject the majority opinion (or merely a plurality, or just widely-held) you should be able to articulate a solid reason as to why it deserves rejection.
- rorrr 15y ago
  That's a bold claim. Even if it becomes one of the top 4 companies, what's the business model? Most of the sites I listed are non-commercial, absolutely free. It's a bitch to compete with free services, and pretty much identical functionality. You must also realize that the sites I listed is just a small percentage, something I googled in 2 minutes. There are many many players in the collaborative editing "market".
  - tptacek 15y ago
    How could you possibly think you know this company's investment pitch based on the information we now have? You just want to bag on YC companies. And I don't care, except that you're doing it pretentiously.
    - rorrr 15y ago
      I actually do love many YC companies (reddit, justin.tv, disqus, airbnb, optimizely), but not this one.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Or the last one you commented about, which you also vacuously slagged.
        rorrr 15y ago
        Both snapjoy and stypi seem to lack innovation, at least from the information they are giving us. Take hipmunk, for instance, that's a great example of a fresh idea.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    One of my coworkers here at Google wrote a webcrawler and search engine - probably the first webcrawler, according to Wikipedia - back in 1993. It was an academic project, deployed completely for free, with no possible way to make money. That didn't stop Google from making hundreds of billions of dollars off search 15 years later. When investors look at a company, they look at what it could become, not what it is now. Most gigantic megacorps started as tiny niches that nobody ever believed they could make money from.
old-gregg 15y ago
The real question I have is: why posting a mean question without making a slightest effort to answer it yourself? Did you read the article? Did you try the product yourself (or all of the competitors you've mentioned)? I, for one, believe that collaborative editing should have been added to every authoring application, not just editors, 10 years ago. I still use shared screen sessions for that.
p4bl0 15y ago
I also thought exactly this until I read "vim plugin". Clearly this is just a start, a way to have something running and make people talk about it, a way have real users testing their technology... And being a YC startup help having a relatively large audience even for this kind of launching with an uninteresting product, so the real world technology testing will work, and I'm pretty sure that's all they care about for now. When they start developping plugins for other apps using the same already-tested-and-approved techno, it will get interesting. This seems to me like a case of "launch now, code later", which in this context may be a good idea. Oh, and by the way, I'd like an Emacs Lisp implementation and an open protocol (and a unicorn).
alanh 15y ago
Simperium is another competitor (and a YC alum, as was AppJet). As everyone else replying to you has noted, these guys have grander ambitions. So does Simperium — they aren’t just doing Simplenote (see http://simperium.com/ http://simperium.com/). (Full disclosure: I contracted with them in the past)
knowtheory 15y ago
Because anybody who works remotely knows what a titanic, epic, massive, planet-sized pain in the ass it is to do remote code editing. And this product does it out of the box. I've worked for four years remotely, and with OSS projects, and this has always been a niche that needed to be filled. I've tried subethaedit (requires someone to have open ports to host), coda (which uses subethaedit's libs under the hood), vim + screen (requires having a server + logins), etherpad (no code highlighting), and git+tight sync times, or just ever more towering pages of gists. Having a websocket based collaborative code editor with line numbers and syntax highlighting is 95% of the way there, where as everything else is at best 75% there. So, yeah. I would pay money for this.
- utnick 15y ago
  Have you tried using webmeeting software for this ( like webex, or gotomeeting, or even skype )? Then you can just share your whole screen / environment with someone remotely. That is what I usually do.
  - knowtheory 15y ago
    Actually yes, i left skype off the list accidentally. I've successfully pair programmed via skype screensharing, but the image compression can often be a problem (as well as refresh rate), and there's no way to actually share work/alternate control in a pair. It sort of works, but gets like a 65-70% score from me. Can get the job done, but seriously inhibits productivity due to lack of features.
pg 15y ago
You could have said the same thing about Dropbox when they launched. Or Google. Lots of competitors is a sign there's something here that people want. Unless the incumbents are protected by some barrier to entry, the winner will be whoever executes best, even if they are a late arrival.
- theli0nheart 15y ago
  Not quite. Both Google and Dropbox brought immense improvements to the state of the art of both of their respective niches. I have a hard time at the moment trying to figure out what benefits this has over Etherpad clones or Google Docs. I'm sure there's a use case that they're trying to tackle, but it's not obvious to me.
  - jessedhillon 15y ago
    In the article, it's mentioned that they are building a platform whereby native apps can add collaboration features, and they mention Photoshop as a possibility for that. That would be huge.
patio11 15y ago
You're not funding position and you're probably not funding velocity, you're funding your estimate of acceleration. At t = not much, what they have built in aggregate is a poor predictor of future value.
chc 15y ago
Your criticism reminds me strongly of patio11's prediction: "What's this?! You dare call yourself a startup? You're attempting to solve a problem which other people have attempted to solve before, and your solution looks like something two guys could have made in three months! Why are you in YC and not me?!" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862853 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862853
shorbaji 15y ago
I am not involved with Stypi but I think the key points from the article are "it wants to let native applications like Photoshop sync changes between multiple users" and that "they’ve laid the groundwork to let other applications sync". In other words a text editor is one instance of an application that can use the underlying service. Think about that for a second. The concept of collaborative editing as a service that can be adapted to ANY application is HUGE. For example, an engineering CAD app would be more powerful with this feature. Going further,if you consider that machines can also "collaborate" then it get's even more interesting. An example of human/machine collaboration could be a real-time reporting application.

by rorrr 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list, the VC firm gets a stake in whatever Stypi decides to build with the huge number of users that implies? Not to put too fine a point on it, but, it's easy to see why you wouldn't invest in it: because you can't afford to put that much money behind a 1:10 or 1:15 risk. But that's exactly the problem every VC firm in the world has: finding the right set of 1:10 bets to put their money behind. I feel like, if you're going to complain about people funding stuff like this, you're really complaining about the whole VC model. And sure, I don't like it either. So go build a company without it. Plenty of us here have or are doing exactly that.

jessedhillon 15y ago
Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list... The question is why do you or anyone else believe that this is a distinct possibility -- i.e. given this team, this product and this vision, why does someone with money believe that this represents a good bet? I agree with your assessment of the VC's challenge. However, VCs don't put money into every long bet that comes their way. The different between a 1:2 bet and a 1:10 bet is obvious -- distinguishing a 1:10 bet and a 1:10000 bet is where the art comes in. (That is distinguishing a long but feasible proposition from bullshit.)
- tptacek 15y ago
  Sure. The point is just the naivete implied by being surprised that someone would invest in an Etherpad clone, as if anyone was likely to have simply invested in an Etherpad clone.
  - jessedhillon 15y ago
    I see people all the time on HN who think that the logic of a situation inescapably reduces to a single, simple statement or set of axioms which coincidentally agree with their own viewpoint. They are genuinely shocked and bewildered that a large segment of the population would fail to reach the same, simple-to-reach conclusion, and from this they conclude that everyone who does not arrive at that conclusion is defective. Even if 50%+ of the opinion-holding population disagrees. Because they are unmitigated narcissists, it never enters their mind that perhaps there are factors unseen to them that make the analysis more complicated for those other people. I think this is related to what Nassim Taleb calls "epistemological arrogance" -- refusing to question the validity of one's own knowledge, despite significant evidence that one's knowledge may be insufficient or invalid, e.g. 50%+ of the population has a different opinion, or people with a compelling need for high-quality knowledge (VCs, in this case) are arriving at different conclusions. For concrete examples of this, see the comments on HN article which involves a discussion of race or gender relations.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      You do raise the important point that one should never assume one knows everything, but 50%+ of the opinion-holding population is wrong about a very large set of ideas (though which 50%+ varies from idea to idea). As such, the fact alone that the majority of a population disagrees with an idea should carry little weight when deciding whether to keep or abandon an idea.
      - jessedhillon 15y ago
        Agreed. However, that fact should give you pause, and if you reject the majority opinion (or merely a plurality, or just widely-held) you should be able to articulate a solid reason as to why it deserves rejection.
rorrr 15y ago
That's a bold claim. Even if it becomes one of the top 4 companies, what's the business model? Most of the sites I listed are non-commercial, absolutely free. It's a bitch to compete with free services, and pretty much identical functionality. You must also realize that the sites I listed is just a small percentage, something I googled in 2 minutes. There are many many players in the collaborative editing "market".
- tptacek 15y ago
  How could you possibly think you know this company's investment pitch based on the information we now have? You just want to bag on YC companies. And I don't care, except that you're doing it pretentiously.
  - rorrr 15y ago
    I actually do love many YC companies (reddit, justin.tv, disqus, airbnb, optimizely), but not this one.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Or the last one you commented about, which you also vacuously slagged.
      - rorrr 15y ago
        Both snapjoy and stypi seem to lack innovation, at least from the information they are giving us. Take hipmunk, for instance, that's a great example of a fresh idea.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  One of my coworkers here at Google wrote a webcrawler and search engine - probably the first webcrawler, according to Wikipedia - back in 1993. It was an academic project, deployed completely for free, with no possible way to make money. That didn't stop Google from making hundreds of billions of dollars off search 15 years later. When investors look at a company, they look at what it could become, not what it is now. Most gigantic megacorps started as tiny niches that nobody ever believed they could make money from.

old-gregg 15y ago

The real question I have is: why posting a mean question without making a slightest effort to answer it yourself? Did you read the article? Did you try the product yourself (or all of the competitors you've mentioned)? I, for one, believe that collaborative editing should have been added to every authoring application, not just editors, 10 years ago. I still use shared screen sessions for that.

p4bl0 15y ago

I also thought exactly this until I read "vim plugin". Clearly this is just a start, a way to have something running and make people talk about it, a way have real users testing their technology... And being a YC startup help having a relatively large audience even for this kind of launching with an uninteresting product, so the real world technology testing will work, and I'm pretty sure that's all they care about for now. When they start developping plugins for other apps using the same already-tested-and-approved techno, it will get interesting. This seems to me like a case of "launch now, code later", which in this context may be a good idea. Oh, and by the way, I'd like an Emacs Lisp implementation and an open protocol (and a unicorn).

alanh 15y ago

Simperium is another competitor (and a YC alum, as was AppJet). As everyone else replying to you has noted, these guys have grander ambitions. So does Simperium — they aren’t just doing Simplenote (see http://simperium.com/ http://simperium.com/). (Full disclosure: I contracted with them in the past)

knowtheory 15y ago

Because anybody who works remotely knows what a titanic, epic, massive, planet-sized pain in the ass it is to do remote code editing. And this product does it out of the box. I've worked for four years remotely, and with OSS projects, and this has always been a niche that needed to be filled. I've tried subethaedit (requires someone to have open ports to host), coda (which uses subethaedit's libs under the hood), vim + screen (requires having a server + logins), etherpad (no code highlighting), and git+tight sync times, or just ever more towering pages of gists. Having a websocket based collaborative code editor with line numbers and syntax highlighting is 95% of the way there, where as everything else is at best 75% there. So, yeah. I would pay money for this.

utnick 15y ago
Have you tried using webmeeting software for this ( like webex, or gotomeeting, or even skype )? Then you can just share your whole screen / environment with someone remotely. That is what I usually do.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  Actually yes, i left skype off the list accidentally. I've successfully pair programmed via skype screensharing, but the image compression can often be a problem (as well as refresh rate), and there's no way to actually share work/alternate control in a pair. It sort of works, but gets like a 65-70% score from me. Can get the job done, but seriously inhibits productivity due to lack of features.

pg 15y ago

You could have said the same thing about Dropbox when they launched. Or Google. Lots of competitors is a sign there's something here that people want. Unless the incumbents are protected by some barrier to entry, the winner will be whoever executes best, even if they are a late arrival.

theli0nheart 15y ago
Not quite. Both Google and Dropbox brought immense improvements to the state of the art of both of their respective niches. I have a hard time at the moment trying to figure out what benefits this has over Etherpad clones or Google Docs. I'm sure there's a use case that they're trying to tackle, but it's not obvious to me.
- jessedhillon 15y ago
  In the article, it's mentioned that they are building a platform whereby native apps can add collaboration features, and they mention Photoshop as a possibility for that. That would be huge.

patio11 15y ago

You're not funding position and you're probably not funding velocity, you're funding your estimate of acceleration. At t = not much, what they have built in aggregate is a poor predictor of future value.

chc 15y ago

Your criticism reminds me strongly of patio11's prediction: "What's this?! You dare call yourself a startup? You're attempting to solve a problem which other people have attempted to solve before, and your solution looks like something two guys could have made in three months! Why are you in YC and not me?!" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862853 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862853

shorbaji 15y ago

I am not involved with Stypi but I think the key points from the article are "it wants to let native applications like Photoshop sync changes between multiple users" and that "they’ve laid the groundwork to let other applications sync". In other words a text editor is one instance of an application that can use the underlying service. Think about that for a second. The concept of collaborative editing as a service that can be adapted to ANY application is HUGE. For example, an engineering CAD app would be more powerful with this feature. Going further,if you consider that machines can also "collaborate" then it get's even more interesting. An example of human/machine collaboration could be a real-time reporting application.