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Interesting, thanks for the response! I guess my argument is that there are products that people want, that aren't financially viable under the current model

by chubot 2y ago

Interesting, thanks for the response! I guess my argument is that there are products that people want, that aren't financially viable under the current model I think Plan A is evidence of that -- investors want to fund hockey stick growth, because they want one win to pay for 99 losses But that shouldn't be the only way to grow a company, and retain skilled engineers. You may be right that it would have been the best strategy at the time, given the flood of investment money into tech. --- Some kind of "bootstrapped" path sounds more appealing and sustainble to me, and perhaps more likely to lead to a high quality product (or at least I don't think it would lead to an inferior product) That's what Plan B sounds like. I am not sure that a cloud OS designed to be self-hosted is ever going to make revenue justified by Plan A (though I'd be happy to hear an argument otherwise!) That is, there's the question of what happens if Plan A succeeds, and the company don't find revenue. I guess that's sort of what happened to Docker -- the company shrunk, and lost a bunch of people. Some people may see that as a net positive outcome, but it seems a bit inefficient to me. And I think better tech could have won there ... i.e. it's not clear that the tech that got a lot of VC investment is the one that we should be using I see a similar dynamic with say Github Actions -- they give a ton of computing resources for free, because it's subsidized. But that actually prevents better companies from forming!

kentonv 2y ago
I don't realistically think there's a "bootstrapped" path to build what Sandstorm was building. Too many pieces needed to be in place before it was a really viable product. After a dozen or so eng-years we still had something that was pretty janky. Moreover trying to take a bootstrapped path creates a distraction from the core technology by forcing you to design for ways you can sell more quickly. That might require shortcuts and compromises, or building things that you don't actually need in the long term. That was certainly the case for us: we spent a lot of time engineering a way to paywall certain "enterprise features", and building a paid hosting service (which was sort of antithetical to the whole idea), and we made compromises in the security model to allow us to move faster. I think it's just a fact that most businesses require upfront capital to get off the ground, and some require a lot of it. So you either need founders who are already independently wealthy or you need some sort of venture capital. And yeah sometimes you have a Docker who makes a great piece of technology and can't figure out how to sell it, but would Docker have been built at all otherwise? Maybe it was a loss for the shareholders but it still seems like a win for the industry.

by chubot 2y ago

kentonv 2y ago

I don't realistically think there's a "bootstrapped" path to build what Sandstorm was building. Too many pieces needed to be in place before it was a really viable product. After a dozen or so eng-years we still had something that was pretty janky. Moreover trying to take a bootstrapped path creates a distraction from the core technology by forcing you to design for ways you can sell more quickly. That might require shortcuts and compromises, or building things that you don't actually need in the long term. That was certainly the case for us: we spent a lot of time engineering a way to paywall certain "enterprise features", and building a paid hosting service (which was sort of antithetical to the whole idea), and we made compromises in the security model to allow us to move faster. I think it's just a fact that most businesses require upfront capital to get off the ground, and some require a lot of it. So you either need founders who are already independently wealthy or you need some sort of venture capital. And yeah sometimes you have a Docker who makes a great piece of technology and can't figure out how to sell it, but would Docker have been built at all otherwise? Maybe it was a loss for the shareholders but it still seems like a win for the industry.