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This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as l
by mdasen 9mo ago
This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in sponsorships that Tailwind is already getting. Google has deep pockets and could easily just say "f-it, we're betting on AI coding and this tool helps us make UIs and $2M/year is nothing compared to what we're spending on AI." It's also possible that the AI Studio team has a small discretionary budget and is giving Tailwind $6,000/year.
It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.
- baggy_trough 9mo agoI would think Tailwind could keep 3 engineers around if they are getting sponsorship of over $1m/yr.
- sodapopcan 9mo agoNot necessarily. We don't know what all their costs are, but it's a lot more than just salaries. I'm sure there was a lot of uncertainty in how long those sponsorships would last. There are any number of factors. Adam also stated in a podcast [0] that he laid people of now in order to ensure they he could give them generous severance packages. I'm sure people will have thoughts on that but whatever, I think that makes sense. [0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- manmal 9mo agoWhat costs could tailwind the OSS project have besides payroll and SaaS subs of max 20% the payroll?
- sodapopcan 9mo agoHosting, marketing, other promotional stuff (conferences, maybe other?), there are still three people on the payroll and otherwise I don't know (which was part of my point) as I've never run a business like this before myself. Oh, subscriptions to AI services... that's pricey I hear ;)
- perks_12 9mo agoHosting for their documentation would only be a noteworthy amount if they chose to host on Vercel. Other than that it's a Hetzner box at $100 per month tops.
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- TiredOfLife 9mo agoWhat marketing? Their only marketing is a link in their documentation.
- manmal 9mo ago20% of payroll would cover all that, disregarding marketing which a project like tailwind doesn’t need IMO.
- lysace 9mo agoObviously, yes. Even in the SV area. We all know engineers' capabilities triple or more if they work from there. /S
- zamadatix 9mo agoI've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I decided to go through the podcast episode about it https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... to see what the full picture was. Remaining: - Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind) - Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind) - Steve (owner/design lead) - Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support) - Robin (engineer) There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product. No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.
- Arcuru 9mo agoFor others, the page where this info comes from is https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
- red_trumpet 9mo agoThanks. If I understand correctly, Google AI Studio is listed as a Partner, which means they provide (at least) 60000$/year.
- northern-lights 9mo agoIt seems to be in Google's interest to keep Tailwind CSS afloat. Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.
- spankalee 9mo agoI think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated real CSS instead. The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes. Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.
- blacksmith_tb 9mo agoI'm not a fan of Tailwind, but I can see that it's probably reasonable for code gen to be able to write / extend projects that use Tailwind, since it's in pretty widespread use. For a new project, maybe it could ask if you want to use Tailwind or just keep things vanilla?
- DoesntMatter22 9mo agoTotally agree with this, and I think it's what will likely happen. IMO Tailwind got to the point where you are adding dozens of classes to the tag and it gets a little unwieldy. There are some options to get around it but if AI just does't need it it's even better.
- YetAnotherNick 9mo agoThe thing is LLM generate token by token and if you have to write entire css before writing the html, the quality could be worse.
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- moralestapia 9mo ago>Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty Tailwind is not under financial difficulty, like, at all.
- graeme 9mo agoIt clearly was if you look at forward trends. In his podcast mentioned revenue was going down by a fixed amount per month, meaning an increasing percentage per month, and they had crossed the line to six months of runway before layoffs. With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
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- throwaway-aws9 9mo agoThe lesson here is to always offer a larger tier than what your largest subscribers have.
- bombcar 9mo agoYes, you should always have a "batshit insane" tier as someone, somewhere, has enough that it appears cheap. This is why enterprise software is "call for pricing".
- ricardobeat 9mo agoNo ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.
- birken 9mo agoWhat kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
- babypuncher 9mo agoLots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.
- zeroCalories 9mo agoRealistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels
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- mcny 9mo agoThat's good. We can tell people that so they will submit us patches for free. Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification. I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.
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- codegeek 9mo agoNot $6000/Year but $60,000/Year. Not sure if you missed a 0. Google AI is listed as a Partner sponsor which costs $5000/Month or $60,000/Year. Since Adam's audio and twitter post went viral, he has aded about 5 partner sponsors netting total of additional $300k/Year right there. And a few other smaller sponsors as well. Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
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- josecodea 9mo agoA huge win, especially because now he can pocket that money and doesn't have to spend it on any of the engineers that he just fired.
- naedish 9mo agoIf the description for each tier is correct then it seems like Google AI Studio is an Ambassador only ($2,500 per month). This tier includes your company logo on the homepage. The Partner tier ($5,000 per month) includes placing your logo at the top of the sponsor list and Google AI Studio is at the end of the sponsor list. Edit Looking at the tailwind.css repo[1] they are a Partner. Not sure why they are at the end of the sponsor list in that case. Though now I look at the bottom of the sponsors page I see they repeat the Sponsors again at the bottom and directly indicate each companies support tier. 1. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commit/7a98bddf8872b663e9422887c29ebdcfea068046 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commit/7a98b...
- eek2121 9mo ago...which is not even a developer's salary. Pathetic from a company that makes billions and has surpassed even Apple in terms of market cap (yes, I know market cap means very little, especially in a bubble, but still...) As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least. Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
- bhelkey 9mo agoAll we know is the lower bound. Google donates >= $5,000 a month.
- solarkraft 9mo agoHow much more do you need to maintain a few CSS classes?