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As someone that is raising money from VCs, I feel really sorry for large VC backed companies right now. What you see here is the Product-VC tension of the AI er
by drdrek 5mo ago
As someone that is raising money from VCs, I feel really sorry for large VC backed companies right now. What you see here is the Product-VC tension of the AI era, and in a large company its devastating.
Users want a product that delivers the value they are looking for, VCs are looking for infinite AI scale, these do not meet. So founders need to present two different values and visions, one for customers and one for VCs.
In a small early stage company you can pretty easily hide each side from the other so you can deliver value to your customers while dancing the VC dance, but as you get larger its harder.
I think founders will endure and VCs will calm down at some point, but there is going to be some suffering along the way.
Oh and have you heard that they built Cluade code with only 20 people? (ignore 12 years of AI research expertise head-start and that Anthropic now has thousands of developers)
- twoodfin 5mo agoThe message was pretty clear that the only “users” that matter to them now are agents. It’s not clear at all this is the wrong move.
- ricardobayes 5mo agoNever really got how gitlab got so big, what's their USP? To my knowledge they don't really have anything that is not reproducible rather easily.
- oblio 5mo agoOn premise Git forge with integrated issue tracker, CI/CD platform, and probably other 20 development adjacent tools. It has a ton of features so for sure it's not easily reproducible.
- rcxdude 5mo agoOne issue I have with them is that they pretty much had all the features I use a few years after they started, and they have, for the most part, just kept adding new ones of dubious value instead of polishing the core ones.
- oblio 5mo agoCould be, but that probably makes their product bad, not simple :-)
- darkwater 5mo agoThe selling point would be vertical integration and that you don't need to stitch together 12 different SaaS CI products all attached to your source code, but just deal with one vendor (GitLab).
- esafak 5mo agoMake a better Github and I'll sign up. Gitlab doesn't quite qualify any more; it's more like a lateral move.
- burnt-resistor 5mo agoIt should be turned into a semi-fictional tale, Catch-23, where intractable human unreasonableness creates comical absurdity.