HN user
hex.ai
The iPhone 5C of Ferraris – and I am sure it'll have the same fate.
It's doubly a shame because Jony actually owns one of the all-time most beautiful classic Ferraris – the 250 Europa. I was hoping they'd do a modern re-imagination and revival.
Who hurt you?
I mean the whole product is a Hex clone, literally every feature is something Hex has had for a long time...
I don't think an LLM wrote it; this has been their brand voice for a long time...
Not surprised - this stuff isn’t fully mature yet. But I interact with their team a lot and know they have a commitment to it (I’m the other guy in that video)
One thing I admire about Snowflake is a real commitment to self-cannibalization. They were super out front with Iceberg even though it could disrupt them, because that's what customers were asking for and they're willing to bet they'll figure out how to make money in that new world
Video of their SVP of Product talking about it here: https://youtu.be/PERZMGLhnF8?si=DjS_OgbNeDpvLA04&t=1195
I’m surprised not to see a discussion of the biggest drawback: despite being fewer characters, “uv” is harder to type than “pip”. It requires two different hands to participate and a longer reach with my left index finger. pip is convenient – just a little rattle off with my right hand.
VCs often help companies find homes within their portfolios
no idea how the product itself works but they have set a new standard for small startup launch videos with this
Windsurf didn't not go through because of regulatory or MSFT issue – that was always a fig leaf. OAI walked.
The implication of her article is that they’d have a hard time raising that money and/or that they somehow aren’t doing well - I don’t see any evidence of this cited anywhere in her post.
This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation. [1]
Ana's contention that Substack is "rickety" seems motivated by her conviction that they should adopt a more assertive, aggressive censorship regime, and that "we need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing".
There are certainly many interesting questions about the future of media and Substack's business – but the parade of people saying it can't succeed without more moderation keep being proven wrong.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/business/substack-fundrai...
Keep the vested equity and move on. Anything else is asking too much.
congrats to Nikita and all the wonderful folks at Neon!
Congrats to everyone. Some of the smartest and kindest people in data coming together!
Congrats to everyone, very excited to see how these come together
Component dependency is pretty wild and could massively simplify some complex apps
Congrats Taimur!
Seems like it's mostly died off, most people I know have moved to hosted solutions like Hex or Colab
Either! Basically any measure an objective observer could look at and be like, "oh yes this is a breakout hit with a bright future ahead of it"
GitLab is a really interesting example, but I don't know if it'd have positioned itself as an "open source alternative"
As for Mattermost, RocketChat, and Outline – I think these are great examples of projects positioned this way that haven't broken out. They all seem great, but it's not clear that being an "open source alternative" to Slack really worked for Mattermost...
Packaging on this is interesting – from pricing page:
How much will Figma Slides cost when it is generally available? Figma Slides will be included in all Starter plans for free or can be purchased for $3 per seat/month on Professional plans, and $5 per seat/month on Organization and Enterprise plans.
Do I need to have a full Figma design seat to use Figma Slides? No, you do not need to have a paid Figma Design or paid FigJam seat to use Figma Slides. You will need a paid Figma Design seat to use advanced design tools in Figma Slides.
We love love love https://arcade.software/
reminds me of fuckitdb https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/
We built Hex’s Magic features using GPT-4. You can generate, edit, debug, and explain SQL and Python. We have a few hundred people using it every day, and are opening it more broadly soon.
Hex just launched a diff view feature, along with git sync and a clean file format: https://hex.tech/blog/github-sync
That was not the case here though! Fast's primary backers were Index, one of the leading valley firms, and Stripe, which, while not a professional venture firm, is highly sophisticated and deeply knowledgable in this space.
It's highly, highly uncommon, which is why the "Ponzi scheme" label falls flat to anyone who is close to venture. Seed investors will typically not exit their positions until very late in the company's life, either in later growth rounds (C, D, etc.) or at IPO.
If the question is "how did they get that valuation despite being a very bad business", it's simply that investors gave them too much forward credit against the very big risks they had to surmount, the biggest of which seemed to be the Founders lack of discipline and inability to execute properly.
> So they hired a massive team of oncologists no expense spared, but their abiilty to deal with cancer isn't good enough
The Fast founders highlighted their team at every turn, showcasing trophy hires from larger, successful companies. Investors bought into this hard especially at the Series A and B fundraises, and believed that a strong executive and engineering bench de-risked the business more than they had.
> Well, they wouldn't be risks otherwise.
Not to them! The issue here was the high degree of self-delusion and spin amongst their team and investors. They downplayed the challenges at every turn, and tried to convince others (and themselves) that they had already gotten past all the hard parts. As it turns out they had not.
Venture valuations can be most simply understood as: potential exit value (reward) * probability of reaching that value (risk).
In this case the potential exit was big: owning checkout for the web is a multi-multi-$B business.
The risks, however, were also big. This was a highly competitive market, with lots of complicated technical and GTM problems to solve. But, investors seemed to believe in their vision + chutzpah + ability to execute, hence they discounted the risk and gave them a rich valuation.
As it turns out, the risks were very real! They successfully hired a big, seemingly-experienced team (something many companies struggle to do) but failed to make enough progress to justify their valuation, i.e., de-risk the business and demonstrate a higher probability of achieving a big exit to potential next-round investors. The product never worked well (actually 502 hard-crashed on launch day) and their team got bloated and slow. Their GTM strategy was fundamentally flawed (horrible CAC/LTV on small merchants) and the founder spent like a mad man. This wasn’t foreseen but perhaps should have been especially by the pros at Stripe
Fast lived a short, insane life and will quickly fade into obscurity versus the more infamous WeWork and Theranos implosions. But I think it’s a more relevant cautionary tale: Fast was backed by “proper” Valley institutions (Index, Stripe, etc.), was a pure software business, and from the outside had all the trappings of hypergrowth success. Lots to be learned by investors, employees, and founders here.