taylorwc

I do indeed work in VC. But as another reply mentions, any accredited investor can write small checks into startups, and most preseed/seed founders are happy to take angel checks.

Disclosure, I’m an investor in Jamsocket, the company behind this… but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that every time Paul and Taylor launch something they have been working on, I end up saying “woah.” In particular, using ForeverVM with Clause is so fun.

Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind

Definitely some exciting stuff like Redwood and Wasp working to solve these problems. I always loved what Meteor tried to do for this, though the JS ecosystem sort of evolved in a different direction.

I’m 100% convinced I would never have learned to code without Meteor… it made so many things simpler. You should check out wasp[0], which has a lot of philosophy in common. Disclosure: I am investor in the company behind the project.

[0] https://wasp-lang.dev

I have read most of his stuff, including The Pale King. It is absolutely worth reading, but also recall that it was published in an unfinished state posthumously. It is not a particularly easy read but has some extremely compelling themes.

This and Bill Watterson’s commencement speech at Kenyon[0] are both things I read a few times a year—-challenging and relatable.

[0] https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html

Typo in the title, ought to be “Skeptic.” Unless, that is, his skepticism is also directly tied to handling sewage.

Do you outright reject "open source" projects ... ?

No! I'm bullish on open source, I just think the current climate is weird. I have a small vc fund, currently 8 portfolio companies and almost half have at least some open source element to their product offering. I'd definitely look at something you're describing, and the fact that you're seeing steady MRR growth is a huge accomplishment, regardless of whether you ever choose to take vc money.

Happy to have a discussion on the topic if helpful, don't feel the need to be in sales mode. You can hit me up if interested: taylor at abstraction.vc

Haha I mean nothing that was obviously ridiculous, like “Applebee’s, but open source” or something. It was more just really hand-wavy logic around why their product needed something open source, with no really compelling answer.

It exists! Disclosure: I am an investor in the company behind this project.

https://github.com/Parabeac/Parabeac-Core

I’d feel a little bad calling any out bc it’s usually not too hard to figure it out if I gave that info even without a name :)

Early stage investor here. You’d be shocked. It’s extremely en vogue to start a company and have your value prop be “open source alternative to X,” without any regard for whether there is actually any logic to something being open source.

This seems a little myopic. Definitely earnings growth is a factor, but it can’t really explain what just happened with GameStop and WSB, nor most of Amazon’s rise over the past decades. Future expected cash flows, market size, interest rates (and therefore capital seeking yield via equity markets) are all factors. Alongside human tastes, cultural perception, and pockets of irrationality.

Just from a 30k foot view, the lender has a valid legal claim to that money. If you accidentally paid your mortgage or rent without meaning to, should the lender have an obligation to return it?

As usual, it's worth going out of your way to read Matt Levine's column on the matter [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...

Here's a pretty good explanation of that how that can happen: https://nope-its-lily.medium.com/gamestop-power-to-the-marke...

OP was making a reference to a recurring line in Arrested Development.

Same reason an NBA team will draft someone who isn't ready be a starter averaging a double double. If I believe the team is elite and that the potential is there, there's potential for such an asymmetric outcome that it's a worthwhile bet.

Early stage (preseed and seed) investor here. I think the easier way to conceive of this is that if I have conviction around the team but not necessarily the product, I will likely invest. The inverse is almost never true for me.

I have invested in founders where I thought their initial conception of the product wasn’t likely to find PMF but I believed that the team had good instincts and the necessary skills to iterate to a different product.

Corey Quinn from Last Week in AWS jokes about using Route53 as a db often, including this hilarious twitter thread [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1120653859561459712

Semi-related, the Hayabusa 2 has an incredibly cool real time dashboard that's publicly accessible [0].

[0] http://haya2now.jp/en.html

I don't know how cos that compete in any related space can survive. When AWS is willing to throw whatever against a wall (launching 50+ services a year) to see what sticks, sooner or later they're going to land in your space.

This is true for a subset of products, but not uniformly. To the extent you're building an infrastructure product, you get to choose what axis to compete on. If you're going up against AWS, then trying to compete with them on things like cost and reliability are likely poor choices. But something like user/dev experience isn't. DynamoDB has a mongo compatible API and yet Mongo's Atlas hosted service is responsible for most of the company's growth over the past year. Why? Because it provides a unique offering, not just a 'good-enough' offering, which is what a lot of higher-level AWS services are.

it is a practitioner-style style deep learning course that instead of starting with the fundamentals starts with examples and results and then over time, layer by layer reveals what it is all about and how it works in detail until you ask yourself "that is all there is?". a great way to make a seemingly unapproachable topic approachable.

Well said and this is exactly what I loved about the course and the way Jeremy peeled things back. If you're a 'learn-by-tinkering' person, and I suspect a lot of HN folks are, I can't recommend it enough.

It's not 1:1 with the narrative you lay out, but there are tons of parallels with Clay Christensen's Disruption Theory[0] ... basically that a successful business misses a new technology that cannibalizes them from the bottom up and they go into a slow death spiral because of their inability and unwillingness to adapt along the innovative axis.

[0] https://www.christenseninstitute.org/disruptive-innovations/

I'm really bullish on this concept. I learned how to code coming from a finance background, and the mental shift from Excel to relational database felt natural enough, but the lack of Excel-like ways to interact with those databases has always felt like white space to me. Well done!

You’re exactly right. Portfolio size is absolutely the key here. To give yourself a fighting chance of finding an outlier-type return, you need to have some diversification... Gerry Neumann did a great post breaking down some of the math on this[0].

[0] http://reactionwheel.net/2017/12/power-laws-in-venture-portf...

Would love to read the thesis if you can share!

Corey is both on-point and hilarious and his newsletter[0] is worth reading. This particular post really resonated with me because AWS gets so much run for being impossible to compete with, but really it's not hard... you just have to pick an appropriate axis on which to compete. It's not likely you'll ever win on availability or integration with AWS services, but the farther you get (in terms of abstraction) from running a data center, there are places where AWS falls flat.

[0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

I found myself nodding agreement until I reached the Cloud9 part... I think I can count on one hand the number of professional devs I know that use Cloud9 as their primary editor/IDE. Curious if I'm in a bubble on that front?