
Dev Community Inc. Raises $11.5M Series A - johnxie
https://dev.to/devteam/special-announcement-from-the-dev-founders-hel
======
ajsharp
Congrats to dev.to on the fundraise. This feels like a positive and exciting
development for open-source companies built in the open.

dev.to is a unique and interesting service -- a company built in the open on
open source technology, and has grown a large community based largely on that
open-source culture.

A discussion I'd like to see from the dev.to founders is how they plan to
evolve what is primarily an open-source community into a software company that
operates that community. This seems like an important discussion to have,
especially for an open company, as the concerns/goals/responsibilities of the
dev.to community are different than those of the dev.to software company (the
company that will sell software to other companies).

A few questions that come to mind:

* To what extent is the dev.to community values/rules/etc are codified somewhere? * What happens in the event of an acquisition, or if a new leadership/management team is brought in? * To what extent are the dev.to community values the values of the company, vs the values of the current company leadership? (this point is sticky, as all companies are a reflection of the people who operate it, yet, "company culture" is a very much a thing)

I'm optimistic and excited to see how dev.to navigates these challenges. It's
a unique opportunity to experiment with new models not yet seen in venture-
backed companies or commercial enterprises in general.

~~~
bhalp1
A lot of good things here. I think I'll try to address a lot of this in an
upcoming blog post or two. I'd get into it now but I'm a bit tired from an
exhausting day of making this announcement.

You can follow me at [https://dev.to/ben](https://dev.to/ben) to get notice
when I get a chance to flesh some of this out publicly.

~~~
type0
I wish you would disable the so called social login (twitter, github) and just
use passwords with 2fa, or at least would add selfhosted Gitlab integrations
for open source developers

[https://gitlab.gnome.org](https://gitlab.gnome.org)
[https://gitlab.freedesktop.org](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org)
[https://salsa.debian.org](https://salsa.debian.org)

just to name a few

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minimaxir
Dev's rise parallels the early rise of Medium: both the good (lots of organic
use/praise), and the bad (signal-to-noise ratio is very low from the content
I've seen shared outside the site). Given this funding announcement, that's
not a bad thing from their perspective. To Ben's credit, there were some
Medium-esque growth hacks earlier in Dev's history, which were removed after I
pointed them out.

The recent implosion of Medium due to user-unfriendly decisions likely helped
Dev out, so there's a bit of good luck there too.

~~~
OJFord
I haven't heard of it before and I'm trying to figure it out from the home
page, but it just seems like a subreddit for software developers? I assume
there's more to it, but..?

~~~
bhalp1
Honestly, that sums it up well enough. But the devil is in the details.

------
JeremyMorgan
This is great news. I've been a member of the community for a while and it's
really positive in nature, a good mix of new developers and experienced. I
like the culture of the people there and the values of the founders.

Their success ultimately will hinge on:

1\. Monetization (obviously)

2\. Their ability to scale (I hope to help with this at some point)

3\. Their ability to maintain the current culture.

If they're able to scale out their infrastructure as people come in, find ways
to make money without annoying people, and maintain the culture they have
right now, the sky's the limit.

I don't know a lot about the leadership other than what I've seen on the site
and following them on Twitter, but they seem very capable of doing it. I have
high hopes for them.

To me, culture is the biggest challenge.

There are communities on the internet that I refuse to do more than lurk in. I
don't join communities to have flame wars (do they still call them that?),
pissing contests, or play gatekeeper to new folks. But I see it all over, and
it drives people like me out.

I just want to talk tech, teach what I know and learn from what others know.
I'm the kind of user you want on your platform. I won't drive people away or
cause you legal problems. I'll help people and bring in more. But I will
absolutely BAIL when it starts getting political, or toxic folks are allowed
to sling crap everywhere. There are a lot of people just me that will simply
walk away. No big farewell post or calling people on social media. Folks like
me just walk away.

So running a community you have to make choices as to what you'll tolerate and
stick to it, it's a thankless and stressful job and you don't really have much
control. I believe that's more challenging than things like establishing a
revenue model or scaling. I just hope they can maintain what they currently
have now. HN has done a good job over the years keeping their stuff moderated,
so it can be done.

Oh, and hopefully they don't do too much of this voting/karma crap like
Reddit. Invisible internet points are what's destroyed their culture if you
ask me.

~~~
detaro
Given that it took the open source release and PRs from contributors to get
rid of the dark patterns on the site, I'm (as an outsider) not that optimistic
about the "without annoying people".

~~~
JeremyMorgan
There's always going to be annoying people in any community. It depends on how
much you let them take over. HN for instance has its share but the mods don't
let them run the place.

~~~
detaro
I'm not really talking about people in the community (although that's of
course also an important point, but I haven't spent enough time on dev.to to
judge that), but design decisions like fake notifications for "you're not
logged in! create an account now", signup prompts styled exactly like comments
interspersed with the actual comments, ..., which were added before the open-
source release.

(and SPA things like breaking the browser back button, although I don't think
that it's intentional)

------
leowoo91
IANAL, but I think they should use "DEV.to team" or "DEV<insert-suffix-here>
team" instead of DEV for their branding to prevent it sounding like FOOD team
against FOOD industry.

~~~
bhalp1
Branding has been the bane of our existence, we're gradually figuring it out.

Luckily our longterm plans revolve around helping other people use our
software under _their_ name.

------
kick
Their signup says "Open Source Forever" but to log in you have to pick between
two proprietary platforms. I can't tell if that's irony or intentional.

------
eric-hu
Their business model sounds interesting to me. If anyone has used any of their
software, I'd like to hear more about your experiences.

~~~
bhalp1
We have some private alpha users, but mostly the re-usable software isn't
quite there yet.

We've been mostly focused on phase 1 which is our own use of the software, but
have a roadmap to get more folks on the underlying platform in 2020.

------
klinskyc
I never understood having Co-CEOs. Why not make Peter CRO or similar, and have
a clearer structure.

~~~
kick
What if Halpern were to get hit by a bus? Then there would be no CEO.

The Oracle structure of co-CEOs leaves a company without any chance of
instability, and works well for what it is.

~~~
bradstewart
Then the board finds a new CEO. How do you make decisions if the co-CEO's
disagree?

~~~
kick
Oracle gets by just fine.

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grwthckrmstr
As a non programmer who doesn't use dev.to, can anyone ELI5 what is dev.to and
what is it's value prop/attracted funding?

------
ericand
Talking about Dev.to on HN feels strange. Maybe I'm on the wrong forum.

~~~
skrebbel
How so?

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secretvrdev
Omg. I read the topic and was great! yeas!

And then i tought. Why are all comments about the platform. I really read
"Docker ... Inc. raised money". But clearly investors are stupid. dev.... m(

