
HippyVM goes to Y Combinator and fails - detaro
http://lostinjit.blogspot.com/2015/03/hippyvm-goes-to-y-combinator-and-fails.html
======
mpdehaan2
Don't assume "there is no money in X", but rather assume "there are no VCs
that wish to invest". (Further, this is what ONE guy tells you, it's not
unusual to have to talk to two dozen -- though I'm not sure you should). You
might still be able to sell a PHP optimizer if you can figure out how to make
parts of it proprietary and keep your company very small and tight. Picking up
a VC will change the way they expect you to grow in ways you might not wish to
grow, as they want very very large exits for large companies. You may still
have a sustainable business or a side project that you can love and make money
on. However, be sure if you do or you don't, if you are giving up gainful
employment.

Realize the VCs motives are about extremely rapid growth, however, and that's
not really required.

I believe there was an article on here recently about a Ruby task manager that
had a proprietary plugin selling for $400 or so, and (I could be wrong) I
believe that was enough to operate as a business for the guy running it. You
probably have something you can charge more than for, if you can get away from
the pure OSS route.

Support may not work as a business model. It might, but it would be harder to
sell.

What you need first, though, is lots of users using your free edition, because
otherwise you're going to have to spend a bit too much time in sales to people
who might not really wish to change things over.

~~~
BruceM
For much of the last 5 years, I've been one of a very small group of people
maintaining, developing and improving Open Dylan
([http://opendylan.org/](http://opendylan.org/)) (a Lisp-like language without
Lisp-like syntax).

I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. It has
also given me a lot of experience working with pretty much anything I want in
the compiler, debugger, linker, run-time libraries, performance tools, C
bindings generators, networking code, garbage collection, type systems and so
much more. Some of this has resulted in further contract work, some has
resulted in contributed fixes or improvements to other libraries.

(I'm now looking to potentially fund a student for some work this coming
summer.)

Now, I'm taking a lot of what I've learned from that and starting up a small
business (not looking for VC) to produce a new kind of developer tool. We plan
to be open source and have some customizations and packaged products that
businesses will be interested in and suspect we can fund ourselves that way.
It'll be a long hard slog to get there, but we're pretty excited about what
we're doing.

In general, I think there are a lot of things that could really use
improvements. Our shells haven't changed much in the last 20 years. (I wrote a
post about this last October: [http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-
command-shells/.](http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/.))
Almost everywhere you look, there are things that could be better. Most of
them are a hard sell as a business. Some sort of increased infrastructure
funding would be great.

Along those lines, there are programs that provide funding for some of those
sorts of things. Stripe had an open source residency program for a short
while. Mozilla funds some projects. The Knight Foundation funds a number of
things a couple of times a year. Even Comcast has a funding program
([http://techfund.comcast.com/](http://techfund.comcast.com/)). I'd love it if
organizations over a certain size allocated some funding for some work that
might benefit them, but would also have a wider benefit. If someone has 50 or
100 programmers on staff, they can probably afford to sponsor someone for 3
months or a year at a time. And who knows what might come of some of it...

~~~
phkahler
>> I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work.

To be clear, you are donating your time to the project. There is no other
source of funding. This is the same as a side project on top of your
consulting gig.

~~~
e12e
I'm not so sure, from the full paragraph above, it seems that he gets to work
on/exercise the compiler _as part_ of the consulting?

~~~
BruceM
Indeed, I did.

~~~
phkahler
Well that awesome then! Carry on.

------
pbiggar
I made phc ([http://phpcompiler.org](http://phpcompiler.org)), which is
conceptually similar to HippyVM, before applying to YC. And I got into YC, and
now run a post-Series A startup, so I probably have a tiny bit of insight.

Trying to sell a PHP compiler is a very bad business plan. In fact, trying to
sell any compiler is a very bad business plan, because you're basically
competing with free. You have to compete against OSS with massive communities
(like gcc) or against deep pockets (like Visual Studio) or against reference
implementations (like the OSS PHP engine).

Imagine trying to sell a PHP compiler. You can try to get wide community
adoption and sell bottom-up. Good luck with that, the PHP community is not
that interested in tools. So you can try to sell top-down to enterprises with
slow PHP problems. Very few companies have slow PHP problems, and those that
do could just use HHVM.

For 30 years, commercial lisp engines, C++ compilers, Java VMs, and tons of
similar things have all been commercially unsuccessful (though not all failed
outright). A PHP engine will have to compete with with Facebook's HHVM (OSS +
deep pockets), against the Zend engine (community adoption + reference
implementation) and against Zend corp (a known and established quantity in the
space).

I spent a bit of time in compiler research and met with tons of compiler
companies at events. One of them said that they couldn't think of any compiler
company that didnt make its money off consulting, and that worse, about 85% of
them made their money off a single client.

Quick, name a successful compiler company! There aren't too many and they
weren't that famous. There is Coverity in the closely related static analysis
space, that sold for $375m. There is Cilk that sold to intel for $100m.
Dredging my memory there's companies like Anamorphic which was acquihired by
Sun in 97 to work on Java.

You're almost better off being a HHVM consultancy than building a competing
compiler and ending up having to innovate on the product as well as providing
consulting.

~~~
bootload
_" In fact, trying to sell any compiler is a very bad business plan, because
you're basically competing with free."_

Don't discount writing new types of compilers that people want.

At one stage pre pg stepping down, an RFS explicitly asked for compilers.
Special types of compiler that have yet to be written that speed up
programming across multiple machines. Disappeared in the RFS list: cf
[http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#program](http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#program)

~~~
pbiggar
Definitely don't trying writing new types of compilers hoping that people will
want them! You could conceivably get lucky, but you won't.

You should be fine writing new frameworks (meteor), or working in closely
related areas like static analysis (coverity, fortify), CI/CD tools
(CircleCI), or even things like DB optimizers. I just wouldn't write a
straightforward compiler.

~~~
bootload
_" Definitely don't trying writing new types of compilers hoping that people
will want them!"_

Conversely, you might do this to solve your own problems and do things you
cannot do now.

------
a-dub
I'd consider taking your existing consulting stuff and adding a
hosting/service component. "We'll run your PHP backed sites better and cheaper
than you can." Pick up a few customers (hopefully from your existing customer
list) and get some revenue coming in (this would be annoying and a lot of work
though). Grow things a bit and use the revenue to fund the development of the
optimizer. At first it would be a bit of smoke and mirrors and a lot of work,
but the knowledge gained from production operations would be invaluable to
building a great optimized PHP runtime.

Struggle like this for a while until things are really working well, then sell
hosted, fast and reliable PHP IaaS at a way cheaper pricepoint because you're
more efficient.

Now you've got money coming in, a great piece of infrastructure built on real
production experience, and a healthy customer list. Sell the company (or just
enjoy the profits), keep the proceeds for yourselves (without sharing with
some VC). Win!

------
bcg1
Its an interesting story but not at all surprising. I wouldn't think that VC
funding is a good model for core infrastructure programs, and author correctly
identifies the two common routes at this point: control by large organizations
or open source.

Hopefully most organizations have realized at this point that it is not a good
idea to build your infrastructure around the big players. Just try to fire IBM
and move off of WebSphere and see how easy that is.

That leaves open source and the author brings up a good point about the
inequity of how much value they bring vs. how their contributors get paid. I
wonder how many companies give back to infrastructure projects (money I mean,
not code contributions, which are of course also important). Things like
Google Summer of Code are great and beneficial, but what about giving actual
cash to these ladies and gentlemen? Seems like someone might even be able to
create a startup around that concept :)

~~~
schizek
Docker, Meteor, ElasticSearch, NPM there is plenty of start-ups doing
infrastructure stuff.

Market don't need fast PHP compiler look how low is adoption of HHVM. PHP is
legacy codebase used for simple CMS. If someone need performance it will use
Java, Node.js etc

~~~
davidw
> Docker, Meteor, ElasticSearch, NPM there is plenty of start-ups doing
> infrastructure stuff.

What you want to look at, though, are established companies with customers
doing open source stuff, like Redhat.

They do exist, but it's not easy.

~~~
icebraining
Oracle, Google, Microsoft, all of them do open source stuff.

~~~
davidw
"Do open source stuff" is very different from "being open source companies".

I actually do think that the 'sweet spot' is to use open source as
infrastructure, and make money with something proprietary, but that's not
something that makes purists happy.

~~~
icebraining
Well, you wrote "doing open source stuff", not me :)

I agree that it doesn't make purists happy, but frankly, I don't find it
particularly important. As long as proprietary software exists, whether
companies are separated between open and closed or hybrid isn't particularly
relevant, in my opinion.

~~~
davidw
Fair enough, it was a thrown-off comment.

The dichotomy is this in any event: it's easy enough to work on free
infrastructure stuff if you make your money elsewhere, but it's difficult to
work on free infrastructure stuff as your business.

------
toyg
The money quote imho is this:

 _> there is no money in infrastructure like programming languages. Very few
people are willing to invest in such companies and the contenders these days
are all Open Source without a decent funding model or backed by a large corpo
(Oracle, Google, Microsoft) or both. [...] we're missing a business model
where infrastructure people can get attention from VCs and a revenue model
that somehow corresponds to the value they're bringing._

~~~
chrisaycock
_> > there is no money in ... programming languages._

And yet there's Mathworks (MATLAB), Wolfram (Mathematica), SAS Institute, Kx
Systems (q/kdb+), etc. Granted, these are all proprietary languages, but they
aren't backed by the likes of Oracle or Google.

~~~
vineet7kumar
In my opinion, The value of programming "systems" like MATLAB lie in the fact
that their primary customers are not really programmers but people like
scientists and engineers who need to use computers and don't really want to
(or have time to) learn new or better programming languages; These companies
make their customers' lives easy by giving them easy to install and use,
complete programming environments including a large set of domain-specific
libraries.

~~~
entee
I would add the very large old codebase in science. These systems gained
popularity well before the advent of Python and other more user-
friendly/approachable languages, so very large numbers of people in academia
are familiar with them and have large volumes of code written for them.

As a grad student you're going to want to solve some problem, and your choice
will be 1.) reimplement large segments of the lab's codebase in your language
of choice or 2.) build something on top of the old code in Matlab.

I tried convincing my grad advisor to do things in python and not matlab, but
no dice. He went with matlab for the problem he (and to as certain extent I)
was trying to solve because of these kinds of institutional factors.

------
wheaties
A very wise developer I know, John Baldwin, (hey if you're reading this) once
told me an important lesson: People don't pay for technology, they pay for a
solution to a problem.

PyPy can't use introspection, like the standard logging framework
([http://pypy.org/performance.html,](http://pypy.org/performance.html,))
without severe performance penalties. Fix that and you've got a solution to a
problem.

~~~
emojiofficer
"Sell aspirin, not vitamins"

Infrastructure tends to be on the vitamins side of that quote.

~~~
falcolas
That quote doesn't quite hold water: the Vitamin industry is a multi-billion
dollar one. Maybe it doesn't quite compare with Bayer, but it's still quite
profitable.

~~~
tonymillion
Actually I'd suggest the Vitamin industry is the easier/better of the two, you
don't actually have to prove the vitamins work in order to sell them.

~~~
swamp40
Yes, I don't think you can take that quote too literally, or the intent is
lost.

Figuratively, of course, it means people will pay handsomely and hurriedly for
you to take their pain away, but it is difficult to get them to pay for
potential small improvements.

------
detaro
HippyVM is a PHP interpreter build on the RPython toolchain (the basis of
PyPy)

previous discussions of HippyVM:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7860492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7860492)
(a year ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241921)
(about first announcement, 3 years ago)

------
XorNot
PHP optimization can be direct sold to hosting companies. They want it - they
want their shared cloud hosting to use less resources, they want it to be
faster. Because faster PHP means more clients on less servers, which means
more money.

~~~
prottmann
That is correct, but how huge is the benefit of HippyVM over a "classic"
optimizer, which cost nothing ?

~~~
nostrademons
Take the percentage increase over the "classic" optimizer, multiply by total
hardware costs of the hosting provider. The result is the dollar figure that
it will save the company. Now your sales pitch is "Our software costs $X and
will save you $Y > $X", which is a familiar and usually successful enterprise
software pitch, since it is pure cost savings from the POV of the customer.

The tricky part is getting integration costs down to < $Y - $X, which is why
the most successful enterprise products tend to be turnkey solutions like
CloudFlare or AWS that build off already existing APIs. New programming
languages usually fail because there's a massive hidden cost in learning the
language and rebuilding the ecosystem that is greater than any potential
savings the language could offer.

------
tosh
It is tough to find a business case for a technologic innovation. It is easier
to start with a business case and then derive the technology necessary for
that.

Steve Jobs:
[https://youtu.be/GnO7D5UaDig?t=50m22s](https://youtu.be/GnO7D5UaDig?t=50m22s)

That said, there are companies like TypeSafe and Cognitect that found a way to
sell solutions and services (often in a consultancy/agency/training model) and
through that business model they can invest in fundamental longer-term
building blocks (like languages, runtimes, libraries, databases).

It's not easy but might be a possible angle to deliver tangible value now &
still drive long-term vision and innovation.

------
mynegation
A bit off topic, but I wanted to comment on U.S. visa part (when the author
realizes that valid visa was in the passport he did not have with him) in
hopes that it may be useful for someone. I was in a similar situation, except
that was an overland crossing from Canada. I had new non-Canadian passport
with me and driving up to the border I realized that my expired passport with
valid US visa was left at home, 4 hours of driving away. That was especially
embarrassing as I had friends in my car. Turns out that after me contributing
around 500$ to Uncle Sam coffins they can pull visa information and previous
entry records and admit me into the country after getting authorization from
higher ranking officer. Usual disclaimer: it may or may not work for you,
especially for air travel, and that was back in 2007.

------
randomsearch
I think the problem here is that they went to YC with a technology, not a
business.

(Not that I'm detracting from the great work these guys have done)

------
raverbashing
The question you should be answering is: What can we do that HHVM can't do?

Support? Sell a turn key solution? Partner with hosting companies?

You (count on) having a thing that runs PHP faster, and you're not going to
have a product/service only with that.

------
loumf
YC has publicly stated that long-term big visions are exactly what they are
looking for. The problem isn't that you need time, it's that the result of
waiting won't be big enough to justify it.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That seems to mean long-term _business_ visions - not long-term technology
incubation, which is something else entirely.

------
mrfijal
author here. we do sell commercial support for pypy and python performance
problems at baroquesoftware.com. let's say it has not been a spectacular
success so far and it's not enough to fund someone to do more boring
infrastructure stuff for pypy like buildbot maintenance. one commercial thing
we're working on is vmprof, which is a multi vm profiler and we plan on
selling it as a service to your existing infrastructure. Feel free to ask me
anything

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Does HippyVM actually work or do anything? Their website is so barren.

I wonder if it really offers any advantages these days. HHVM is really fast,
PHP 7 is really fast, and PHP now has Zend (ew) OPcache and its optimiser
built-in.

HippyVM is quite weird, too: it's made by Python developers who don't seem to
have ever contacted anyone from PHP.

~~~
hacknat
I agree with you and would like to add (to the author of Hippy): Why not
contribute to HHVM (or fork it and improve it)? If you made a few tactical
improvements to HHVM that sped it up a bit, and kept a few good ideas in your
back pocket, I'm sure the whomever is PMing the project at Facebook would love
to talk to you.

Don't want to work at Facebook? I understand that, but before you say no,
infrastructure teams at large companies tend to have a lot of freedom and lack
of politicos sniffing about. It might actually be quite a bit of fun on the
HHVM team.

~~~
crudbug
PyPy [1] is whole different compiler infrastructure, it is designed to build
dynamic languages.

[1]
[http://www.aosabook.org/en/pypy.html](http://www.aosabook.org/en/pypy.html)

------
greedoshotlast
As many people have pointed out, many VCs want a fast ramp up. Also be aware
that taking money from VCs will introduce a new level of complexity to your
operations. Some VCs will even try to essentially make decisions for you and
the future of your business.

VC money always comes with "strings attached".

While I'm not against taking money from VCs, seriously consider if it will
benefit your company's growth and business models by taking money from them.
There are ways to bootstrap and grow a business without external funding like
VCs. This is something a lot of people seem to have forgotten in this current
startup 2.0 mindset.

To the founders of HippyVM don't let Y Combinator's rejection stop you!

------
Alex3917
I agree that it's hard to make money off infrastructure, but at some point
maybe it makes sense for YC to start just donating money to the open source
projects its startups are using or could otherwise benefit from. E.g. if PyPy
got a hundred bucks for each YC startup using Python, I'd have to imagine
they'd be able to make enough improvements to make it a no brainer to use,
which would produce enormous savings across the portfolio in terms of EC2
bills and electricity usage.

One way or another there needs to be a mechanism for solving the free
ridership problem, and it seems like doing this at the investor level is as
good a place as any.

------
willyk
Did you consider looking into any crowdfunding options? Perhaps with
Kickstarer or Indiegogo? That's been used by some to both generate seed
capital, help get products to market, and test/validate the model.

~~~
mrfijal
yes, pypy.org runs crowdfunding. success is moderate at best

------
dougabug
Maybe this sort of effort could be supported by some kind of hybrid MOOC/crowd
sourcing framework. A big part is perhaps a cultural shift. In the US, tipping
servers is voluntary, and yet most people are fairly consistent about tipping
mostly due to cultural norms (plus having a tip line on the bill/receipt).

There's a potential cultural shift from "I like this" to "I _value_ this"
which could make many activities economically viable which are now pet
projects or personal passions. You should be able to tweet cyber currency or
something.

------
hyperliner
I feel bad for you. But I think you have a few choices:

a) Forget about doing difficult things and focus on something easy like
dating, swipe left/swipe right app. It is not that Europe does the hard things
like compilers, it is that America does the easy things like dating or cat
apps or farting and stuff. However, there is hope. Look at what Slack is doing
with yet another messaging app. Is there another app that is simply "a bad
solution" which you can come up with a better, easier, more delightful
alternative?

2) If you already did the hard stuff, what about packaging it with other
elements of the stack and providing a fully optimized stack? Then you can
offer it as a solution to enterprises. It is hard though. Enterprise sales.

3) Don't open source. Get paid for what you do.

4) Open Source but charge for the services around it. Consulting services. But
you are already doing something along these lines.

I am sure there are others.

------
brudgers
To me, meaningful monetization of something like a compiler requires
identifying big dumb companies for whom it would provide a significant
competitive advantage, and tackling enterprise sales.

The misfit with YC/VC is that such a company is more consultancy than startup.
The potential paying customers are snowflakes if not unicorns.

------
crudbug
Here is an IDEA ! Add optional static types support in RPython to provide
further compiletime optimizations (along with _any_ type support). This adds
static types to Ruby[1] , PHP [2], Python [3] or any dynamic X. I am sure
people would pay for enterprise support for this compiler toolchain.

[1]
[http://docs.topazruby.com/en/latest/](http://docs.topazruby.com/en/latest/)
[2] [https://github.com/hippyvm/hippyvm](https://github.com/hippyvm/hippyvm)
[3] [http://pypy.org/](http://pypy.org/)

~~~
rlamy
It's the wrong level: the RPython toolchain has no notion of PHP-level types,
they're entirely implemented by the interpreter. Besides, optional static
types are nearly useless (performance-wise) when you have a JIT.

~~~
crudbug
I was thinking about RPython to native code AOT route.

------
crudbug
This makes me wonder- Why did Dropbox guys started building Pyston [1] ? Why
not get behind pypy team and support them ?

[1] [https://github.com/dropbox/pyston](https://github.com/dropbox/pyston)

------
shanemhansen
The most useful thing I can think of for HippyVM is some sort of *aas play.
Maybe they offer a service like google app engine or heroku who's default vm
is faster (and therefore cheaper to run).

If something like New Relic didn't work on your vm you could offer a competing
service that utilized jit-specific tracepoints. People who care enough to want
a faster vm and have money will probably want great performance insight, and
vm developers are uniquely positioned to offer that insight.

------
lnanek2
The [http://hippyvm.com/](http://hippyvm.com/) site looks really nice and it
is impressive they managed 2x Facebook's offering's speed. Too bad it also
says it is too incomplete to work for web servers yet. Not sure I would want
to compete with Facebook's huge team and resources either, if I was company or
an investor.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The site is also utterly substance-free:

> Compatibility

> HippyVM is aimed at being 100% compatible with Zend PHP

 _aimed at_ means nothing. How compatible _is_ it _now_?

> Performance

These benchmarks lack dates, interpreter versions, system information, source
code, raw data...

...and worst of all, aside from this, that's it! There's no more information
on the site, just a link to the source code.

------
pbreit
I wanted to punch my screen while reading this. Every anecdote, including the
airport blurbs, screamed "stay away from this crew".

No, most businesses/investors looking for a return cannot wait forever. So you
have 2 options: a) find the few who will or b) figure out an interim step that
has value and can show results in a shorter time frame.

------
arturadib
Misleading title. They never "went" to YC as we normally understand it, they
"applied" to YC.

------
hluska
I wonder how the YCombinator process would have gone had they entered as a
non-profit??

------
markovbling
South Africa represent! Be cool to meet up if you're in Cape Town some time :)

~~~
fijal
Find me at the power and the glory on most weekday mornings, unless the surf
is good ;-)

------
sjg007
What about selling your own php app accelerator service. Heroku like.

