
Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees - thepoet
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-source/
======
dmvaldman
Hey all. I was the second engineer at famo.us and was later chief architect. I
have many stories, but I won't go into any of them :-)

If you were interested in the library and are sad that this pivot means it
won't be supported, I want to mention there is ongoing work in the OSS
community outside the company supporting the pre-pivot vision.

I've personally been working on a fork called samsaraJS
([http://samsaraJS.org](http://samsaraJS.org)), and there is another community
effort at infamous.io.

These are both early stage labors of love, and always looking for
contributors!

~~~
idlewords
Please write your stories down even if you don't share them with anyone. You
may change your mind years later and the brain has a way of blotting the
craziest stuff out over time.

------
duiker101
I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more
than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never
thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much
money.

I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are
throwing money at someone with a pitch like that.

I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things that were
described in the Reconsider article that was posted the other day
[https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f](https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f)

~~~
adevine
I think that essentially their pitch was that they would become _the_
development platform for building apps. If they had considerably grown the
number of apps on their platform, and gotten lots of positive developer buzz,
they would have easily gotten more funding, even if they weren't making any
money yet.

The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really
hard, and they didn't succeed. One of the biggest problems that I see that
people underestimate is that most (not all, but most) great native mobile app
engineers _don't_ want to build cross-platform apps. They tend to be "platform
partisans", either loving Apple or Android, but not usually both. They always
want to become experts in the latest and greatest platform technology. Perhaps
more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross-
platform technology either. If you want to be featured in the App or Play
Stores, you've got to have a native app that uses the latest iOS or Android
features.

I see lots and lots of cross-platform mobile solutions on HN, but I rarely see
people considering the incentives of both Apple and Google, and the mobile
developers, when it comes to evaluating these solutions.

~~~
devit
The incentive for developers is that you don't write the same code twice.

Of course this applies to developers whose goal is to create software, as
opposed to those whose goal is to bill hourly.

~~~
adevine
That's only an incentive for developers if they individually are writing the
code for both platforms. Many (most?) shops where an app is the main product
(or a very important piece of the main product) have separate iOS and Android
dev teams.

------
n7c3c1
I will never understand how startups like this get money with such incompetent
leadership.

Look at how this Famo.us office tour showcases the waste:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4)

~~~
artursapek
I've always disliked Techcrunch but I'm starting to realize how valuable their
"Cribs" series is. They have the very best documentation of a dying culture of
spoiled founders aimlessly running startups like a daycare for adults. I
wonder how much longer people are going to be pulling this off for. Investors
need to wise up and start giving their money to people who are mature enough
to be modest and efficient with their company's resources before they've
proven themselves as a business.

~~~
argonaut
I seriously get the feeling people are just looking for any excuse to
criticize Famous. I don't see what's wrong with their office. What's
objectionable? A couple of $5 nerf guns? A cheap Lego board for project
tracking? Or is it the fact that people aren't packed in as tight as they are
at a place like Facebook (which is ironically something people on HN love to
criticize)? The crappy makeshift studio they have? Seriously. Their office
seems pretty normal.

The only thing you might find objectionable is the expensive SF location,
which the article notes they got on the cheap at below-market rates, or the
printer (the printer is probably only 1-2 thousand dollars, less than a
Macbook).

~~~
7Figures2Commas
Yeah, I don't see what's wrong either. The CEO is a fantastic interior
designer. And his LinkedIn self-summary[1] is a real piece of art in its own
right.

I find it hard to believe any of what this former employee wrote[2].

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewcomb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewcomb)

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-
source/?fb_comment_id...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-
source/?fb_comment_id=1000213700000381_1000304419991309)

~~~
argonaut
A non sequitur. I said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the
office. I didn't comment on the company at all (the company is clearly in the
dumps).

~~~
7Figures2Commas
> I said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with the office.

Just because _you_ said there's nothing wrong or particularly wasteful with
the office doesn't mean others agree. Outside of bubbleland, most people are
going to struggle to understand why the CEO of a company that almost certainly
doesn't have a cent of profit spent any time whatsoever thinking about how he
could avoid "boring noise panels."

"Why not make this a piece of art as well on the ceiling?" Really?

When will folks learn[1]?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778832)

~~~
argonaut
And you know it was he who personally spent his time buying those noise panels
(and not, say, the office manager) because...?

My broader point is people are just trying to find any excuse to uncharitably
interpret anything just so they can to crap on the company.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
"One of the things I wanted to sort of like inspire people with that worked
here is you always feel beautiful while you're here." Those are the words of
the chief interior designer himself.

Bottom line: this company crapped on itself. You're deluding yourself if you
truly believe office managers are driving decisions to waste time and money on
stupid sh*t like beautiful noise panels.

~~~
chejazi
It's easy to criticize a figure who has made mistakes over his/her values that
are unrelated to those mistakes. It seems that may be happening here.

------
ndesaulniers
> Open Source ≠ Business

> Newcomb himself admits it was a “divergent brainstorming process,” saying
> “We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model
> around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn’t do it.”

What a load of shit. This has nothing to do with open source.

It's more like people don't want to pay for another JavaScript framework that
claims to be better than the current web stack which at the end of the day,
ends up reimplementing most features a web browser already has, but in WebGL.
In the article, Steve even admits "We built a shitty game engine".

Recently, there were a few other attempts at reimplementing most of the web in
WebGL, I think Flipboard had an article.

Let me point out, this is hard. You wind up with some of the features HTML/CSS
already has that's faster, but a ton of missing stuff you end up needing at
some point.

For example in WebGL, layout is non trivial, rendering text correctly is non
trivial, events are non trivial. These things are an afterthought when working
with HTML/CSS.

People love to shit on HTML/CSS and blame it for their problems, but at the
end of the day, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.

Don't blame open source because it can't rescue your product. Great products
and care for the community foster great open source communities, not the other
way around.

~~~
bhouston
Also trying to be faster than HTML/CSS is a hard game, the developers of
Chrome and Firefox, etc are constantly optimizing.

~~~
ndesaulniers
Just wait until you see what Servo can do. Parallel layout is sick.
[https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for-
pa...](https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for-parallelism-
and-concurrency)

~~~
merb
Sorry but I try out servo EVERY day and it will take a long time until this
will be stable.

It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant. It misses a lot of CSS2.1, CSS3 and
JavaScript feature's. Static sites working better and better (and are way way
faster than firefox).

However I think that servo is the right step, however I just think that it
should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster.

~~~
ndesaulniers
> I try out servo EVERY day

Cool, thanks for helping out! I hope you're helping them by reporting bugs
when you find them.

> it will take a long time until this will be stable

Sure, it's a WIP. That's to be expected. Expecting otherwise is unrealistic.

> It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant

[https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/04/17/another-big-
mil...](https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/04/17/another-big-milestone-
for-servo-acid2/)

> and JavaScript feature's

Maybe DOM bindings, but Servo ships with bindings to SpiderMonkey, the JS VM
used in Gecko, so all of the Language JavaScript should be there.

> I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be
> faster

Check out the top story on proggit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rqqvu/mozilla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rqqvu/mozilla_is_hiring_3_engineers_to_work_on_servo/)

~~~
merb
Currently we are not testing against our application always, but I sometime
try it out and its working aweful.

also on acid2 i get different results every day/week. sometimes i'm good
somtimes not.

Yeah servo gets more support, i still think it takes at least another year (or
more) to ship it.

------
AdrianRossouw
Man, famo.us.

I dove in because i try to get a balanced view of things before I make up my
mind about things, and there was some stuff in there that I really liked. I
tried building something with it, and it didn't really work out.

But even worse was the way that they interacted with their open source
community.

It was completely cathedral-style, for a long time. And just as they became
more bazaar-like everything dries up from them. Nobody was on irc, nothing on
the issue queues. The only thing we heard was more promises for x integration,
and y integration.

Eventually the community got fed up and called them out on it, to which they
finally admitted that they had started a complete rewrite behind closed doors
to use 'mixed mode' css3d and webgl rendering. 6 months later, they released
their new 'engine' rewrite, and an additional 'framework' on top of it, which
really did not seem fully baked.

They subsequently made a really big deal of helping found the jquery
foundation, and organized a jquerySF conference that had them on stage
promising to replace major jquery widgets with drop-in famo.us ones.

And then nothing. Commits stopped, feedback stopped, slack channel was closed.
News started filtering out of devs working there leaving one after the other.

The entire thing did teach me some important life lessons, though =) At least
there's a few mistakes i won't make again.

------
tptacek
_Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript
rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced
engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on
commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management
system for branded marketing apps._

Yikes. If ever I wanted a paragraph printed on a poster to scare me into
working harder, this is probably the one.

~~~
eli
I would be wary of assuming the problem was that they didn't work hard enough.

~~~
tptacek
Oh, I'm not saying that it was.

------
braythwayt

      > Newcomb describes it as “one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to
      > make because it meant letting go of some people.” Stressing the firings
      > weren’t easy for him. “Before I made the decision, I drove scar from San
      > Francisco to Baltimore and back to think it through,” he explains. “I took
      > eight days.”
    

I have fired people. It is brutal. I have been fired. It's worse. So managers,
please: Never solicit sympathy for the pain of firing people.

------
0x0
I never understood how they could claim "this is not html5" and "we have a
direct conversation with the GPU", when it appears to be just a bunch of
<div>s with style="transform:matrix3d(0,1,2...)"?

~~~
adrianpike
Steve said a lot of things that smelled _way_ off to anyone technical. I
remember calling him out on that specific "this isn't html5" line he liked to
parrot years ago.

He either knew he was bullshitting, or he didn't have enough technical
understanding to actually understand his own platform, and if pushed on
anything remotely technical, he'd basically just throw his cofounder into the
ring to overwhelm everyone with the (admittedly very clever) optimizations
they were doing at their rendering layer.

I ran _fast_ the other direction, the whole thing gave off a horrible vibe.

------
Uroboric
I briefly contracted there and it was obvious to me that this would happen.

The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they
could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their
costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some
tremendously talented engineers.

~~~
aikah
My biggest issue with it is that they made a great demo yet they didn't really
have a useful framework. They kept things hush hush for too long , with a lot
of teasing and by the time they released something, people moved on.

Compare to what ionic did, and i'm not a big fan of it, but the ionic team
demonstrated the usefulness of their framework quite fast with concrete apps.

As for making money obviously, you make money with consulting, cloud
services,tools for professionals and co, but you need a community at first
place. Famo.us never had a one.

~~~
Uroboric
You basically hit the nail on the head.

That said, they were in fact making an effort to increase adoption with
initiatives like Famous University, famous-angular and various project demos
and usable widgets.

The answer to why they struggled to increase adoption so much isn't that clear
to me, but what I do know is that they had a lavish office in an expensive
part of SF, free food and a relatively large, well-paid staff.

------
untog
Wait, you're telling me a VC funded JavaScript framework didn't work out?

~~~
idlewords
Didn't work out YET. They'll bounce back!

------
jbuzbee
Clickbait use of "Fired" \- It's a pet peeve of mine when headlines used the
term to create more drama. The correct term for terminating an employee due to
business reasons as opposed to "cause" is laid-off.

------
ThomPete
Famo.us to me was always a platform/framework or even a language more than it
was a product or service.

I have no idea how they could have raised $31M on that.

This could have been an amazing framework built by the open source community
instead it's now just another growth before revenue scheme that went wrong.

Sad.

~~~
jrbedard
Famo.us founder was a Powerset co-founder, which had an highly successful exit
to Microsoft. This pattern often _explains_ generous funding of outlandish
ideas.

~~~
detaro
(for those like me that don't know Powerset:) Powerset worked on made natural-
language search engine.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_%28company%29)

------
jonny_eh
They always seemed so smug about themselves and their lackluster product. I'm
not the least bit surprised. I wish them the best though.

------
aaronbrethorst
At least the employees who got canned weren't being paid as poorly as
Gumroad's employees:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20141224195227/https://angel.co/...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141224195227/https://angel.co/famo-
us/jobs)

Of course, Famo.us' employees seemed to get a lot less equity, but let's be
honest: I'd rather make $175,000/year and get 0.05% of nothing than
$75,000/year and 1% of nothing[1]

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517008)

------
drcode
> What makes our product offering unique is that our apps can be built without
> coding

Oooh... that's going to be a tough argument to sell to people.

~~~
jonesb6
I think most of us remember the DreamWeaver days of WYSIWYG editors. Products
like squarespace have been hugely influential, I'm the type who would normally
nope out of using such a product but I've recently become an advocate for the
better ones in a number of situations.

Will it take over like they said it would ten years ago? Hell no. Will it gain
more market shares as people apply it to the right problems? I think so.

~~~
drcode
True, I think there's been a trend towards less programming for specialized
applications. But in a way you're making my case for me anyway: If what you
are saying is true then the fabulo.us claim of being "the first" is false
regardless.

------
elmar
“We have about five years of money in the bank, so now it doesn’t matter what
happens in the market”

First time I heard of 5 years runway....

~~~
mathgeek
I'm more amused by how that statement makes it sound like the runway is the
goal.

------
imaginenore
Famo.us business should be selling books and webinars on how to raise crazy
money. They are definitely awesome at that.

------
idibidiart
Hype to usefulness ratio of 1000:1

------
stevebmark
Famous never should have been funded. Not because of lack of talent on the
team, but because it's an inherently unprofitable idea. The responsibility of
knowing that should fall on the team, not the investors. I think it was
disingenuous to seek funding for this idea. GitTip or another OSS funding
model would have been far more appropriate. A cross platform animation library
should not have paid employees, and was an unfortunate choice for investors.
(They burned 30 MILLION working on an open source animation library?!). It
sounds like a few dozen people were lucky enough to get Bay Area salaries to
meander around a broken idea. I don't think an investor would have the
technical experience to realize the technology both would not work well, not
solve the right problems, and not be marketable. They fired a dozen people?
How many more are left?! Anything built by the remaining team should not be
done under the Famous brand. It was disingenuous of the founder to pitch it as
a fundable, profitable idea and use techno-speak to wow investors for
something that many developers in the industry could see right through.

~~~
Eridrus
Not really sure why investors shouldn't be expected to be able to do due
diligence on the startups they invest in.

~~~
stevebmark
UI development is so specialized now that I bet you could sell enough snake
oil to lots of investors who would have a hard time verifying if your idea has
profit potential or not.

I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for
this without putting any of his own money into paying employees. It's one
thing to sell snake oil, it's another not to even try to build a working snake
oil prototype on your own time without taking someone else's money and burning
it.

~~~
argonaut
Do you have inside information we don't know about? You know for sure he
didn't put his own money into the venture?

~~~
stevebmark
No, I have no more information than is in the article, but I have no reason to
believe otherwise.

~~~
argonaut
If you don't know whether or not the founder put his own money into it, then
don't say things like: "I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went
straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into
paying employees."

------
puppetmaster3
I predicted this:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689406](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689406)

------
spyder
For a company that's building UIs their website in Firefox is unreadable due
to the horrible font: [http://imgur.com/8ANC4bH](http://imgur.com/8ANC4bH)

I don't hate thin fonts - for example in bigger sizes it looks good - but the
thin an small combination is a bad choice. In Chrome it's a little bit better
but I still won't read it.

------
tlobes
Ex-famo.us (pre-pivot short-term contractor'ish) here. It's sad to see
famousJS go to the grave, but I'm excited to see dmvaldman's samsaraJS
([http://samsaraJS.org](http://samsaraJS.org)) evolve into something great
(cakaaaaaaw!). The pre-pivot famo.us was inspiring to work with and I was
humbled to see all the projects being created by both the in-house and
external teams.

It was an exciting place to work, for all it's ups and downs. Besides the
product itself, the office, albeit ungodly expensive given it's location and
size, was the perfect place to be productive and push yourself well into the
night. There were spots you could work collaboratively next to others as well
as little nooks you could "hide" and get some comfy undisturbed privacy. The
ambiance of the place worked beautifully to be both creative and technical,
together or individually. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's an
expense that easily justified the potential reward.

On the other hand, the social culture that Steve crafted, often reinforced by
his example, didn't sit right with me personally, nor did it sit well with
many others. "Toxic" was an unfortunate word thrown around quite a bit while I
was there. I do hope he takes time off to honestly...subjectively... reflect
back on how he chose to treat people he calculated could be useful to him in
the moment as opposed to those who were not.

On the flip side, when child-like dreamer Steve came through, speaking about
his passions and what inspires him to do what he does, he was, in those
moments, a really enjoyable guy and motivational figure to work for. I'll be
casting an unpopular opinion here, but I do think the guy has it in him to
lead another company to success, as long as he takes a cold, hard, unbiased,
and honest look at himself to fully understand why famo.us, not just the
product, but more the culture he crafted, failed with him at the helm.

The most important takeaway from my stint there was working with the
incredible team and crafting the friendships I did. The level of talent that
many of the original engineers had and the amazing personalities behind said
talent gives me no worries that those who were let go will move on to
something far greater and hopefully, personally rewarding. I already know that
quite a few have! :)

[http://www.thefamousgroup.com](http://www.thefamousgroup.com) \- Dat logo,
though.

------
ex_famous
Another ex-famous person here (again, short-term-contractor).

The folks focusing on the techcrunch cribs video and drawing damning
conclusions from it are, rather predictably, chasing a red herring.

For what it's worth I actually felt more productive, focused, and relaxed (in
a good way) in that office than in any I've ever worked in before or since.
The high ceilings made a remarkable difference. The mix of open and private
spaces worked. Going to work in a place that felt like a higher-class version
of your home but where you could collaborate with your coworkers was pretty
amazing. It was basically what co-working spaces always try to be but can
never fully pull off. It doesn't make sense to complain about the damage open
plan offices are doing to productivity and then get angry at someone who does
the opposite. Granted, you don't need a semi-luxury penthouse. :) But I think
the office was an under-appreciated reason why they were able to get (and
retain) a lot of great engineers. It was in general a very sane, reasonable
environment to do good work in, in contrast to most offices.

jondubois, aikah, and others are on the right track. Making money off a front-
end framework is a long shot. The monetization plan (to the extent there was
one) was always heavy on optimism and reliant on a lot of things going very
very right.

That's not to say it was impossible, though.

The reasons famo.us failed are the reasons most startups fail: 1\. They didn't
do nearly enough to truly understand their users and meet their needs 2\. They
didn't communicate or collaborate well or consistently enough internally.

I could say more about both 1 and 2, but I'll wrap it up there. The real
narrative of what went wrong is one that's familiar and pretty generic. The
subplots of what they were trying to build and who was involved just makes it
all a bit more interesting to speculate about.

p.s. dmvaldman is the man – you should check out his framework and say hi.

------
rubiquity
I'm not sure you're allowed to call that a pivot.

------
fiatjaf
"micro-app", a landing page you have to download from an app store. What a
stupid idea.

------
Grue3
Back when this got released, I thought "there's no way this is going to work".
It was just too slow while hardly doing anything impressive. And it was billed
as if it is actually faster than doing things normal way.

------
dchuk
Why on Earth would they have a smushed iPhone 6 on that landing page for
famous.co?

------
jondubois
Making a business out of open source is hard. Especially for front-end related
stuff. I think it's much easier to build a business around backend
technologies - On the backend, there are more opportunities for things like
enterprise plugins and integrations (as-a-service).

Also the frontend space is insanely competitive. There are a lot of really
good frontend frameworks that most people have never heard of.

------
zurichisstained
As an early intern, I wonder if the stock that I got after being let go from
these guys will ever be worth a lick. :-/

~~~
amarpatel
Cash out!

------
draw_down
To be honest, nothing about this has ever made sense to me. And I'm a JS
developer.

------
anonbanker
I think, with the three javascript videos I had to click away while trying to
read this article, I vow to never read techcrunch again.

I think they're exploiting their relationship with HN, and their need should
be re-evaluated.

------
wdmeldon
It kinda looks like he somehow made $31M selling "mystery boxes"....

~~~
nkozyra
Whoa, tell me more about your mystery boxes, I'm intrigued. Are they
disruptive?

~~~
idlewords
Can you think outside them?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You have to sacrifice a cat to find out.

~~~
mathgeek
You might have to sacrifice a cat to find out, but you won't find that out
until you open the box.

~~~
mekael
In mother Russia, cat sacrifices you.

------
chkuendig
Aren't these the guys who implemented their own UI toolkit on top of WebGL
because "HTML5 is slow and our stuff is GPU-accelerated"?

------
pbreit
Like Gumroad, a company like this should not be staffing up to 20+ before
finding some traction or at least some product/market fit.

------
ismail
Honest question: Is it normal for SV companies to be taking "beer breaks"
during the work day?

I found that a bit strange.

~~~
api
They're going for the Ballmer Peak:

[https://xkcd.com/323/](https://xkcd.com/323/)

------
kevin_thibedeau
How did they get a hold of famous.org? Should startups be spending money on
domains like that?

~~~
ksherlock
In this case, yes, they should. Assume they spent 15.5 million on their
javascript framework and 15.5 million on the famous.org domain.

The domain has a value of ~$25,000 (-99.8% return on investment).

The javascript framework has a value of $0 (-100% return on investment).

------
fivesigma
Obligatory Jared Dunn:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA)

------
agounaris
Actually where did they spend those 31m??

------
iamleppert
Can someone please explain what an "app engine" is? Is it 4-stroke or straight
6? Does it come with a cat back exhaust?

In all seriousness, to me a framework is just an opinoited way of doing things
that makes a bunch of decisions for you so you have less to think about. It
hinges on the fact someone has uncovered some useful abstractions that make
the act of coding less tedious.

I checked out their demo and while it looked fancy, I didn't see any compeling
reason to use it over plain html/css or three.js if you need fancy 3d stuff.

Also, calling your product "shitty" isn't the best strategy. Geeks see self-
deprecation as a sign of weakness.

