I interpreted the title of this submission to mean "Has anyone exhaustively tried out Bret Victor's ideas?" With respect to Eve, the answer is that although we tried many things he demoed, we didn't try them all, and therefore I characterized it as not being a full attempt at his ideas. And to be clear, I don't want to sell Chris short by implying that Eve was just some attempt at reifying Bret's ideas, because Eve did have a lot of ideas that didn't come from Bret (or that Bret himself got from others like Kay).
Whatever failings of Eve a business idea (admittedly many), it didn't prove that these ideas are a dead end. Far from it, we arrived at the best ideas toward the end of our runway. Early on we spent a lot of time trying things out that seemed cool in Bret's demos, but didn't really scale to being an actually useful tool, either because the demo was too niche (e.g. the Mario jumping thing), or because it wasn't actually a useful thing (e.g. live coding by recompiling a program on every keystroke). That's what the 2mil actually bought I think.
In the end, we abandoned the business but not the ideas. The Eve v0.6 runtime was forked into Mech, and although that's been largely replaced by now, it still maintains the spirit. Chris has been working on his own project for a while now based on the final Eve prototypes that we demoed right before we closed up shop.
> burned through the cash at a higher rate than they should have to make it to the finish line.
We were actually very frugal with the money, and set the burn rate as low as we reasonably could. Most of it went to our 5 salaries, which were far below market in SF; and our rent, which was pretty reasonable for SOMA. Like I said, Paul took a different more drastic approach with Dark to set their burn rate even lower, but Chris (and all of us really) didn't want to go that way because it was better working on Eve as a team. The best thing we could have done actually would have been to leave SF, but that wasn't really an option for many reasons.
The problem with determining burn rate to make it to the finish line is: how do you a priori figure out where the finish line is in such a nebulous space? We went home in the end, because the entire idea of Eve was essentially about trying to identify that line. How far did we need to push in order to get to a business that empower a billion to code? We identified several viable businesses along the way (you can see companies like Wix and Miro becoming large in this timeframe, and Eve could have been something like that), but they weren't the business, the one that would bring a billion other people into coding. Low-code isn't the way.
I'm sure we could have convinced some VC to fund a low-code SAAS at the time -- we had the team to build it. But it was a decision we made to actively not do that thing, and shoot for the moon. Can't blame VCs for not funding that kind of ambition in perpetuity, but I still can't characterize the effort, not having realized its full vision, as a full attempt.
Excellent comment, thank you for the additional insight. In my opinion - but feel free to ignore it - you either start such a project from within a university, a large company that then funds it all the way through (though the project can still get axed) or you bootstrap it whilst being extremely frugal. VC is an extremely bad match for such a project for many reasons, just when in the life cycle of a fund an investment is made can have a very large effect on the outcome.
Betty Blocks comes to mind, they are funded and Mendix eventually got acquired by Siemens so there are some examples of success stories in this space but also many failures and compared to those two this is a much more ambitious project and much more risky as well.
And I agree that you can't a-priori determine how much cash you will need but you can make sure that you either have plenty or nothing at all assuming that the finish line is achievable in the first place, which I'm not necessarily sold on.
Whatever failings of Eve a business idea (admittedly many), it didn't prove that these ideas are a dead end. Far from it, we arrived at the best ideas toward the end of our runway. Early on we spent a lot of time trying things out that seemed cool in Bret's demos, but didn't really scale to being an actually useful tool, either because the demo was too niche (e.g. the Mario jumping thing), or because it wasn't actually a useful thing (e.g. live coding by recompiling a program on every keystroke). That's what the 2mil actually bought I think.
In the end, we abandoned the business but not the ideas. The Eve v0.6 runtime was forked into Mech, and although that's been largely replaced by now, it still maintains the spirit. Chris has been working on his own project for a while now based on the final Eve prototypes that we demoed right before we closed up shop.
> burned through the cash at a higher rate than they should have to make it to the finish line.
We were actually very frugal with the money, and set the burn rate as low as we reasonably could. Most of it went to our 5 salaries, which were far below market in SF; and our rent, which was pretty reasonable for SOMA. Like I said, Paul took a different more drastic approach with Dark to set their burn rate even lower, but Chris (and all of us really) didn't want to go that way because it was better working on Eve as a team. The best thing we could have done actually would have been to leave SF, but that wasn't really an option for many reasons.
The problem with determining burn rate to make it to the finish line is: how do you a priori figure out where the finish line is in such a nebulous space? We went home in the end, because the entire idea of Eve was essentially about trying to identify that line. How far did we need to push in order to get to a business that empower a billion to code? We identified several viable businesses along the way (you can see companies like Wix and Miro becoming large in this timeframe, and Eve could have been something like that), but they weren't the business, the one that would bring a billion other people into coding. Low-code isn't the way.
I'm sure we could have convinced some VC to fund a low-code SAAS at the time -- we had the team to build it. But it was a decision we made to actively not do that thing, and shoot for the moon. Can't blame VCs for not funding that kind of ambition in perpetuity, but I still can't characterize the effort, not having realized its full vision, as a full attempt.