"They are now contemplating a few purchase offers. I have no control or say over this process. There’s a lot of politics. I’m a builder, not a politician and I see no point in staying on."
The investors poured ~$15m into this company, and the board is now trying to fulfill its fiduciary duty by trying to recoup some of the invested capital. I understand that open-sourcing the code base would be a better outcome for its customers. However, I am having a tough time seeing if the investors were truly political or antagonistic in any way.
A bit of a tangent, but board members (and company officers) do not in general have a specific duty to maximize shareholder profit. They have a duty of care (think carefully about decisions) and a duty of loyalty (act in the best interests of the company as a whole). Those could lead reasonably to a profit-maximizing decision but it isn't a straight line.
Author goes on to talk about how difficult it was to raise capital, and the company being constantly undervalued. Doubtful they're only referring to this singular event.
Open sourcing their code would be a terrible idea for the business unless they opted for a Elastic/MongoDB style license where you are prohibited from offering a cloud version of the code.
Because you know AWS would be circling this news very closely for another product to add to their lineup.
Folks commenting that "I can do stacked diffs by branching off a branch off a branch" are missing the core point that code reviews suck right now. The PR authors hate them, so do the reviewers, and so do folks who will look at them in the future to try and debug code. There's a reason big tech uses stacking: once you stack you can't go back!
I don't remember the last names of my best friends from elementary school who moved to different states, and have started blanking on names of a few folks from middle school. This was about 20 years ago, so I find it perfectly plausible to forget the last names of folks who you 1. knew only for 3 months, 2. have not talked to for 56 years
I understand AWS UX is quite bad (I have also personally been bitten by GCP UX) and would be more sympathetic with the OP if this were the cost for 1 or 2 months.
If OP didn't notice it for 8-9 months, I do think it's unfair to blame the entire amount on AWS.
"Over the space of a year, we had a 60% MoM Growth Rate, 35K MAU and a great team!"
60% MoM growth = 281x growth in a year. So you had 35k/281 = 125 users a year ago? This seems like a disingenuous growth rate unless I'm missing something
If I had 1 user on month 1, 1000 users on month 2, 5000 on month 3, 10000 on month 4, I could claim a 1000% (10x) MoM growth rate. But that'd imply you'll have 100K users during month 5 and 1M users on month 6, whereas it'll likely be <40K.
One of the reasons you look at MoM growth rate is to project how fast it'll keep growing over the immediate future. It's unclear to me right now
BTW don't get me wrong, I like the story and the hustle. Just not these numbers :)
Am I the only one who looks at this and thinks: "wtf, no, versioning notebooks should not be this tedious?" instead of suggesting other horrendous ways of versioning them?
I’m going to disagree with all the positive comments in this thread. I feel like they’re all “feel good” comments instead of being realistic. CS 50 is a freshman level introductory CS class. It’s not a theory class, it’s not a class teaching you how to implement sort behind the scenes.
I would agree that an algorithms class does not equate to success as a software developer, but if you’re having issues with an intro class, there are certainly gaps in your knowledge. They might not reflect in your current job but may reflect in the future. I’d recommend actually brushing up on your fundamentals.
I think some do if you ask. I know for a fact that the founders of the company I work for would ask for intros to some of the LPs as part of the fundraising process (we do Enterprise b2b sales so they were mostly looking for sales prospects).
Protip: if an investor (potential or otherwise) tells you to let them know if there is something they can do for you, look through LinkedIn and ask for intros to sales prospects
Because their LPs usually insist on confidentially as a condition of investment. Some institutional investors do disclose which VC funds they participate in, though.
How is this setting things up "quickly" when OP is asking to limit complexity? You're suggesting:
1. Server side in Go
2. Cross-compiling it
3. sftp'ing and restarting the service everytime
4. postgres
5. ansible
6. Makefiles
7. Webpack
8. Babel
9. React
Cross-compiling with Go is done by setting two environment variables. That's it. This is not like the mess of C++ cross-compiling. In LiteIDE it is simply a matter of choosing Linux from a drop-down: https://www.wut.de/pics/screenshot/e-505ww-07-pide-000.png
SFTP is not exactly hard. Nor is `nohup ./server &`.
From 5 on I agree though - is that 4 build systems? Insanity. I would just make a static web page with normal HTML forms or whatever and Go templates. If you really need client-side Javascript, I'd just use jQuery, or something similar and lightweight like minifiedjs.
yeah, I use straight HTML wherever possible. But for some things it isn't possible, or suitable. I'd love a simpler client-side environment. Any suggestions welcome... I'm looking at Vue.js now, recommended from comments here.
The investors poured ~$15m into this company, and the board is now trying to fulfill its fiduciary duty by trying to recoup some of the invested capital. I understand that open-sourcing the code base would be a better outcome for its customers. However, I am having a tough time seeing if the investors were truly political or antagonistic in any way.