I'm watching this very closely since I am a founder of another OSS-based company doing something very hard and trying to monetize via things like services, support, etc.
(Ironically we just ported the new version of our SaaS code base to RethinkDB! We plan to stick with it. It's too nice, and I'm optimistic it'll find an OSS home.)
I'm anxiously awaiting the postmortem, but my sense (albeit from a distance not knowing anyone involved) is that their failure resulted from an underlying assumption that they'd always be able to raise more money as easily and quickly as they had in the past.
As a result they deferred marketing and monetization strategy too long and ran a burn rate that was too high. When the money didn't come they couldn't sustain what IMHO could have otherwise been a fantastic business. If they'd had a little more time to build out Horizon and some of their other efforts, I think they would have made it.
It makes me feel a little bit vindicated for taking the contrarian (to some) position of hugging "default alive" instead of hiring for what feels like the sake of hiring. A good fraction of the Silicon Valley people I talk to (founders, VCs, etc.) have consistently encouraged us to spend more and increase head count, etc., sometimes on the argument that this would make us look better to investors.
Personally I'm concerned more with looking better to customers and surviving. The whole thing just seems bizarre and irrational to me even when I try to put myself in a VC's shoes. If I saw two companies with roughly equivalent stacks and growth and one was burning cash at half the rate of the other, would it make sense for me to choose to invest in the more expensive of the two?
Of course not being in Silicon Valley also helps us keep our burn really low... and I've had people say there's no way we can possibly succeed without being there. So hey, we're either smart or doomed. We'll see.
(Ironically we just ported the new version of our SaaS code base to RethinkDB! We plan to stick with it. It's too nice, and I'm optimistic it'll find an OSS home.)
I'm anxiously awaiting the postmortem, but my sense (albeit from a distance not knowing anyone involved) is that their failure resulted from an underlying assumption that they'd always be able to raise more money as easily and quickly as they had in the past.
As a result they deferred marketing and monetization strategy too long and ran a burn rate that was too high. When the money didn't come they couldn't sustain what IMHO could have otherwise been a fantastic business. If they'd had a little more time to build out Horizon and some of their other efforts, I think they would have made it.
It makes me feel a little bit vindicated for taking the contrarian (to some) position of hugging "default alive" instead of hiring for what feels like the sake of hiring. A good fraction of the Silicon Valley people I talk to (founders, VCs, etc.) have consistently encouraged us to spend more and increase head count, etc., sometimes on the argument that this would make us look better to investors.
Personally I'm concerned more with looking better to customers and surviving. The whole thing just seems bizarre and irrational to me even when I try to put myself in a VC's shoes. If I saw two companies with roughly equivalent stacks and growth and one was burning cash at half the rate of the other, would it make sense for me to choose to invest in the more expensive of the two?
Of course not being in Silicon Valley also helps us keep our burn really low... and I've had people say there's no way we can possibly succeed without being there. So hey, we're either smart or doomed. We'll see.