jamesfzhang

I've use Scientist for every major refactor I've done--IMO it's one of the best examples of a library that does one thing extremely well and has a clean interface.

One counterexample is Hearthstone. Players buy packs to have access to cards that otherwise would take them weeks to unlock. AFAIK, professional & hardcore players actually spend a lot of money buying these packs so that they can unlock the cards ASAP and study & test them for competitive play.

I left the company when it was around 40 and only know of revenue numbers at that point. Nothing has been announced publicly as far as I know, but it's substantial & comparable to some of the companies on this list.

Wistia. 10 year-old business. Raised only a seed round and has been profitable & growing many years in a row.

Algolia is an amazing product. I've used it on several projects over the past few years and the performance & ease of use is top notch.

You have no idea what the probability is. It's not 100%, but it's also not 0%. You also have no idea what Instagram's probability (and hence, expected value) was at the time of their acquisition. Having such a short-sighted, negative outlook isn't healthy.

This is such a negative, short-sighted outlook. A company doesn't need an immediate monetization strategy that's open to the public for it to have value that's attractive to an acquiring company.

Edit: Furthermore, PH definitely does have potential to have a large scale revenue stream. Any "destination" site that millions of people visit daily with intent to try/buy new products has major potential.

Give them some credit beyond being "amazing negotiators." Have you used their kit? The publicly released one, or the one actively in development? How do you know if their tech isn't that valuable?

EDIT: It's very hard to pinpoint an exactly value for R&D heavy startups. Their tech could easily be worth well over $1 billion if it plays a crucial role in developing & accelerating GM producing & selling driverless cars. Just know that GM sold $154 billion worth of car last year.

Congrats to Will and Sublime, great everyone involved!

TLDR:

- Basecamp releases v3

- Basecamp markets to their customers to upgrade to v3

- Some people upgraded & noticed their integrations with 3rd party applications no longer work (presumably thinking it's the 3rd party developers' fault)

- 3rd party developers aren't happy that they can't update their integrations since v3 lacks an API

- DHH says the API is in the works but hasn't been as high priority compared to other features on their list

- 3rd party developers get mad at DHH's response