Octopart (YC W07) is Joining Altium

IIRC Octopart was a part of one of the 2007 batches. Congrats on staying with it!

Relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

> When we first met the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn't seem especially committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It was the usual story: he'd drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word "Billionaire" printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.

Edit: Funnily enough, one of the Octopart founders quit grad school on the first day HN existed. Time flies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...

Congratulations for the Octopart team. However, as a user of both Altium and Octopart, this is worrisome.

Altium has a bad history of licensing schemes, bad support and, most of all, old technologies. As a user, I understand a professional tool must be stable and not jump in the latest fad, however, the Delphi and Turbo Pascal cracks in Altium show all to often. Most designers I know get the illustrative habit of closing Altium from time to time to avoid losing data in the next crash.

Their version control bindings also show their age, and a few years ago I cracked in a post[1] about Altium and git:

> The answer I eventually got from Altium was "what is git?" I took that as a "don't try it."

I really like the tool, but the company seem too invested in selling services like Vault and flexboard, which sound great for big companies and consumer products, but, as a freelance and custom projects engineer, they are a much lower rank to me than simply good and practical ECAD.

[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5121233/how-to-use-altium...

Has Octopart given interviews regarding their technical infrastructure? Everything on their site is very fast and performant. The autocomplete on the homepage is excellent. And the filtering done via the sidebar post-search handles a high-level of complexity quite well.

Octopart's founders in Newsweek in 2007, under the title "Meet the Next Billionaires":

http://docs.octopart.com/newsweek_octopart_small.jpg

Yay, I hope you can influence Altium in a positive way. CAD is changing so much and some of the old school guys want to get back to the old days of $25,000 "seat" licenses and what not but that horse has left the stable. Octopart has been my go to source for finding parts (and datasheets given the crap that is the datasheet web spam) for many years.

Yesterday I had PG's Startup School 08 video[1] on the background and he spoke about them just after being a cockroach and how companies succeed not just by not being evil but by being good.

Really happy for them. Great team.

[1]https://youtu.be/q7K0vRUKXKc?t=891

Congrats octopart. You guys found a niche, offered an excellent service and stuck by your mission (despite naysayers).

Also, good seeing people make money off the new electronics revolution.

Well done. I love Octopart. It's on my browser tool bar next to the Google icon and it is my starting point on every production run's buying cycle.

Congrats guys!! I guess it's down to us and Virtualmin as the last to represent YC W07 :)

Congrats! Octopart is a wonderful tool, and I look forward to see it continue to grow.

Awesome, congrats on seeing it through 8 "short" years. PG spoke highly of you as being benevolent so I wonder about your progress!

Congratulations and good luck on a new stage of Octopart!

I met one of the Octopart guys at a YC at NYC event one time and we briefly chatted about Griffiths' QM book, what customized site would be like in the future, and other random things. Brief conversation, but walked away thinking they were nice people working on a cool idea. very cool to see this.

That's great! I've been an Octopart-Arena user for nearly 2 years. I've had good experiences with their support and APIs.

I hope this will allow for a better implementation of compliance linking -- I've been waiting for a good RoHS and REACH tool, and I think Octopart has a great start.

Congrats Sam and team! One of the most helpful founders I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

Not a user of Octopart, but a fan of them and their story ... congrats to them!

Exciting for octopart and altium users :)

One of the companies I've admired most through the years. Congrats!

Octopart took forward what Tandy and Radio Shack couldn't... Congratulations Octopart!

just learnt harish from octopart is now hacker at angellist.

congrats to the founders.

RIP Octopart, and good luck in the Delphi aka Turbo Pascal house.