Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

If you were interested in the library and are sad that this pivot means it won't be supported, I want to mention there is ongoing work in the OSS community outside the company supporting the pre-pivot vision.

I've personally been working on a fork called samsaraJS (http://samsaraJS.org), and there is another community effort at infamous.io.

These are both early stage labors of love, and always looking for contributors!

I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that.

I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things that were described in the Reconsider article that was posted the other day https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f

Look at how this Famo.us office tour showcases the waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4

> Newcomb himself admits it was a “divergent brainstorming process,” saying “We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn’t do it.”

What a load of shit. This has nothing to do with open source.

It's more like people don't want to pay for another JavaScript framework that claims to be better than the current web stack which at the end of the day, ends up reimplementing most features a web browser already has, but in WebGL. In the article, Steve even admits "We built a shitty game engine".

Recently, there were a few other attempts at reimplementing most of the web in WebGL, I think Flipboard had an article.

Let me point out, this is hard. You wind up with some of the features HTML/CSS already has that's faster, but a ton of missing stuff you end up needing at some point.

For example in WebGL, layout is non trivial, rendering text correctly is non trivial, events are non trivial. These things are an afterthought when working with HTML/CSS.

People love to shit on HTML/CSS and blame it for their problems, but at the end of the day, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.

Don't blame open source because it can't rescue your product. Great products and care for the community foster great open source communities, not the other way around.

I dove in because i try to get a balanced view of things before I make up my mind about things, and there was some stuff in there that I really liked. I tried building something with it, and it didn't really work out.

But even worse was the way that they interacted with their open source community.

It was completely cathedral-style, for a long time. And just as they became more bazaar-like everything dries up from them. Nobody was on irc, nothing on the issue queues. The only thing we heard was more promises for x integration, and y integration.

Eventually the community got fed up and called them out on it, to which they finally admitted that they had started a complete rewrite behind closed doors to use 'mixed mode' css3d and webgl rendering. 6 months later, they released their new 'engine' rewrite, and an additional 'framework' on top of it, which really did not seem fully baked.

They subsequently made a really big deal of helping found the jquery foundation, and organized a jquerySF conference that had them on stage promising to replace major jquery widgets with drop-in famo.us ones.

And then nothing. Commits stopped, feedback stopped, slack channel was closed. News started filtering out of devs working there leaving one after the other.

The entire thing did teach me some important life lessons, though =) At least there's a few mistakes i won't make again.

Yikes. If ever I wanted a paragraph printed on a poster to scare me into working harder, this is probably the one.

  > Newcomb describes it as “one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to
  > make because it meant letting go of some people.” Stressing the firings
  > weren’t easy for him. “Before I made the decision, I drove scar from San
  > Francisco to Baltimore and back to think it through,” he explains. “I took
  > eight days.”

The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.

I have no idea how they could have raised $31M on that.

This could have been an amazing framework built by the open source community instead it's now just another growth before revenue scheme that went wrong.

Sad.

Of course, Famo.us' employees seemed to get a lot less equity, but let's be honest: I'd rather make $175,000/year and get 0.05% of nothing than $75,000/year and 1% of nothing[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517008

Oooh... that's going to be a tough argument to sell to people.

First time I heard of 5 years runway....

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7689406

I don't hate thin fonts - for example in bigger sizes it looks good - but the thin an small combination is a bad choice. In Chrome it's a little bit better but I still won't read it.

It was an exciting place to work, for all it's ups and downs. Besides the product itself, the office, albeit ungodly expensive given it's location and size, was the perfect place to be productive and push yourself well into the night. There were spots you could work collaboratively next to others as well as little nooks you could "hide" and get some comfy undisturbed privacy. The ambiance of the place worked beautifully to be both creative and technical, together or individually. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's an expense that easily justified the potential reward.

On the other hand, the social culture that Steve crafted, often reinforced by his example, didn't sit right with me personally, nor did it sit well with many others. "Toxic" was an unfortunate word thrown around quite a bit while I was there. I do hope he takes time off to honestly...subjectively... reflect back on how he chose to treat people he calculated could be useful to him in the moment as opposed to those who were not.

On the flip side, when child-like dreamer Steve came through, speaking about his passions and what inspires him to do what he does, he was, in those moments, a really enjoyable guy and motivational figure to work for. I'll be casting an unpopular opinion here, but I do think the guy has it in him to lead another company to success, as long as he takes a cold, hard, unbiased, and honest look at himself to fully understand why famo.us, not just the product, but more the culture he crafted, failed with him at the helm.

The most important takeaway from my stint there was working with the incredible team and crafting the friendships I did. The level of talent that many of the original engineers had and the amazing personalities behind said talent gives me no worries that those who were let go will move on to something far greater and hopefully, personally rewarding. I already know that quite a few have! :)

http://www.thefamousgroup.com - Dat logo, though.

The folks focusing on the techcrunch cribs video and drawing damning conclusions from it are, rather predictably, chasing a red herring.

For what it's worth I actually felt more productive, focused, and relaxed (in a good way) in that office than in any I've ever worked in before or since. The high ceilings made a remarkable difference. The mix of open and private spaces worked. Going to work in a place that felt like a higher-class version of your home but where you could collaborate with your coworkers was pretty amazing. It was basically what co-working spaces always try to be but can never fully pull off. It doesn't make sense to complain about the damage open plan offices are doing to productivity and then get angry at someone who does the opposite. Granted, you don't need a semi-luxury penthouse. :) But I think the office was an under-appreciated reason why they were able to get (and retain) a lot of great engineers. It was in general a very sane, reasonable environment to do good work in, in contrast to most offices.

jondubois, aikah, and others are on the right track. Making money off a front-end framework is a long shot. The monetization plan (to the extent there was one) was always heavy on optimism and reliant on a lot of things going very very right.

That's not to say it was impossible, though.

The reasons famo.us failed are the reasons most startups fail: 1. They didn't do nearly enough to truly understand their users and meet their needs 2. They didn't communicate or collaborate well or consistently enough internally.

I could say more about both 1 and 2, but I'll wrap it up there. The real narrative of what went wrong is one that's familiar and pretty generic. The subplots of what they were trying to build and who was involved just makes it all a bit more interesting to speculate about.

p.s. dmvaldman is the man – you should check out his framework and say hi.

Also the frontend space is insanely competitive. There are a lot of really good frontend frameworks that most people have never heard of.

I think they're exploiting their relationship with HN, and their need should be re-evaluated.

I found that a bit strange.

In all seriousness, to me a framework is just an opinoited way of doing things that makes a bunch of decisions for you so you have less to think about. It hinges on the fact someone has uncovered some useful abstractions that make the act of coding less tedious.

I checked out their demo and while it looked fancy, I didn't see any compeling reason to use it over plain html/css or three.js if you need fancy 3d stuff.

Also, calling your product "shitty" isn't the best strategy. Geeks see self-deprecation as a sign of weakness.