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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup. It's focus is entirely on the personalities involved and not at all on the product. They talk about their cool new office, funding, they have a 50 point list on values, they have a podcast, a newsletter...

Yet there's essentially nothing about what the product is (that being the only thing most people care about). This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards. Worry about the product first, last and in-between. The rest is just there to signal to us that your priorities aren't in the right place.

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Reminds me of the top comment from PragmaticPulp in another HN thread [1], where Pragmatic realized the personality very much is the product:

I know two people on the “30 under 30” list. Both of them are incredibly charismatic and charming in person. Their Instagram and Twitter accounts churn out constant brand building material. They both have pseudo-startups with noble causes and vibrant websites. Their startups have a list of impressive advisers, including B-list senators and industry executives.

However, neither of them have made any progress on building an actual business. One of them has supposedly been developing the same simple product for almost 7 years now, but they’ve never been able to produce even a proof of concept prototype.

I thought I was missing something for the longest time, until I let go of the idea that they were really trying to build a company. They’re not. They’re building their personal brand, and succeeding wildly thanks to publications like the “30 under 30” list that have an insatiable appetite for underdog success stories.

Surely some of these companies are legitimately successful with great business models, but they’re mixed into these lists with the brand builders who know how to game the system. I’d be interested in reading an honest “Where are they now” follow up series that checks in with these founders at the 5-year mark after they make this list to see who the real successes are.

[1] The Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Hustle | Hacker News. (2019, December 02). Retrieved from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082523

Contrast this with the website of CoreOS when they were in start up mode. It was all about their product and why it would change the world. CoreOS was perhaps the best startup of the decade in my opinion.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131004150004/http://coreos.com...

Haven’t followed CoreOS, but it joined red hat. Does that comport with your view of it?

It means they had a successful exit from/transition out of "startup" status and joined a company with decades of Linux development experience.

So it’s not red hat scooping up competition in the startup phase? Like my Econ background expects.

Both/And

Red Hat is absorbing some of their technology rather than just firing everyone and terminating the product like Travis CI for example.

Early CoreOS employee here. CoreOS technology forms the basis of Red Hat's OpenShift 4. It was definitely a product driven acquisition, not any attempt to kill competition.

And to Rob's point, many of the CoreOS folks were boomerangs in RH parlance (people who rejoined RH, by choice or acquisition).

Technically, there actually weren't that many. More folks were Rackers (ex-Rackspace employees).

Edit: I was an early CoreOS employee who was the first "boomerang"

Success is one of those things that can only be measured with respect to a certain frame of reference. The consumer perspective(s), the investor perspective, and the employee perspective can all lead to wildly different evaluations of a project's success.

On the positive side, you've got the fact that they made it to a profitable exit, which would be hard to ignore if you had a financial stake in the venture. You've got the implication that Red Hat believed that CoreOS was essential to its fortunes in a container-oriented future as a clear vote of confidence that they built something good. The fact that Red Hat kept CoreOS going suggests that they felt it was so good that their existing technology couldn't realistically catch up.

On the negative side, if you don't like Red Hat then, yeah, that certainly counts as selling out.

Regardless of the acquiring company's motivation, being acquired is one of the textbook criteria for a successful startup. The other is becoming a large company by themselves, but this is rare.

And since Red Hat kept Container Linux/CoreOS open source, this wasn't really a move to eliminate competition. They can support enterprise clients, but the open source nature doesn't stop another company from offering their own enterprise support.

> Regardless of the acquiring company's motivation, being acquired is one of the textbook criteria for a successful startup.

Depends on the acquisition price. Acquihires are failures. Investors might get their money back, and everyone else (including founders) walks away with nothing but a job at some company they didn’t necessarily want to work for.

And redhat's openshift product massively improved as a result of CoreOS technology.

But the real question is: who are they? I've never heard about them, I don't understand all this hype here

Jessie was employed by Docker, Bryan was CTO of Joyent and Steve was COO of Joyent. They all did some important contribution to the container ecosystem and they are now starting what appears to be a company selling custom cloud hardware.

> custom cloud hardware

Uhh, you mean computers?

Looking at their pedigree, I'd hazard that the computers are geared towards running containerized workloads, so "custom cloud hardware" sounds about right.

That seems to be the common theory, but what does that even mean? There's nothing all that special about running containers at the hardware level, they are really just groups of processes that the kernel manages a certain way.

That's not completely accurate. Hardware & OSes have not been designed for heavy multi-tenancy, leading to (among other issues) cache interference. At Netflix [1], we have to do quite a bit of work to undo that. Bigger orgs like Google have spent more than a decade improving the Linux scheduler in their own fork for similar reasons.

[1] https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/predictive-cpu-isolation...

Very interesting link, thanks. Obviously your use case goes way beyond running a standard Docker installation. It sounds like you really want the kernel to schedule containers instead of processes -- which it doesn't really do by default, hence my comment. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, that you're able to get these clear performance gains from a highly optimized special-purpose scheduler. Still, I was a bit surprised. :)

However, that's at the OS level. What can realistically be done at the hardware level? It must be possible in theory to design a CPU that's better at this kind of context switching, but I don't know if a new "computer company" really wants to go there.

While that's true, this particular company doesn't seem to be targeting anything that would improve containers (OS optimizations, new CPU). So I think the OP was correct in that simply changing the BMC or making it more secure on boot won't affect containers.

I'd be surprised if they didn't leverage something like the SmartOS container capabilities https://www.joyent.com/smartos

People who worked at Docker, Joyent, and Sun would be the ones to answer your question :). Consider the possibility that the kernel and the h/w are increasingly at odds on commodity server hardware.

My watch is a computer, so I don't think they want to make general purpose computers.

>selling

Not for a long while.

Bryan Cantrill was involved in Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle IIRC.

The other folks though, I have no idea.

Bryan is an O.G. systems engineer who worked at Sun and who's given many great talks and worked on lots of cool projects, and Jessie rose to prominence as a core docker developer and prolific and talented blogger/speaker, among other things. Both are well-known engineers with major contributions to open and closed source systems infrastructure. Steve Tuck I don't know yet, unfortunately.

Here are some more links if you're interested: https://blog.jessfraz.com/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill

* Edit: Rephrased from "O.G. Sun Engineer", I don't know how accurate "O.G. systems engineer is", it's all relative anyway. For reference, I I'd consider Jess an "O.G. containerization engineer" :)

> Bryan was one of the O.G. Sun engineers

He's not that old!

(Hehe thanks, fixed.)

> Bryan was one of the O.G. Sun engineers

From Bryan's linked blog post - he joined Sun in the mid-90's. Sun was founded in 1982, so he was an (excellent) engineer there, but not one the "O.G.s"

Ah whoops! I meant "O.G. systems engineer" in general, independent of his time at Sun, not O.G. in terms of Sun's history! I don't know much about his history other than what I've gleaned from watching a few of his talks.

Ever hear of dtrace?

No.

> This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards.

I worked for such a CEO. In the first year we had four week-long retreats to: an island in WA state, Palm springs, Austin, and Banff (that's where the stats team was). TONS of swag. Aeron chairs. New MBPros. Oh, and champagne fridays. Needless to say it burned through it's good will seed round in 1 year, and the CEO begged for another year's worth of money from friends before shuttering. But hey, hype sells in the software world.

Chairs and laptops are fine. Even nice ones. They aren’t what brings down a tech startup. These purchases can speak to the mentality of the founders, but they are also nice all around for quality of life. We spend a lot of time on laptops, sitting in those chairs. The chairs last a long time and hold their value well. Worth every penny. The Trips are kind of telling, though. We are a small consulting firm and have nice laptops, chairs, desks, and keyboards. Those things aren’t the problem :)

Yeah, the red flag in a startup is a founding team who can't explain in a sentence what their product is or why it's different. So far I've read 3 blogs and 4 websites and all I can tell is that they have a garage and also maybe an office.

Their homepage is pretty clear - they are trying to make cloud technologies more accessible in on premises solutions.

I am not an expert in the field, but I work at a place that is very resistant to cloud solutions for certain applications, and getting the same stuff working on prem can be difficult and pricey.

Got to agree here. The idea of a company not providing decent hardware and chairs says a lot. It's a couple thousand per employee at most, for an easy gain in employee satisfaction.

Trips are pretty silly though.

God, I couldn't wait to give up the CEO title. When I brought on a partner I immediately ceded it to him when we discussed roles. He was shocked and thought he would start as the COO for years.

It's such a thankless job and one that has a specific skillset that is fairly rare. You can be the Founder but not the CEO; something people seem to forget in this business.

Agreed. I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here for a company I invest in. The company currently manages thousands of hosts and the cloud is eating into their profits. The hardware out there is way to expensive (or a bad job was done searching) to move away from the cloud. If they can provide good hardware that would allow the thousands of host company to save money if they did it on their own, then we would be interested in looking into it.

Off the top of my head of what would be required besides just cheap hardware. 1) Cloud like software to manage it or k8s native support. I don't know exactly how that would be done, but the administrative costs of using this hardware can't be so high as to make the cloud a more viable option. 2) Some options for network access. Cloud does not just provide VM's but the underlying reliable network with multiple redundant pipes. Comcast Internet access might be good enough, but some customers might require large redundant pipes. While they might NOT need to solve this themselves, they should make sure that the market does provide solutions that when taken into account, allows for cheaper than cloud solutions. 3) Physical location... same as item 2 but for physical location of the hardware.

I remember back in the day managing colos. It really sucked. It was not just hardware costs that sucked. They should just consider that.

Some pretty good points there! Can you think of systematic ways to make colo not suck to operate?

> I would just move on to the next article, except that there is a need here for a company I invest in.

This is exactly how any "WeWork" type company sucks in investors. You'd just ignore the stupid out of hand except that it would be so nice to believe that if this company is on the level and IF their product does what they say it will and IF they deliver it in a reasonable time frame then it will solve the problem and somehow make money for investors.

Forget the names and reputations of the people involved... if three random people came up to you at a conference and said "We've formed a company to solve problem X!", wouldn't you wait until they showed an actual product to even think about potentially making decisions based on what they might do?

Depends on the kind of product. Some products take time and money to make. Others take far less.

You're asking VCs to disregard social proof and FOMO, which will never happen, as those are the main things they rely on.

I think providing reliable compute and storage is not so difficult and for that there are many options that are cheaper than AWS or Azure (e.g. Hetzner cloud, Scaleway, Vultr or DO). The hard part, in my opinion, is providing managed services like relational databases or key-value stores. For that there are far fewer vendors available, so if Oxide manages to build something that makes this easier I think they’d have a pretty solid business case. In general I think we see a trend towards simpler IT and system architectures, which I really like as I think the complexity has become way too high. I e.g. know a company that invested significant resources (people and hardware) in setting up an OpenStack cluster but even after three years never managed to use it in production. From what I’ve heard k8s has a similar complexity problem, so I really think there’s room for a simpler approach to scalable computing.

> The hard part, in my opinion, is providing managed services like relational databases or key-value stores.

Just moved from AWS to Vultr & DO and it's loads cheaper and faster for my use case (lightweight landing pages basically).

Managed services are still incredibly tough because of client support, and like you said, relational databases and key-value stores.

In terms of software that enables users to treat bare metal as a "cloud", consider MAAS: https://maas.io/

If SuperMicro plus real estate, power, provisioning, and operating costs isn't competitive with cloud costs, perhaps it might be because the large cloud vendors have entire teams focusing entirely on bringing down the cost of building and operating these things at scale.

Cloud vendors don't have 90% profit margins; the cost of cloud is what it is because operating computers at scale is hard.

Honestly I feel that far too many companies are afraid of building their own servers. In addition to getting exactly what you need for each workload, it can save the company a boatload of money over time. System integrators like Dell charge companies millions of dollars to assemble servers that are no better than anything I could build myself.

Another overlooked benefit of building your own hardware is you don’t need to add complex overhead like virtualization or containers. You can “right size” each server with the perfect amount of CPU, IO and RAM for the processes you will run on it. Paired with a kernel compiled specifically for that server, your businesses applications will be vastly more performant than ones running on a cloud platform.

Honestly, too many businesses hop on the latest fads. The smart ones see the value in going back to the basics.

Agreed. I was somewhat confused on why they had more focus on their Podcast than telling me it was an AWS for startups/people.

Maybe sometime in the future when I have time I can go through these long-form types of content, but they say nothing about what they're building on their landing page/don't describe in the level of detail I'm assuming they have in their podcasts.

Similar to what you're saying, it's like buying the swag for a company that doesn't exist.

It seems like they plan to do hardware-software co-design. Devices (servers, switches?) and firmware designed specifically for their software stack. A software stack (drivers, OS) designed specifically for their hardware. Really interested in seeing where this goes.

"Hey look we have this cool solution" -> "Hey look we have a few small to middle tier customers" -> "Hey look we have a big customer" -> "Hey look our big customer bought our company". It's the silicon valley startup shuffle...

But if you have fun and make money in the process, what's wrong with it? Companies are not (or should not) be like children.

They're apparently doing hardware-software co-design for rack-scale servers, integrating some kind of state-of-the-art systems-management features of the sort that "cloud" suppliers like AWS are assumed to be relying on for their offerings.

Kinda interesting ofc, but how many enterprises actually need something like this? If there was an actual perceived need for datacenter equipment to be designed (and hardware-software co-designed) on the "rack scale", we would probably be doing it right and running mainframe hardware for everything.

It starts looking appealing when your monthly AWS bill is deep into the 5 figures and you’re kinda trapped: do you pour your engineering resources into cost-optimizing your infrastructure (doable, but time consuming) or kick the can down the road?

Believe it or not, going private but not having to give up the niceties of AWS or Azure would be quite appealing.

Remember Eucalyptus? Was lead by the former CEO of MySQL. Built an open-source project that attempted to be compatible with AWS. The project is still alive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_(software)

To say the project is still alive is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think?

Looks like the last release was in 2017. Eight years of releases is a relatively good run. May be of interest to those like Oxide, who are considering similar paths, with the added complexity of firmware, BMCs, roots of trust and OCP-style hardware.

https://github.com/eucalyptus/eucalyptus/releases

Also, some companies just want their data in-house and not hosted on a remote cloud. Sometimes contracts preclude the use of 3rd party external companies to house critical data.

This is certainly a need in HPC environments. Think of natgas / big oil, finance, science (protein folding, genetic synthesis, genome research, etc). The cloud simply makes no sense for a lot of these industries. We're talking 20k physical computers and using MPI for their research jobs kind of scale. The cloud is not a good fit for those types of envs where they're using 100% of their compute 100% of the time if at all possible.

I would guess the problem with business as usual is that the cost magnitude of doing this means that only companies throwing off serious cash are doing this.

Which has the side effect of their solutions being bespoke, because acceptable cost looks like "Tell me when I need to stop adding zeros to make this happen."

To go another way you either (1) need to be Amazon-scale already (i.e. "there aren't enough zeros to make inefficiency worth our time") or (2) be willing to say no to huge profits out of ideological purity.

The well-funded client / custom trap is real.

I work for one of those HPC / financial firms that I alluded to above. The "no well funded client trap" is also real :)

First comment talking about what they are doing.

This was in one of the blogs:

"...the sharpening desire among customers for a true cloud-like on-prem experience (and the neglect those customers felt in the market) made it more in demand than ever."

I think that's a good summary description.

In other matters I was went looking for the Rust connection (given a name like Oxide) and was not disappointed.

> "a true cloud-like on-prem experience"

I'm afraid what people mean by that statement and what the startup is going to try to do are completely different things. As in people mean AWS-like cloud services running on multiple servers they control with all the fault tolerance and geographically distributed. But for the startup it probably means cloud services running on expensive servers in a fast local network.

Does that mean "I have servers... Oxide manages the virtualization"?

Or "I bought a rack full of Oxide and now I have my own puddle of elastic compute on-premises." (If you condense a small cloud, you get a puddle, I presume.)

If hardware is involved it would seem like the latter. In which case they'll be competing with Amazon's on-premises solution and commodity hardware.

I wonder if they're trying to eliminate the VM substrate layer that clouds today currently run on by replacing it with hardware and an OS that is more amenable to running containers natively with good isolation/security properties?

So, like AWS Nitro?

Nitro doubles down on VMs instead of abandoning them, but it is indeed a good example of what integrated hardware and software can do.

What they did with Nitro is develop custom PCIe devices to handle storage and networking, so these devices' virtual functions (SR-IOV) are directly passed through to the VMs and now the hypervisor basically has nothing to do other than switching contexts.

”I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup .... they [list their values] ... yet there’s essentially nothing about what the product is.”

Imagine you and your friends excitedly announcing on your personal homepages that you are setting out to build your passion project into a going concern “not driven by power or greed, but by accomplishment and self-fulfillment” [1] and being flooded in a community of supposed hackers with derision that your post wasn’t a good enough press release.

For some people, the actual human excitement of friends earnestly getting together to build something new primarily because they want to see it in the world is so foreign that they can only snark about it.

Hopefully that kind of response vindicates their values more than it demoralizes.

[1]: https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-wi...

Vaporware has been looked down upon in our industry for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Plenty of teams that seem good end up producing nothing. Announcements like this are a huge red flag to people who have seen this pattern many times over.

Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about.

Yeah ... if you’re a marketer. People who actually make stuff are allowed to be excited about what they‘ve been working on in their garages and get to tell people more about it on their own schedules. They don’t owe you a feature comparison table every time they talk about their project.

In fact, they don’t owe you anything at all.

A thing I'm curious about is how they plan on handling the supply chain. As a consumer of server products I observe that running a server company is much less a technical problem and much more of a supply chain management problem. As I understand it, it is one of the many reasons why Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple.

That being said, I wonder if the forcing factor behind building their own servers for the big three companies was mostly the inability to get hardware fast enough. Sure, there are tons of other benefits you get after you start building your own servers, but I wonder if they would have been pursued if Dell could land servers on time. In this sense, building your own machines is a much smaller scale to try to supply chain your way around, even if you're Google. That and private companies can be much more agile since they don't have to support existing workloads. Hard drive shortage? Change the spec last minute to not rely on them. This is pretty exciting to see, and there are plenty of third party vendors making money in the space, but they seem to want to revolutionize the space, and I'm curious to see how that happens.

They’re not selling you anything, they’re raising money. I’m sure investors are getting the details after signing NDAs.

I was under the impression that potential investors usually don't sign NDAs.

Correct. Or rather, I've never seen it. Some are even offended when asked. N=~150

Investors do not often sign NDAs covering "ideas", they will sign (and will often ask you to sign) NDAs with scope limited to investment terms and due diligence information.

Probably depends on how much leverage those seeking funding have.

They're converting Twitter fame into capital funding. Not having a product means you technically don't have an obligation to deliver anything in return for that capital.

There is one post that's marginally helpful: https://sysmgr.org/blog/2019/12/02/a-new-machine/

My guess is they want to sell servers with a first class control plane. Something much less clunky than what's currently possible to cobble together with IPMI, PXE, Intel ME, grub, etc. Similar to what AWS, GCP, etc, use internally. And maybe expanding into routers based on these servers, also with a control plane, etc.

I'm extrapolating a lot out of little though. They are very vague.

Remember 'Color'?

Yes. Priceless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs

Wow, that was eight years ago...

"Color Labs, Inc. was a start-up based in Palo Alto, California. Its main product was the eponymous mobile app for sharing photos through social networking. It allowed people to take photos in addition to viewing other photos also taken in the vicinity."

I wouldn't compare the venture in question at all to 'Color'...

You're missing the point. The only reason Color is even known is because its principal had name recognition before the venture was started.

I agree. All I see here are developers with huge Twitter followings pitching themselves for capital funding with ideals as the product.

There are plenty of investors who think just having a large Twitter following is reason enough to invest.

I dunno what your problem with these people is, but Jessie is a Docker maintainer and Bryan built dtrace and went on to do fascinating things with illumos and Joyent. Steve Tuck spent 10 years at Joyent, starting as a Sales Director and ending as President.

These are all serious people, and the first two have reputations built on strong technical contributions to (even ignoring the wild overuse of k8s for resume-driven-development) complex technical products.

I wish it said this on their “about the team” page.

They must have defined the problem that they're trying to solve if they convinced an investor to fund their company right? If they want to build any interest in what they're doing it you'd think they'd share it.

But no we hear how excited they are and their fifty points defining what company they want to be. If the company's product is top secret then why share anything at all?

Not necessarily. If you ask most investors, they usually will boil down an early-stage investment to "I invested in this team".

They focus on the team because that’s the how startups raise money these days, investors figure they could always pivot to something else. Obviously this can be problematic especially when the founder(s) is good at raising money, see Wework

Fair point "WeWork", but this early on I think the focus of an investor should be more on the founders vs. product/business idea. This early on there's a potential for pivoting, and you'd rather have smart, talented individuals that can deliver vs. a product idea

Sometimes, though, getting noticed is the hardest challenge a company can face. In these companies, name brand recognition is worth more than a billion dollars of funding. Kylie Cosmetics is just one example.

I think this is more true in the consumer space. If you're asking me to build a business on your product, I'm going to bolt at the first sign of flakiness (of which these vanity blog posts are a big red flag).

Perhaps they do, but they are not ready to share it with the world yet?

It's baby steps all the way at this phase.

It reminds me of that startup where each of the founders gave themselves a goofy title like 'Cheif Cleverberry' or something like that. I wish I could remember the details. I think it was ex-blackberry employees starting a phone company.

Here’s a link for all you haters https://news.slashdot.org/story/04/01/26/1128246/tivo-buys-s...

Exactly. They are trying to cash out their Twitter fame. This company is essentially a personality cult at this point. It might turn out wonderful and I'm excited to see what the product will eventually be.

Twitter fame? That's like saying Carmack was just trying to cash out his Facebook fame.

Cantrill and Frazelle both have created software used by millions.

That's the point. It doesn't matter what they did previously or who they are. The current product can only be judged on it's merits.

It absolutely does matter... someone with a track record of success will and deserves to get the benefit of the doubt when starting something new compared to someone with a poor track record or no record at all.

Its a biased population? Self-selecting? A track record may be 'somebody who was at the right place at the right time'. A track record of winning the lottery, for instance, doesn't mean squat.

A track record means, at bottom, that they had no disqualifying traits.

Ironic you should pick winning the lottery, because it absolutely DOES mean squat. For instance, the only person I'm aware of with a "track record" of winning the lottery had a system to consistently win the lottery. Had you given your money to him you'd be rich.

https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/this-couple-found-a-math-...

I agree, but also “no disqualifying traits” is more valuable than you are giving it credit for. If you want to use the scarce signals available to judge the prospects of a very new startup, biasing for founders with no disqualifying traits is probably not a bad start. There’s a reason YC, TechStars, etc all explicitly say they invest in founders more so than product ideas.

Sure. But the number of that kind of person, number in the thousands. Then hundreds of thousands.

The track record of Software startupers/leaders/influencers/whatever going Hardware, boasting with overconfidence before even starting, is abysmal.

what software used by millions have they created? Solaris is nearly dead, and Joyent utterly failed to go anywhere.

Docker Dtrace

> Joyent utterly failed to go anywhere

Joyent was acquired by Samsung, and it's not one of the bullshit acquisitions that destroys the projects/products — Samsung is now using Manta/Triton (and ZFS on illumos/SmartOS) at their massive, massive scale.

https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent

> Cantrill and Frazelle both have created software used by millions.

And yet here they are building a sever hardware company??

> That's like saying Carmack was just trying to cash out his Facebook fame.

Thats an absurd analogy. Carmack is responsible for arguably the most important advancements in video game design. Specifically for code he personally architected and wrote.

For example - Frazelle is one of 1300 contributors (currently 13th in terms of # of commits) to Docker core. Not to diminish her contribution, but these individuals are contributors, not single handed creators (which was implied), of "software used by millions".

For the record - I enjoy Frazelle's content and personality. I wish her the best, but the commentary here is near cultish.

While I'm not very fond of the cultish commentaries, bashing them as soon as they announce their new venture isn't any better.

I think they have some merit and know a thing or two about computers.

Not sure why you're responding to me specifically, but I agree with your general premise, but disagree with your specific characterization.

The general criticisms here are warranted and I think are constructive enough that they'd be beneficial to these founders and others seeking to do something similar.

WRT to Frazelle, are you referring to her contributions on the Docker team as "creating software used by millions"? If so, that seems disingenuous, or perhaps she was more of a core contributor than I realized? If not, what software are you referring to?

Carmack had 5 or 6 game engines under his belt before any social media even existed.

Usenet was one of the first social networks, and Carmack posted there in the 1990s

Isn’t it usually a red flag when the announcement of a startup talks about who the founder(s) and investors are before the product? Am I seeing shades of Theranos here? Why not focus on how far along the product is or the viability of the idea?

Seems like waporware. Unless their idea of rack hardware is bending sheets into racks it not very clear how they would suceed. It's not clear at all what they want to do acctually. Maybe selling kind off custom computer rack servers with vendor lookin? Like IBM mainframes? Except not doing the advanced chips inhouse.

I couldn't agree with you more!

This was the top comment by a long shot and is all of a sudden way down the bottom... hmmmmmm.

It's one of my highest upvoted comments ever with 250 points. Not sure why it dropped to the bottom so fast.

It immediately went from #1 to like #15 behind comments that obviously do not have a lot of votes. Take a guess why. HN fuckery afoot as usual.

It's just more signal not to use whatever they end up producing. Whether it was an astroturf campaign or they used personal connections to get HN to re-rank things, it doesn't speak well to transparency, honesty or being customer-centric. I think my original comment was a very valid criticism of vaporware and vanity blog posts used in lieu of actual product information. Trying to sweep that under the rug is not a good look.

There's a strong recency component to the comment ordering. New comments get a boost so they are visible enough to get upvotes if they deserve them, and over time the order settles.

We downweight bilious comments, especially at the top of threads. Why? Because the internet tendency is to make everything ill-tempered, peevish, and gross. The spirit of this site is curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and for that to have breathing space, there needs to be an active counterweight.

The main thing to understand is that it's a global optimization, not something stupid like supporting particular PR campaigns.

That's very fair and I apologize for the snark.

According to other comments on this thread all three of the names mentioned are already highly successful and financially independent individuals. I wonder if the high risk tolerance encourages them to focus more on the lifestyle aspects of this project (and if that is a trend we see in other startups founded by already successful individuals).

There is also something about well-off individuals taking investment money to get a fancy office rather then bootstrapping and keeping all the equity/destiny of the company themselves that smells funny to me. I guess its "free money" but I have to wonder if the products would be better if it was sweat equity instead.

Who tries harder - pro sportsballer with the check in the bank, or the first-year college player?

The pro sportsballer, hands down. His superior work ethic is likely a big part of why he made the pros, and 99% of first-year college players won't.

The average NBA career is about 4.5 years

Why so short its not a full on contact spot like NFL or Rugby

Considering that apparently they will try to do something on the hardware side, additional capital may be necessary. Just guessing.

They are starting in a garage https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/born-in-a-garage/

Read up before you make unfounded claims

I was misled by the top comment in this thread “talking about their fancy new office”.

> There is also something about well-off individuals taking investment money to get a fancy office rather then bootstrapping and keeping all the equity/destiny of the company themselves that smells funny to me. I guess its "free money" but I have to wonder if the products would be better if it was sweat equity instead.

Based on the description of the company, they are working on hardware.

I'd agree with your statement if this was a pure software company, but anything involving tangible products can require initial capital orders of magnitude more than what 3 engineers are worth..

Speaking of that, does anyone here have a ballpark number for what it would cost and what the minimum order quantity would be like, to get one of the major Taiwanese OEM companies to manufacture an initial run of a custom server product? My guess is that the capital requirement would be in the 10s of millions of dollars.

Real airports have control towers, baggage handlers, and hangers. Seeing them, it is a mistake to assume no flight operations. To assume it's only a cargo cult. Or to assume, in the age of Kickstarters, that it will never be more than marketing. None of which is my prediction of the company's successful shipping of quality product. Some companies never get past the low hanging fruit. Other companies do.

Airports also have flights going in and out, so you can see that they are operating.

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