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Comment by rorrr | Hacker News Reader

So their competitors are just

    Google docs
    PiratePad
    collabedit.com
    primarypad.com
    TypeWith.me
    Sync.in
    EtherPad Foundation
    iEtherPad.com
    titanpad.com
    etherpad.tugraz.at
    etherpad.mozilla.org:9000
    sketchpad.cc
    okfnpad.org
    pad.telecomix.org
    twiddla.com
    ...

Now the real question that I'd love to be be answered is - why would anybody fund this?

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The real question I have is: why posting a mean question without making a slightest effort to answer it yourself? Did you read the article? Did you try the product yourself (or all of the competitors you've mentioned)?

I, for one, believe that collaborative editing should have been added to every authoring application, not just editors, 10 years ago. I still use shared screen sessions for that.

Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list, the VC firm gets a stake in whatever Stypi decides to build with the huge number of users that implies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, it's easy to see why you wouldn't invest in it: because you can't afford to put that much money behind a 1:10 or 1:15 risk. But that's exactly the problem every VC firm in the world has: finding the right set of 1:10 bets to put their money behind.

I feel like, if you're going to complain about people funding stuff like this, you're really complaining about the whole VC model. And sure, I don't like it either. So go build a company without it. Plenty of us here have or are doing exactly that.

Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list...

The question is why do you or anyone else believe that this is a distinct possibility -- i.e. given this team, this product and this vision, why does someone with money believe that this represents a good bet?

I agree with your assessment of the VC's challenge. However, VCs don't put money into every long bet that comes their way. The different between a 1:2 bet and a 1:10 bet is obvious -- distinguishing a 1:10 bet and a 1:10000 bet is where the art comes in. (That is distinguishing a long but feasible proposition from bullshit.)

Sure. The point is just the naivete implied by being surprised that someone would invest in an Etherpad clone, as if anyone was likely to have simply invested in an Etherpad clone.

I see people all the time on HN who think that the logic of a situation inescapably reduces to a single, simple statement or set of axioms which coincidentally agree with their own viewpoint. They are genuinely shocked and bewildered that a large segment of the population would fail to reach the same, simple-to-reach conclusion, and from this they conclude that everyone who does not arrive at that conclusion is defective.

Even if 50%+ of the opinion-holding population disagrees.

Because they are unmitigated narcissists, it never enters their mind that perhaps there are factors unseen to them that make the analysis more complicated for those other people.

I think this is related to what Nassim Taleb calls "epistemological arrogance" -- refusing to question the validity of one's own knowledge, despite significant evidence that one's knowledge may be insufficient or invalid, e.g. 50%+ of the population has a different opinion, or people with a compelling need for high-quality knowledge (VCs, in this case) are arriving at different conclusions.

For concrete examples of this, see the comments on HN article which involves a discussion of race or gender relations.

You do raise the important point that one should never assume one knows everything, but 50%+ of the opinion-holding population is wrong about a very large set of ideas (though which 50%+ varies from idea to idea). As such, the fact alone that the majority of a population disagrees with an idea should carry little weight when deciding whether to keep or abandon an idea.

Agreed. However, that fact should give you pause, and if you reject the majority opinion (or merely a plurality, or just widely-held) you should be able to articulate a solid reason as to why it deserves rejection.

That's a bold claim. Even if it becomes one of the top 4 companies, what's the business model? Most of the sites I listed are non-commercial, absolutely free. It's a bitch to compete with free services, and pretty much identical functionality.

You must also realize that the sites I listed is just a small percentage, something I googled in 2 minutes. There are many many players in the collaborative editing "market".

How could you possibly think you know this company's investment pitch based on the information we now have? You just want to bag on YC companies. And I don't care, except that you're doing it pretentiously.

I actually do love many YC companies (reddit, justin.tv, disqus, airbnb, optimizely), but not this one.

Or the last one you commented about, which you also vacuously slagged.

Both snapjoy and stypi seem to lack innovation, at least from the information they are giving us. Take hipmunk, for instance, that's a great example of a fresh idea.

One of my coworkers here at Google wrote a webcrawler and search engine - probably the first webcrawler, according to Wikipedia - back in 1993. It was an academic project, deployed completely for free, with no possible way to make money.

That didn't stop Google from making hundreds of billions of dollars off search 15 years later.

When investors look at a company, they look at what it could become, not what it is now. Most gigantic megacorps started as tiny niches that nobody ever believed they could make money from.

Google didn't succeed because of a crawler. They succeeded because of pagerank algorithm, a new invention (plus hiring the smartest people they could find).

And I'll ask again - what's so groundbreaking about this project?

You're missing the point which is: when Google was funded, it wasn't Google, the king of search, as we know it today, but yet another search engine in a saturated market, started by 2 academics with no business background.

The reason they were founded was that they convinced the investors that their plans and ambitions go beyond what they've built so far.

It's a remarkable lack of imagination to not see a potential in a good, collaborative web editor. Sure, if they don't ever write a single line of code, it's not going to be anything special. But they probably will and they probably have many ideas on how to move this project forward.

An obvious evolution would be to turn it into a web-based IDE, competing with the likes of cloud9.

Or they could make it an embeddable editor widget usable by others (it's surprisingly difficult to build a decent web-based editor and a lot of web-based software (a forum, a commenting system, q/a sites) needs a good editor).

Or many, many other possibilities. Stop thinking of it as a finished product. Think of it as a first step in a thousand-step journey and try to imagine what the other 999 steps could be.

It's you who is missing the point. Google was not "yet another search engine", they invented something new, which gave them the edge.

You keep talking about the future possibilities, but you fail to point out what gives this particular project that edge. What is it?

FWIW, PageRank is a relatively minor component of the ranking algorithm (I dunno why people latch onto it...maybe because it's a public, patented, easy soundbite), and the core Google ranking algorithm was entirely rewritten by Amit Singhal in 2001. The ranking edge that most people associate with Google wasn't even written when Google got its funding, and its inventor hadn't yet been hired.

I don't follow. Wasn't Larry Page the inventor of PageRank? And didn't he make it while still at Stanford?

I'm saying that PageRank isn't the ranking edge that Google is famous for, and that if you applied the ranking algorithm as invented by Larry and Sergey to the web (even the web at the time, before everyone started to game Google), it would suck. It might suck a bit less than AltaVista, which was why they got funded, but it's not at all the quality that people have come to associate with Google.

Ah. When you say 'the edge Google is famous for' I think of PageRank.

Exactly.

I think folks enjoy thinking that something they can also understand (like PageRank) was the reason Google was successful...

You could have said the same thing about Dropbox when they launched. Or Google.

Lots of competitors is a sign there's something here that people want. Unless the incumbents are protected by some barrier to entry, the winner will be whoever executes best, even if they are a late arrival.

Not quite. Both Google and Dropbox brought immense improvements to the state of the art of both of their respective niches.

I have a hard time at the moment trying to figure out what benefits this has over Etherpad clones or Google Docs. I'm sure there's a use case that they're trying to tackle, but it's not obvious to me.

In the article, it's mentioned that they are building a platform whereby native apps can add collaboration features, and they mention Photoshop as a possibility for that. That would be huge.

Because anybody who works remotely knows what a titanic, epic, massive, planet-sized pain in the ass it is to do remote code editing.

And this product does it out of the box. I've worked for four years remotely, and with OSS projects, and this has always been a niche that needed to be filled. I've tried subethaedit (requires someone to have open ports to host), coda (which uses subethaedit's libs under the hood), vim + screen (requires having a server + logins), etherpad (no code highlighting), and git+tight sync times, or just ever more towering pages of gists.

Having a websocket based collaborative code editor with line numbers and syntax highlighting is 95% of the way there, where as everything else is at best 75% there.

So, yeah. I would pay money for this.

Have you tried using webmeeting software for this ( like webex, or gotomeeting, or even skype )? Then you can just share your whole screen / environment with someone remotely. That is what I usually do.

Actually yes, i left skype off the list accidentally.

I've successfully pair programmed via skype screensharing, but the image compression can often be a problem (as well as refresh rate), and there's no way to actually share work/alternate control in a pair.

It sort of works, but gets like a 65-70% score from me. Can get the job done, but seriously inhibits productivity due to lack of features.

I also thought exactly this until I read "vim plugin".

Clearly this is just a start, a way to have something running and make people talk about it, a way have real users testing their technology... And being a YC startup help having a relatively large audience even for this kind of launching with an uninteresting product, so the real world technology testing will work, and I'm pretty sure that's all they care about for now.

When they start developping plugins for other apps using the same already-tested-and-approved techno, it will get interesting. This seems to me like a case of "launch now, code later", which in this context may be a good idea.

Oh, and by the way, I'd like an Emacs Lisp implementation and an open protocol (and a unicorn).

Simperium is another competitor (and a YC alum, as was AppJet).

As everyone else replying to you has noted, these guys have grander ambitions. So does Simperium — they aren’t just doing Simplenote (see http://simperium.com/). (Full disclosure: I contracted with them in the past)

You're not funding position and you're probably not funding velocity, you're funding your estimate of acceleration. At t = not much, what they have built in aggregate is a poor predictor of future value.

I am not involved with Stypi but I think the key points from the article are "it wants to let native applications like Photoshop sync changes between multiple users" and that "they’ve laid the groundwork to let other applications sync".

In other words a text editor is one instance of an application that can use the underlying service. Think about that for a second. The concept of collaborative editing as a service that can be adapted to ANY application is HUGE. For example, an engineering CAD app would be more powerful with this feature.

Going further,if you consider that machines can also "collaborate" then it get's even more interesting. An example of human/machine collaboration could be a real-time reporting application.

Your criticism reminds me strongly of patio11's prediction:

"What's this?! You dare call yourself a startup? You're attempting to solve a problem which other people have attempted to solve before, and your solution looks like something two guys could have made in three months! Why are you in YC and not me?!"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862853

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