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Comment by kyeb | Hacker News Reader

There are some legitimate concerns about Warp throughout these comments (telemetry, business model, etc.).

But the one thing that really excites me is to have a full team working full-time on building the terminal that developers want to use. They're doing real user research, talking to developers, and taking feedback in forums like HN seriously - and using up millions of VC-dollars building a new version of this fundamentally important core utility. I'd much rather have that VC money go toward an attempt at a better terminal than some ML or web3 startup.

I think this doesn't usually happen? All the terminal emulators I've used usually open-source projects developed in someone's free time. Don't get me wrong, projects like Alacritty, urxvt, xterm, Terminator etc. are amazing for the funding they have (I think mostly $0?), but I'm super excited to see what a cohesive terminal based on real UX research can look like.

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> using up millions of VC-dollars building a new version of this fundamentally important core utility

It's nice to think of this as 'taking advantage of' VC dollars, but VC dollars come with strings attached, namely the need for an 'exit'. The exit only happens if the company in question makes multiples of what it invested, meaning that VC-funded companies need significant revenue from their users. These days, the growth required for an exit leads to: 1) advertising being laced into a product, 2) user data being sold or otherwise monetized, or 3) charging you a monthly subscription fee.

Maybe this time it's different—there are theoretically other VC-friendly business models that work for software—but I struggle to see how.

Open-sourcing the application from the beginning would certainly give more confidence here.

I'm already wary of creating accounts on VC funded apps. Surely there are others like this too. I'm just tired of being burned by the cycle you just described, eventually value must be extracted and usually that means a tradeoff of user values versus budget values and I'm not here for that anymore.

Thanks kyeb. I agree with both points here - we need to be very careful and sensitive in terms of how we build this product from a privacy and security perspective, but we see the opportunity mostly the same way you do.

There are some great open source terminals out there, but having the opportunity to rethink it with a team of dedicated full-time engineers I think gives us an opportunity to build something really powerful and useful.

Not to mince words, but so far you've made a very basic series of unforced errors on both privacy and security. This is perhaps to be expected, as glancing at your About page, you don't seem to have any security or privacy specialists on staff. I don't even see a security page or contact info.

Warp is starting to read like a Product-driven startup. The kind where people figure security and privacy are little features you can just throw in at the end of the dev cycle and advertise until then. It's not like anybody is going to actually check or care, right?

It's an understandable error in a visionary. Yet it's not the kind of mindset that produces trustworthy, secure, privacy-respecting enterprise products that companies happily pay lots for.

You're absolutely right. Warp needs to be very careful and sensitive about privacy and security. It may be worth reflecting on why you haven't been so far.

There is a lot of constructive value in this comment, I hope it is internalized and thought about

For sure - one of my main takeaways from our ShowHN is that there's a ton of reasonable concern around login, telemetry, and open source that we need to address. We are going to come back to HN as we do that.

The HN community has a different default perspective than I have on a lot of these issues, but a perspective that matters to a ton.

The specific concerns identified here can be thought of as symptoms. I invite you to contemplate what cause they might share. Addressing specific issues around telemetry, openness, and logins without fixing the underlying organizational concerns will leave you playing whack-a-mole forever.

Since you get our collective concerns, I look forward to seeing how you address the organizational issues here.

Yeah I think some folks are seeing this and thinking the terminal is the product, when in reality the devops platform is the real product here and a slick terminal emulator is one component of that platform. Enterprises pay good money to companies like Redhat, Teleport, etc. for similar kinds of devops collaboration/security platforms.

where's the devops platform?

if all they have to offer us is the terminal, then their product is the terminal

it's a good question. today warp is a terminal as you say. the hope is that we can build a platform around the command-line, but we decided by trying to start with the terminal's fundamental UX to see if we could improve it. in order to make a platform we believe first we need a great product that folks want to use.

Everyone offering "platforms" these days. It's getting really tired and I can't be bothering to pay attention. Tools is where it's at, not platforms.

Warp wants to john deere-ify our tools. Soon you won't be able to buy a hammer or table saw without some sort of platform marketing speak and a subscription service.

Spirit Airlines of the Command Line.

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