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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

This is all very well but how are going to make money? They have taken VC investments.

There's a bit of an answer to that from Charlie Marsh here: https://hachyderm.io/@charliermarsh/113103579845931079

> What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.

> An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. [...]

Honestly, they should do that, it would force their competitors to actually improve their own, and if they don't well, there you go, really great funding your way.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Sounds like they have patient investors. They are doing amazing work.

the packaging one is an odd example because it’s hard to imagine a company that both needs an enterprise packaging solution external to their cloud provider, and is python only

i have a similar concern for the Pydantic folks commercializing via observability platform; how big is the market for python-only observability?

i think both cos will either look for money elsewhere, or find themselves having to deal with at least a few other language ecosystems. Even python+typescript would 10x the TAM or more

I'm not sure that business model exists personally but good luck to them. It's trivial to spin up an index on AWS or Azure. Usually for a company it's hard for minions dealing with this stuff to get approval to spend money on a new supplier, but easy to set up something with your existing cloud provider.

These questions are often hard to answer for people unfamiliar with how VC works, but mostly because VC is not intuitive from a 'normal business' perspective.

Essentially, VC's know very that what they're funding is risky and may go completely caput. However the VC model explicitly aims to fund companies that have the potential of becoming huge and becoming very profitable.

Both the founders and VC's behind Astral are not stupid, they know that it could fail or only have moderate success... However, if they succeed in building the next generation go-to ecosystem for python development (which is arguably the world's most popular programming language), we could imagine a future where they spin off some product and it does incredibly well!

It's not that that future's unimaginable. It's more that it would be nice to have an easy path to knowing how these tools will be funded. They will suck time and effort out of the ecosystem of Python tools, which is fine, except it's not fine if they vanish or decay in X years' time because of funding issues.

I don't know the solution, and I really think these tools look about as great as tools can look, so I'm very keen to use them. I would just like some way to know that they'll be supported for 10 years at least.

If they open source it, who cares? Obviously I would like them to continue maintaining their stuff, and I am sure they are imaginative enough to find some source of income.

It must be nice to receive VC funding without knowing how you are going to repay it!

Honest question - have you worked with VC’s much? That’s pretty much the MO. Get a snippet of an idea that has the potential to scale to unicorn levels, make sure you have a super coarse idea of how to monetise it, and then shoot and see how far you get.

VC funded companies (almost[0]) never repay it.

They only try to create enough value that the VC can one day sell their stake for more than they paid for it. The key is convincing the VC not that that is particularly likely, but that if it happens there's a chance it'll be a lot more than they paid for it.

[0] occasionally a company gives money back to investors when it fails

A Microsoft acquisition? Could help them to keep their open source trickery going. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

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