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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

> We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026

Remember that post announcing the millions of VC capital they raised? This is the result

Using mainstream libraries instead of reinventing the wheel would have been a good decision with or without VC money.

I like Zed but it's still my secondary editor because it's missing usability features that I value in other editors. I think we all benefit if they focus their attention on the parts of Zed that differentiate it rather than writing new frameworks and libraries.

Isn’t the thing that differentiates zed actually largely its performance? Using electron or GTK or whatever would not differentiate it in this way.

They're switching to wgpu (another performant Rust library), not GTK or electron

I think the parent meant that Zed could not have used an established UI library like GTK or Electron since performance was such a big focus of the editor.

Yes, so I'm glad Zed at least did spend the time to reinvent the wheel, because it benefits everyone to focus on performance, not to mention we have a high quality piece of OSS at the end of it, as even if it's paused development for now, it can still be forked or otherwise iterated upon.

> Using electron or GTK or whatever

You say that like they're in the same category, but one is an embedded Chromium and the other a native windowing toolkit.

You vastly overestimate the amount of pressure a board can place on an early stage startup. The far more likely scenario to me (someone who raised VC money) is that the CEO likely looked at their run rate and decided to prioritize things more aggressively. This is hardly surprising and it has nothing to do with VCs.

Doesn't it have something to do with VCs? Does the company behind Zed actually make any money on their own?

I mean, in the sense that they are VC funded and so I guess you can tie anything back to VCs? You could just as easily say it has something to do with the founders mother, who gave birth to them.

No, I don't think you could easily say that. You can't say it literally has nothing to do with VCs when VCs are the only reason they're able to keep operating financially.

The founder's mother is the only reason they're able to operate at all.

If you want to talk about the VC I think you'll need to get more specific.

What are you even talking about?

I really couldn't have been clearer. The implication was that Zed made a decision because of pressure from a VC. I said that they were vastly overestimating the pressure a VC can exert on an early stage company.

You've then pointed out that the company is directly tied to the VC, which is true but just as relevant as saying that the company is tied to the founder's parents. You've failed to explain what different there is between the VC and a parent other than that there's a causal link in the existence of the company.

So I suggested that you substantiate that difference if you want to make a point about the VC.

I don't know what is confusing about this.

What's that, doing actual work rather than labor-of-love open source stuff? Seems reasonable.

Did you not raise a bunch of money from Sequoia? Sounds like you're in a perfect place to quit your job and hack on GPUI for us.

>What's that, doing actual work rather than labor-of-love open source stuff?

except the 'labor-of-love' stuff is what set the editor apart and why real users were choosing it and the 'actual business work' the moneymen are eager about is exactly what's in every other editor and what nobody asked for

They wrote GPUI as a business decision, to focus on performance, because they knew that that would be a core differentiator to all the other IDEs out there that use Electron for example. That they also liked writing it (as a "labor of love") is incidental.

Didn't they also invent Electron for their Atom editor when working at GitHub? Which then was hijacked by Microsoft and VS Code. Was Electron (Atom Shell) a core differentiator of Atom? Absolutely. Was it a business decision? No, it was a dream to use javascript/html/css to build a desktop editor. I think, similarly, Zed was an experiment to build a modern desktop app without any C++ legacy or OS API wrappers.

Those creators own their company in the case of Zed, so it is a business decision. Otherwise they could've just gone with Electron again. The business decision is that they wanted to be different in the market, the speed of vim with the IDE capability of VSCode.

Without such venture capital, I doubt GPUI, at least to the level of complexity it has today rather than being a toy project, would have even existed. It costs money to develop open source sustainably.

GPUI development predates Sequoia's funding by about two years.

Companies start with founders funding themselves through savings and friends and family rounds before institutional investors are usually even interested. But make no mistake, they start it as a commercial venture, otherwise they wouldn't have taken VC in the first place, nevermind that VCs wouldn't have funded it if not for their pitch on how it could become a billion dollar company.

And since Sequoia? It is primarily the Zed team working full time on it, which costs money.

IMGUI and other GPU accelerated toolkits exist and have been created without billons of VC revenue.

In fact the entire Qt group is just work 650m EUR

Who said anything about billions? I just said that it costs money to pay people to work on OSS, which is accurate as ImGui is sponsored by companies and Qt is a commercial entity with infamous licensing. VC doesn't necessarily mean billions in funding.

They really should focus on fixing bugs and improving basic functionality.

Eg if you edit or create a file outside of Zed, there’s a good chance it won’t show up in the file browser.

Also… multi window doesn’t exist so the multi monitor story is trash.

gpui existing in the first place is a result of them raising VC

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