Interesting move. I've just read Peter Thiel's startup notes, and one point he's adamant about is to build your product as a monopoly for a small market (this is in no way new advice, but since I just finished his book his formulation is the most recent one in my head). E.g. Facebook and Harvard students, AirBnB and housing for conferences, etc. If you can't get to mass adoption in a small niche, how are you going to scale it up? Additionally, your product has to be at least an order of magnitude better than what the niche already uses (e.g. Facebook was an order of magnitude better than Harvard's static face book).

I have a hard time seeing what small niche Eve will dominate, and how it's at least 10x better than any existing solution. Looking at the examples they give:

> a scientist doesn’t have to rely on the one person in the lab who knows python

Scientist these days pretty much have to pick up a programming language (Python, R, Matlab, etc.) throughout their undergrad/early grad studies. If you're going to target that niche, not only are you fighting against the huge investment professors and labs have made in existing tools (along with the small libraries/frameworks they built themselves), but you also have to provide an equivalent quality ecosystem for the weird data formats some very specific niches use, for the lab equipment, and so on. If you wanted to deliver a 10x improvement on the existing state of computation in research labs, you'd have to spend a lot of time focusing on exclusively that.

> a child could come up with an idea for a game and build it in a couple of weekends

They already can, using Scratch or the myriad similar tools available which will probably remain better because they were designed with game design in mind.

> your computer can help you organize and plan your wedding/vacation/business.

People already use MS Office, Google Docs, etc. for these tasks. Unless Eve brings a 10x improvement to those tools, how can they ever hope to displace them? My dad has been using the same version of Excel for the past 10 years, I have a hard time imagining people like him switching over.

In his lectures, Peter Thiel spends some time talking about all the solar startups that emerged more or less at the same time in the late 2000s, only to fail miserably. While the buzz and excitement for solar power companies was there, in reality they could not deliver on what startups need to deliver to thrive: a product solving a real problem for a niche market that's at least 10x better than the existing solution in place. I feel like we're in a similar space with all those "learn to code" and "new programming tools" companies that have been steadily emerging.

No doubt, the CS academic and HCI researcher that I am is excited by Eve- I'm sure they've done their research and that it would be a really neat product. The entrepreneur in me is however extremely doubtful.