Open Sourcing a Failed Startup
nirvdrum.com
nirvdrum.com
We were somewhat better placed to open it up, we had separated various parts more completely, hadn't put in the full billing engine, and had no third party code or other things that we were distributing that might be an issue.
But... one of the things nirvdrum didn't touch upon was that we just hadn't designed it to be a single-server, single-customer install.
We designed it as a platform, and made assumptions along the way. I didn't mind opening the embarrassing code (everyone's shit smells), but the people who were asking all seemed to want a single, well-documented install... and we were having to walk away and go get a day job.
We did choose to open it in the end, and you'll find our work here: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/
But I only know of a few people who have actually installed it to date (and struggled, because it's not well documented). All of the effort to open-source it just found another set of tyre kickers.
Sigh. It's tough. Just letting go. And it's definitely made tougher by wrangling with these questions and trying to do the right thing without investing so much at a time when you're exhausted, broke and likely quite down about things.
Since our cluster provisioning and deployment was encoded in the project rubber [1] configuration, that complication is somewhat mitigated. But the point remains: the application requires multiple machines across platforms to be remotely useful.
[1] -- https://rubber.io/
In the end I'm much happier that buro9 found a way to keep it ticking over. Given the choice of continued service vs. Open Source I definitely would have chosen continued service - but it's even better to have both!
It's worth noting for people that don't know, that I ate my own dogfood. The communities and forums I run are now hosted on Microcosm.
So when we were facing the "What next?" moment, I knew I had to install and setup my own instance of the platform just to give my users an uninterrupted service.
What I did, was for every customer already on the platform who had stuck with us, loved what we'd done... I offered them space on my instance.
I never wanted to leave even a single customer in the lurch. I think it sucks that startups do, especially if a way can be found.
When I find the time and energy (between the new job and getting married in a month), I still want to add CSS sanitisation to the mix as well.
I have people that ask me to open-source my current side-project all the time (one that is paid), and I find it insanely disrespectful.
"Yes, let me just hand over the source code for my commercial product. How about not."
I'm not trying to sound greedy, but money speaks. If these companies want the software open sourced, they should be pitching in for the cost. If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all.
EDIT: Perhaps this is a good place to drop the "challenge" I gave myself and invited other developers to join me a few months ago.
DEVELOPERS - I challenge you to spend some money TODAY:
https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-...
I can see it being rude for people asking you to open source an ongoing concern side-project. But if your startup failed, your application didn't have any value in the marketplace (or you weren't able to execute).
As you said: "If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all." If the market doesn't value it, and it failed, why would people pay to open source it?
If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died?
They may not have valued it as much as the product was charging for, but that's a different debate entirely. I'm assuming there was some discussion of commercial viability, lowering prices, etc. before they chose to shut down. (You pretty much said this part in your second paragraph, this is the "execution" part.)
They have time to contribute back through documentation, bug reports, and even bug fixes. The only thing they don't have is money. That doesn't mean they don't value the project.
There might be no/little value in the product but some probability of value in the source. For example, for a competitor there is possibly a lot of value in seeing the approaches the software took, the problems the developers ran into, etc. Key word: Possibly.
I'd personally just ask to interview the startup owner for 10 hours at say $200/hr but I know some people aren't great at extracting value from a face to face chat.
It's a good thing my kids pay me to love them.
If we are talking about a start up, what about current clients? Maybe your business could not be sustained by the number of clients you had, they do find value in but they can not by themselves sustain your business.
Markets are not only not omniscient, they're remarkably easy to influence if you're one of the relatively few people who understand how to do effective marketing. (I'm not, but I've certainly experienced people who are.)
Ability-to-persuade usually trumps ability-to-deliver. Even in tech.
So what's the real value of a product/service?
With a failure like this, the lack-of-value may have been as much about the failure to upsell and market correctly as about a lack of practical usefulness.
Perhaps a better solution here would be to hand the code off to a trusted group of volunteers for clean up purposes.
Wow, that speaks volumes. Good call on not open sourcing your code.
So twitpic might be different, but I agree with the general point: if you care so much and you are making money with it, pay, otherwise go build it yourself.
I have gotten asked about whether I'd OSS my services if I was unable to continue maintaining them commercially. Nope. Not a chance. If they need a soft landing, that soft landing will be a 6 month warning to get your data out, prior to them going into the big bit bucket in the sky. It is extraordinarily difficult to take a multi-tenant SaaS app and turn it into a single-tenant appliance. There are people who do exactly that as a consulting service, and they charge tens of thousands of dollars for it, for a reason. (Plug: take a look at jidoteki.com, which is attempting to productize that particular space.)
Just doing the license review is something that they pay serious professionals with high-three-figures-an-hour bill rates to walk on a file-by-file and function-by-function basis in the case of e.g. an acquisition. If a forgotten subsystem got written by a freelancer 4 years ago and you don't have an IP assignment readily at hand your options are a) locating the freelancer and convincing them to sign additional contracts or b) doing a quick cleanroom reimplementation of code you might not even have know existed.
It's not like OSSing the code will quiet the criticism, either. Some folks simply want to see it OSSed for the same reason they want to see their football team win, but some of the folks have the notion that they're actually going to use it. When it doesn't work (and it won't work), they're going to expect you to fix that for them. For free, naturally. This will often entail doing free tech support for other people's software -- in some cases, other people's very expensive software that they should probably be paying professionals to support for their customers.
If any of this discomfits OSS users, the mint prints out paper ballots which allow you to allocate your votes on desired outcomes for the future. See that some go to the people responsible for software you can't live without.
I wish I had realized it a bit sooner. But, hey, I feel more comfortable having thoroughly exhausted the option.
The public sees Apple apps for 99¢, so shouldn't all software be priced like that?
I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upgrade. She paid $29 nine years ago, and was seething mad at having to pay for an upgrade. How do you deal with that?
I'm just looking for an Opens Source banker who will give me an Open Source mortgage.
After 15 years in the field (as a consultant) NOW I can say, you just drop the client if she does not want to pay. These people don't value other people's work.
If you're asking why sadly: if you're not paying... etc
+1 :)
A $400 couch for $200, table for $20, beautiful custom framed long print of an old possibly rare poster for $50. Laser printer for $20. Ridiculously reasonable prices on everything on and on.
Nobody bought anything and every thing I managed to sell was preceded by an arduous process of "oh how about this much". Two days before moving out I listed everything I had left for free, which was basically everything. Immediately the phone was off the hook, people were leaving work to come pick up whatever it was.
What I'm saying is nobody pays shit for anything.
Long ago I volunteered at a food pantry that "sold" food for $1 a bag, because (against what Econ 101 would say) people didn't act as entitled when they were entering a transaction.
In fact people pay A LOT for tons of things, they just have so high of a bar or are so fickle about what they do buy that it seems like there is no way to figure out how to get them to buy.
If you're selling a $100 laser printer for $20, then you're clearly not trying to extract the maximum value from it, so why wouldn't I try to see if you'd take $10 for it?
It seems like you implied that getting rid of the things in question was more important to you than getting a fair price for it. People simply carried that assumption further.
I sold our stuff on an auction site (TradeMe, the NZ EBay equivalent), with $1 reserve, and applied some of the lessons I've learned from lurking here.
My wife thought I was crazy. She was completely ready with the "I told you so". I argued that we didn't have time to relist it if it didn't sell at the reserve, so $1 it had to be!
Everything sold for more than I expected, dramatically so (frequently more than replacement cost). Even better, when people came to pick up their purchases, they were invariably _happy_ about it!
Going back, I compared my results with those of the same items on the site, my $1 item outsold them.
It helped that ads with pictures, $1 reserve and paid placement got preferential placement.
Things to do:
1) Put some effort into the copy.
2) Track down the user's guide.
3) Track down a product review.
4) Take pictures - Make sure they are in focus!
5) Show the label indicating model number clearly.
6) Answer all questions promptly.
7) If people ask for Buy Now price, decline. :)
8) Pay to be top of the results!
That is - they are getting the market value rather than the arbitrary value the seller assigns. Even if that value ends up being the same.
Wife on the other hand? I can't even be in the same room with her during negotiations over $40 chairs, she's ruthless and it makes me feel so awkward.
I think that's why B2B is so popular: people are willing to spend money to increase their corporation's value, when spending more than a latte's worth on personal software often is agonizing.
I can imagine hourly workers/consultants thinking to themselves, "Hey, this is a nice piece of software, let me pay the $x it costs for it and I'll stay at work another hour tonight."
I can't imagine salaried employees thinking, "Hey, let me buy A, B, C, D, E, and more, be in a budget deficit for the remainder of the year and hope for a raise!"
If you had listed your couch as $205, table $21 dollars, etc. you would have probably received offers closer to your asking price.
Round number prices signal you have no idea what the items are actually worth prompting people to ask "how about this much."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#Anchoring_in_negotiat...
When your business fails after years of struggle because people didn't want to pay for your software, and those same people make you feel guilty for not supporting the codebase after you can't pay the bills... that breeds the kind of resentment that creates real-life Walter Whites. It's hard to understand the experience unless you've been through it.
One thing that came out of it is that now I always try to find a way to pay for the things I use. Especially when I don't have to -- because I know I'm in the minority. And when I don't pay for something and that something goes away, I don't get frustrated anymore. I know i'm getting what I pay for.
In short, please pay for your software.
I regularly donate to several free software projects (kde, gimp, vlc, firefox, and occasionally others) because they respect my freedom.
I strive to avoid proprietary products. If other developers want my money, I want my software freedoms. Those that provide them get money from me. I do understand this is not the norm behavior, and it is awful that it takes developers disrespecting the users of their software to have them pay for it. Just nobody sees the value in software freedom (and yes, even if you cannot write code you benefit from being able to pay any developer to fix your problems, and you can also pay auditors to inspect the code whereas with a proprietary product you are screwed).
As long as consumers don't pay/donate for opensource software, producers cannot afford to pull the ripcord and switch things over, even if they want to.
If it helps you financially to not open the code because someone may yet still pay or because it saves you time then thats a good choice, don't feel bad one bit about it. But forget people who "should have paid" if it has no relevance now other than to torment you.
You also may have an adjustment period as you go back to working for another company. It's weird because you feel like you've already grown out of that yet will be expected to fit in as a corporate soldier.
I can offer hope you will eventually see an upside in personal growth. You'll realize that you've gained experience and expertise in running a company that's rare and extremely hard to come by any other way.
Good luck on your road to recovery, don't give up.
I'm actually fairly at ease with things. Making the decision to leave it behind was liberating. Dealing with the BS required to shutdown a company is just annoying. But, the open source question has come up quite a few times. I wanted to give it more than a simple "no" answer and explain why. I feel like it's really a loaded question to ask a start-up that just shutdown, especially when it's not often asked of start-ups still running.
I threw the pettiness quip in there to be intellectually honest. Taken out, I don't think it materially changes the decision. But I wanted to address it. I'm human. I certainly have irrational tendencies and I'm rather okay with that. Sure, I'll work on them, but humans aren't perfect automata even if this forum is wont to linking to Wikipedia pages on logical fallacies. Even after challenging that part, I couldn't find a strong enough set of pros to outweigh the cons in spending more time to give it away.
We consider this a strong selling point to our current prospects, actually. There's no fear of vendor lock-in, they can kick us out tomorrow and get a new vendor to support them, they have 100% freedom to modify the code and tailor it to their needs if we don't provide what they need, and - if we close up shop - they have options for future support, whether it means supporting it themselves, or paying someone else to do it. But access to the code will never be a problem.
This opened a lot of doors for me.
It's a very different business model, with different advantages and disadvantages that are very hard to compare directly. It's not an easy decision to make.
My current project was Closed Source for a year and a half and has now been Open Source for a year.
Open Source was always something I thought about, and sometimes people asked, but the thing that made me flip over was the realisation one morning after some bad sales meetings that with either a Open Source or Closed Source project, making a project that users both actually want and you can get some money for was very hard work, and if I was going to do all that work anyway I may as well do the one I personally preferred.
So I Open Sourced it, and I feel I did so from a position of strength. It's been a great year for the project, and I don't regret it.
I've also been on the flip side of that; Open Sourcing a project from a position of weakness. We had talked about Open Sourcing it from the start but never did, then the project never took off and in the final stages before we finally killed it we Open Sourced it. It never gave us or anyone else that I know off any benefit, and was a waste of time.
Thanks nirvdrum for a honest and good post - I'm actually talking about Open Sourcing my project in a week and would like to quote your blog - with a link and credit, of course. Good luck for the future ...
To be honest, I was sorry to see mogotest go, because it shows that there might not be any business in cross browser testing. But there is! In my eyes it was a valid effort on all fronts - trying to build a community and handling lots of browser vendor irregularities. He was one of the first ones. But the market wasn't there, yet.
Good luck! The cross browser testing space will miss him!
When closing down, has anyone explored not completely shuttering the company, but instead continuing to exist as a licensing entity? License the source code itself to your existing customers so that they can continue using it, without all the messiness involved in open sourcing it completely?
Probably a terrible idea, but it's what this blog left me thinking.
One reasonable choice would be to give or sell your former paying customers just a raw code dump, with a notification and a disclaimer of all the included license problems and other embarrassement. Giving it for free would of course be an easy way to avoid unnecessary liabilities.
Who knows, maybe next they want to buy your services to make fixes and new features? Perhaps they might even be willing to sponsor you in making it a proper open source project.
Talk to your customers. They are your most valuable asset.
EDIT: continued the natural train of thought
Will "maintaining trust" pay his mortgage? Unless he's going to found another company, that's not very useful for him.
1) The costs of running a single instance of the application far exceed the plans I was selling. It requires a certain amount of amortization to become cost effective for a lot of people. Dealing with Windows and Mac licensing and the hardware required just to get the browsers going, let alone the analysis engine, is too much for most of our customers.
2) Browser vendors pump out releases every 6 weeks. Without some form of ongoing support, the app would become obsoleted in fairly short order.
As such, the licensing model only makes sense for those that are comfortable messing around with the source. While the article makes it sound like it's a coupled nightmare, most things are actually laid out very nicely. But, it's still a level of complexity a lot of people aren't going to want to tackle.
I mean, you have clients, that value your software. You have bills to pay. Do the clients value it more than the bills you pay? Why don't you try to discover that?
(Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)
Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED.
I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason than that it prevents people from publishing or even talking about publishing for fear of having to deal with entitled strangers arguing with them about what to do with their work. Whatever "good" that sense of entitlement does is, I think, outweighed by the bad.
You obviously disagree.
Unless your belief is simply that all code should be open source. And that's fine, but then it doesn't really seem tied to the shutdown of the company.
Humanity isn't worse off for it if you don't release the source, but you could potentially make humanity better off by releasing it. If you keep it to yourself forever, never to be used or seen again, you reduce the chance of helping someone's project or improving someone's life to 0%.
If you do release it, there's that chance that a few people out there will borrow some of its ideas to help them out, or perhaps they'll actually use the entire codebase so they don't reinvent the wheel. This could save them a lot of time and effort. Or maybe a non-coder will use it because they genuinely want to use the app. And who knows, maybe it'll be a lot more than a few people.
It's just a bit existentially sad to essentially lock all that code produced out of so many man hours in a little sphere that is never opened again.
For a good example of this, look at Isaac Newton's unreleased works.
If you really don't want to appease obnoxious beggars from companies, you can just release it with a license that restricts all, or certain kinds, of commercial use.
Absolutely, yes it is worth hanging on to. "Dumping it in the trash" is such a biased metaphor. Having self respect and not being a pushover pays gains in the long run, so yes it's worth it.
(I would argue that yes! we are! after... some debatable period or time, and I would argue that not all that can be recovered is worth recovering, but those are strictly subsidiary from the question).
The specific entitlement we are discussing is whether work you produce on your own in private, without ever revealing it to the public, is so encumbered by the entitlement of strangers that you have a duty to furnish it.
That's what people who cajole business owners over open-sourcing their failed projects are asserting.
I argue that, generally, if said piece of property has no other encumbrance, then after some event or period of time, if this property is not providing value, the creator/owner should yield the property to the broad public, as their duty to society.
In particular, I am not asserting that they have a duty to make it useable or useful, or have a duty to do anything besides a tar ball or the moral equivalent. I am not asserting that it is always possible (encumbrances exist...). I am asserting the principle that our duty to society demands yielding this property up to the world at some point when we no longer find it valuable to own in any sense.
I am founding my statement of duty based upon reading too many papers from the 50s-70s where really interesting systems were developed, and then redeveloped years later, when the original companies had disappeared or discontinued the initial product. I think we could be much further along if the publishing of source was a commonly done thing.
So, the question then becomes how much more do I owe society? Am I obligated to spend 40 hours to clean up the code? Should I pay for a personal E&O policy on the off-chance I'm infringing on IP or unwittingly using someone's patented work? Should I continue running the corporation just to protect my personal interests?
And even if we managed to come to some agreement on all that, is it really the best way I could contribute to society? Would that 40 hours be better spent volunteering at a soup kitchen? Maybe spending the time programming for some non-profit that needs help?
The question seems simple at face value. The reasons for open sourcing dead software sound fantastic in an idealistic society. But the reality is far more complicated than the question suggests. And I don't think it's entirely fair to expect or demand this of people.
Let me pose a hypothetical example - Suppose your company produced the World's Shiniest Algorithm (WSA), allowing our total software energy use to drop below 10% of what it currently does.
And, then, because your company is led by a scientist who can not run a business, it completely implodes. The WSA is now out to lunch. What is the moral duty relating to the WSA? Should it have been published/open sourced?
On the flip side, what of the company with the World's Worst Algorithm, allowing your fine company to rank size of navel lint. This also implodes (for obvious reasons). What is the moral duty relating to the WWA? Should it have been published/open sourced?
My perspective is largely informed by seeing a lot of published papers referencing really awesome software long ago that essentially went into the garbage can due to commercial reasons. I don't think that it was a net win for society that that happened.
To your example, if someone tells you exactly how something was built, but didn't give you the source for the embodiment, that seems like a fine societal contribution to me. But, I'd probably argue that if it were truly that valuable to society, society probably should have found a way to support it, too. As long as the argument is no one owes a founder anything (which I can agree with), then the founder shouldn't owe anyone anything as a matter of fairness.
As a member of society, I have learned that if something is actually all that great, it will eventually become open source or be replaced by open source. Jeff Atwood had an article about this a long long time ago.
Society learns also from being punished. If people did not give away their work for free, society would learn more quickly that you have to pay people to work. Then society could benefit 1) from paying people to work 2) from having a claim on the work they produce.
They aren't going to learn if people keep bending over.
But I've also seen first hand that actually, yes, a whole fuck of a lot of people just want something for nothing and will happily tell you how great your thing is but only when they don't have to pay anything for it. And even once you do go free and open "to save it from the filing cabinet," any option you leave open to contributing to the maintenance of it long term even will be largely ignored.
Even Mozilla continues to exist more because of the search engine licensing money than actual contributions to the effort.
My old business records might be made into useful scratch pads by developmentally challenged individuals undergoing vocational training at the local GoodWill Industries. But where theory meets reality, donating twelve banker's boxes of paper is neither in my interest nor those creating the training program.
People who save empty shampoo bottles and mayo jars and used condoms because they might be useful someday are the subject of the reality show 'Hoarders'. Some things are not worth preserving.
And discarded code doesn't take up space in a landfill.
Not all companies have that model though.
Moreover, I think the shared source model is one that more companies should pursue from the beginning. For one, having light on the code from day 1 helps keep developers honest. Secondly, it establishes a trust relationship with customers that can be very powerful. And lastly, it eliminates one element of fear in the purchasing decision...potential customers don't have to worry about being left in the lurch if the business goes under.
If there weren't enough customers to support the business model with the way he was approaching it, then there isn't enough business to sustain it. If one of his customers is interested in the platform enough that they want access to the code to run it, they should pay him for it - either to hire the talent, or to buy the business.
Some projects are created because people are passionate about them, and some are created so that people can keep the lights on.
Shared source is an awful model for startups - it results in increased legal wrangling to establish ownership and licensing, it creates entanglements that could prevent or constrain growth, and it explicitly says to the startup "I don't trust you to be here soon, so I want to own part of you."
The correct way for a business to eliminate a fear of a partner disappearing is to pay fair value and sign a contract so that the vendor they depend on has a reliable cash flow.
The fact I can't easily open-source certainly could be a topic of discussion. But I don't think I was being terribly dishonest by outsourcing large pieces of functionality to software I don't have the rights to distribute. We originally used jQuery UI and it was a constant source of headaches. We switched to ExtJS, got a much richer UI up in a weekend, had paid support for any issues, and our customers were happier with the product. It was a trade-off and I was hedging on making the company work, not making it easier to give away should the company fail.
And that says nothing of the commercial products I licensed that I knew I wouldn't be able to sublicense. But, the name of the game was expediency. I liked the theme on WrapBootstrap. I paid ~$20 for it and got up and running in a weekend. Recreating that would have been considerably more effort at significantly more cost. I made a trade-off, as businesses need to do. It's technical debt, one I'm not obligated to pay and don't see the long-term value being worth it.
I think here they mention it in the adventures in Angular podcast that Misko took it from a previous company which was a startup between him and another developer that did not went through -> http://devchat.tv/adventures-in-angular/001-aia-the-birth-of...
It might also have been here or one of the the Javascript Jabber Angular episodes (their search functionality seems to be down for the moment)
> after taking it to Google, adding a tone of features to the codebase and using it in internal projects before open sourcing it.
Are pretty unique circumstances, that don't really show that it's an easy thing to do usefully/succesfully, for projects that aren't taken into Google, have a ton of features added by paid Google engineers, and then are used by internal projects at google to work out further kinks and cow paths.
It's a shame yours didn't work out - I think I was lucky I had something that could be crowdfunded more easily.
Having said that, none of the people that berated me for being Open Source have contributed anything back (others have been very helpful though). I've also had to cope with cheap clones, the possibility of competitors using my own software, and a huge support burden from users of other hardware.
This is a rough business and I'm not sure if I would want to open source the library either. For one thing, we have better replacements now like ZeroMQ and Firebase. Also the idea of giving up on all that work (that I someday may be able to still use) leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
In my book at least, you've already contributed a huge amount to open source and I wouldn't worry about needing to do more :)
It didn't work out because it seems everyone asking wanted it for free. That's their problem. You did everything right.
Honestly, there shouldn't be any rush to do anything. You released some good tools, and that's fine.
It took a while, but I'm happy to say I joined as a researcher at Oracle Labs working on their JRuby/Truffle implementation. I started this week and while it's early days yet, I feel relieved in a way I haven't in years.
Indeed, I think this is the biggest failure I see of startups, regardless of the quality. The seeming inability to reach out for help, guidance, and provide feedback and communicate with others outside their company... especially (and surprisingly) their investors and mentors.
Startups - communicate often and early with others.
So I want to say, congratulations on your new job. It sounds incredibly interesting. I hope you enjoy it, meet new people and learn new things.
So far, the new gig has been great. I was extremely reticent to join such a massive company, but it's the sort of work virtually no start-up would ever be able to justify spending resources on. The change of pace and the new experience should be worthwhile. And rather than working in a silo, I'm surrounded by some of the top people in their respective fields. It's ... different :-)
If you develop a piece of software in the open, preferably with a community around it, then you won't be able to get away with it being impossible to deploy or containing inappropriately-licensed subcomponents. If you don't, you'll likely run into all of the problems the author mentions, and more, when you go to 'Open Source' it. Not only that, but there'll be nobody to maintain the resulting project, and it's likely that nobody will actually benefit.
Open Source is great (FWIW I work exclusively on Open Source at the moment), but it isn't like a condiment you can spread on after the fact. It needs to be baked in to your strategy.
One of his minor arguments against open sourcing was having to maintain the code base, and i've heard this from others too. With a dumping ground there would be no such obligation.
I have a few projects on Github that aren't under my name because I don't want to be pestered about them, ever. And I never have.
Setting all that aside, open sourcing the codebase is not some trivial process.
And I'm not talking wanting to clean up stuff I might be embarrassed by. Here's
a non-comprehensive list of issues that need to be addressed:
- The web site design was a theme bought on WrapBootstrap that I don't have the
rights to sublicense.
- The rich UI widgets come from the commercial version of ExtJS. That needs to be
excised or the whole project needs to be GPLv3.The null device.
Is it possible that the "bombardment of questions" you claim was nothing more than a handful, maybe in the half-dozen or so range, of people who wanted to offer you emotional support because that is free for them to do while paying you for a product they did not want is not?
We don't all get immediate success. What matters is perseverance and determination - never giving up. Not making excuses for why the world failed you. You'll never get anywhere that way.
I wish I could comment the way I would respond, but I am at work now...Good luck to you.
At the end of the day, I didn't want to waste away on a slow-but-steady company. I wanted to lighten my load so I didn't need another hand surgery. I wanted to spend more time with 1.5 year old child. And I wanted to work with smart people learning new stuff.
But, by all means, take a single sentence intentionally devoid of context and continue to extrapolate.
the experience of having founded and run a company for 5 years is a skill that will be valuable. put it on your resume and sell it as experience few others have, because that's true.
I don't want to go into a rant or anything but really your comment is wrong at so many level
dumpster ? as if open source could only result from some failed attempt
Would be interesting to see how many Github projects have regular monthly updates after 12 months, 24 months, etc.