HippyVM goes to Y Combinator and fails

Don't assume "there is no money in X", but rather assume "there are no VCs that wish to invest". (Further, this is what ONE guy tells you, it's not unusual to have to talk to two dozen -- though I'm not sure you should). You might still be able to sell a PHP optimizer if you can figure out how to make parts of it proprietary and keep your company very small and tight. Picking up a VC will change the way they expect you to grow in ways you might not wish to grow, as they want very very large exits for large companies. You may still have a sustainable business or a side project that you can love and make money on. However, be sure if you do or you don't, if you are giving up gainful employment.

Realize the VCs motives are about extremely rapid growth, however, and that's not really required.

I believe there was an article on here recently about a Ruby task manager that had a proprietary plugin selling for $400 or so, and (I could be wrong) I believe that was enough to operate as a business for the guy running it. You probably have something you can charge more than for, if you can get away from the pure OSS route.

Support may not work as a business model. It might, but it would be harder to sell.

What you need first, though, is lots of users using your free edition, because otherwise you're going to have to spend a bit too much time in sales to people who might not really wish to change things over.

I made phc (http://phpcompiler.org), which is conceptually similar to HippyVM, before applying to YC. And I got into YC, and now run a post-Series A startup, so I probably have a tiny bit of insight.

Trying to sell a PHP compiler is a very bad business plan. In fact, trying to sell any compiler is a very bad business plan, because you're basically competing with free. You have to compete against OSS with massive communities (like gcc) or against deep pockets (like Visual Studio) or against reference implementations (like the OSS PHP engine).

Imagine trying to sell a PHP compiler. You can try to get wide community adoption and sell bottom-up. Good luck with that, the PHP community is not that interested in tools. So you can try to sell top-down to enterprises with slow PHP problems. Very few companies have slow PHP problems, and those that do could just use HHVM.

For 30 years, commercial lisp engines, C++ compilers, Java VMs, and tons of similar things have all been commercially unsuccessful (though not all failed outright). A PHP engine will have to compete with with Facebook's HHVM (OSS + deep pockets), against the Zend engine (community adoption + reference implementation) and against Zend corp (a known and established quantity in the space).

I spent a bit of time in compiler research and met with tons of compiler companies at events. One of them said that they couldn't think of any compiler company that didnt make its money off consulting, and that worse, about 85% of them made their money off a single client.

Quick, name a successful compiler company! There aren't too many and they weren't that famous. There is Coverity in the closely related static analysis space, that sold for $375m. There is Cilk that sold to intel for $100m. Dredging my memory there's companies like Anamorphic which was acquihired by Sun in 97 to work on Java.

You're almost better off being a HHVM consultancy than building a competing compiler and ending up having to innovate on the product as well as providing consulting.

I'd consider taking your existing consulting stuff and adding a hosting/service component. "We'll run your PHP backed sites better and cheaper than you can." Pick up a few customers (hopefully from your existing customer list) and get some revenue coming in (this would be annoying and a lot of work though). Grow things a bit and use the revenue to fund the development of the optimizer. At first it would be a bit of smoke and mirrors and a lot of work, but the knowledge gained from production operations would be invaluable to building a great optimized PHP runtime.

Struggle like this for a while until things are really working well, then sell hosted, fast and reliable PHP IaaS at a way cheaper pricepoint because you're more efficient.

Now you've got money coming in, a great piece of infrastructure built on real production experience, and a healthy customer list. Sell the company (or just enjoy the profits), keep the proceeds for yourselves (without sharing with some VC). Win!

Its an interesting story but not at all surprising. I wouldn't think that VC funding is a good model for core infrastructure programs, and author correctly identifies the two common routes at this point: control by large organizations or open source.

Hopefully most organizations have realized at this point that it is not a good idea to build your infrastructure around the big players. Just try to fire IBM and move off of WebSphere and see how easy that is.

That leaves open source and the author brings up a good point about the inequity of how much value they bring vs. how their contributors get paid. I wonder how many companies give back to infrastructure projects (money I mean, not code contributions, which are of course also important). Things like Google Summer of Code are great and beneficial, but what about giving actual cash to these ladies and gentlemen? Seems like someone might even be able to create a startup around that concept :)

The money quote imho is this:

> there is no money in infrastructure like programming languages. Very few people are willing to invest in such companies and the contenders these days are all Open Source without a decent funding model or backed by a large corpo (Oracle, Google, Microsoft) or both. [...] we're missing a business model where infrastructure people can get attention from VCs and a revenue model that somehow corresponds to the value they're bringing.

A very wise developer I know, John Baldwin, (hey if you're reading this) once told me an important lesson: People don't pay for technology, they pay for a solution to a problem.

PyPy can't use introspection, like the standard logging framework (http://pypy.org/performance.html,) without severe performance penalties. Fix that and you've got a solution to a problem.

HippyVM is a PHP interpreter build on the RPython toolchain (the basis of PyPy)

previous discussions of HippyVM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7860492 (a year ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241921 (about first announcement, 3 years ago)

PHP optimization can be direct sold to hosting companies. They want it - they want their shared cloud hosting to use less resources, they want it to be faster. Because faster PHP means more clients on less servers, which means more money.

It is tough to find a business case for a technologic innovation. It is easier to start with a business case and then derive the technology necessary for that.

Steve Jobs: https://youtu.be/GnO7D5UaDig?t=50m22s

That said, there are companies like TypeSafe and Cognitect that found a way to sell solutions and services (often in a consultancy/agency/training model) and through that business model they can invest in fundamental longer-term building blocks (like languages, runtimes, libraries, databases).

It's not easy but might be a possible angle to deliver tangible value now & still drive long-term vision and innovation.

A bit off topic, but I wanted to comment on U.S. visa part (when the author realizes that valid visa was in the passport he did not have with him) in hopes that it may be useful for someone. I was in a similar situation, except that was an overland crossing from Canada. I had new non-Canadian passport with me and driving up to the border I realized that my expired passport with valid US visa was left at home, 4 hours of driving away. That was especially embarrassing as I had friends in my car. Turns out that after me contributing around 500$ to Uncle Sam coffins they can pull visa information and previous entry records and admit me into the country after getting authorization from higher ranking officer. Usual disclaimer: it may or may not work for you, especially for air travel, and that was back in 2007.

I think the problem here is that they went to YC with a technology, not a business.

(Not that I'm detracting from the great work these guys have done)

The question you should be answering is: What can we do that HHVM can't do?

Support? Sell a turn key solution? Partner with hosting companies?

You (count on) having a thing that runs PHP faster, and you're not going to have a product/service only with that.

YC has publicly stated that long-term big visions are exactly what they are looking for. The problem isn't that you need time, it's that the result of waiting won't be big enough to justify it.

author here. we do sell commercial support for pypy and python performance problems at baroquesoftware.com. let's say it has not been a spectacular success so far and it's not enough to fund someone to do more boring infrastructure stuff for pypy like buildbot maintenance. one commercial thing we're working on is vmprof, which is a multi vm profiler and we plan on selling it as a service to your existing infrastructure. Feel free to ask me anything

Does HippyVM actually work or do anything? Their website is so barren.

I wonder if it really offers any advantages these days. HHVM is really fast, PHP 7 is really fast, and PHP now has Zend (ew) OPcache and its optimiser built-in.

HippyVM is quite weird, too: it's made by Python developers who don't seem to have ever contacted anyone from PHP.

As many people have pointed out, many VCs want a fast ramp up. Also be aware that taking money from VCs will introduce a new level of complexity to your operations. Some VCs will even try to essentially make decisions for you and the future of your business.

VC money always comes with "strings attached".

While I'm not against taking money from VCs, seriously consider if it will benefit your company's growth and business models by taking money from them. There are ways to bootstrap and grow a business without external funding like VCs. This is something a lot of people seem to have forgotten in this current startup 2.0 mindset.

To the founders of HippyVM don't let Y Combinator's rejection stop you!

I agree that it's hard to make money off infrastructure, but at some point maybe it makes sense for YC to start just donating money to the open source projects its startups are using or could otherwise benefit from. E.g. if PyPy got a hundred bucks for each YC startup using Python, I'd have to imagine they'd be able to make enough improvements to make it a no brainer to use, which would produce enormous savings across the portfolio in terms of EC2 bills and electricity usage.

One way or another there needs to be a mechanism for solving the free ridership problem, and it seems like doing this at the investor level is as good a place as any.

Did you consider looking into any crowdfunding options? Perhaps with Kickstarer or Indiegogo? That's been used by some to both generate seed capital, help get products to market, and test/validate the model.

Maybe this sort of effort could be supported by some kind of hybrid MOOC/crowd sourcing framework. A big part is perhaps a cultural shift. In the US, tipping servers is voluntary, and yet most people are fairly consistent about tipping mostly due to cultural norms (plus having a tip line on the bill/receipt).

There's a potential cultural shift from "I like this" to "I value this" which could make many activities economically viable which are now pet projects or personal passions. You should be able to tweet cyber currency or something.

I feel bad for you. But I think you have a few choices:

a) Forget about doing difficult things and focus on something easy like dating, swipe left/swipe right app. It is not that Europe does the hard things like compilers, it is that America does the easy things like dating or cat apps or farting and stuff. However, there is hope. Look at what Slack is doing with yet another messaging app. Is there another app that is simply "a bad solution" which you can come up with a better, easier, more delightful alternative?

2) If you already did the hard stuff, what about packaging it with other elements of the stack and providing a fully optimized stack? Then you can offer it as a solution to enterprises. It is hard though. Enterprise sales.

3) Don't open source. Get paid for what you do.

4) Open Source but charge for the services around it. Consulting services. But you are already doing something along these lines.

I am sure there are others.

To me, meaningful monetization of something like a compiler requires identifying big dumb companies for whom it would provide a significant competitive advantage, and tackling enterprise sales.

The misfit with YC/VC is that such a company is more consultancy than startup. The potential paying customers are snowflakes if not unicorns.

Here is an IDEA ! Add optional static types support in RPython to provide further compiletime optimizations (along with any type support). This adds static types to Ruby[1] , PHP [2], Python [3] or any dynamic X. I am sure people would pay for enterprise support for this compiler toolchain.

[1] http://docs.topazruby.com/en/latest/ [2] https://github.com/hippyvm/hippyvm [3] http://pypy.org/

This makes me wonder- Why did Dropbox guys started building Pyston [1] ? Why not get behind pypy team and support them ?

[1] https://github.com/dropbox/pyston

The most useful thing I can think of for HippyVM is some sort of *aas play. Maybe they offer a service like google app engine or heroku who's default vm is faster (and therefore cheaper to run).

If something like New Relic didn't work on your vm you could offer a competing service that utilized jit-specific tracepoints. People who care enough to want a faster vm and have money will probably want great performance insight, and vm developers are uniquely positioned to offer that insight.

The http://hippyvm.com/ site looks really nice and it is impressive they managed 2x Facebook's offering's speed. Too bad it also says it is too incomplete to work for web servers yet. Not sure I would want to compete with Facebook's huge team and resources either, if I was company or an investor.

I wanted to punch my screen while reading this. Every anecdote, including the airport blurbs, screamed "stay away from this crew".

No, most businesses/investors looking for a return cannot wait forever. So you have 2 options: a) find the few who will or b) figure out an interim step that has value and can show results in a shorter time frame.

Misleading title. They never "went" to YC as we normally understand it, they "applied" to YC.

I wonder how the YCombinator process would have gone had they entered as a non-profit??

South Africa represent! Be cool to meet up if you're in Cape Town some time :)

What about selling your own php app accelerator service. Heroku like.