pfg is correct
3,090 karma · joined December 11, 2009
Before: Accel. Dropbox. Accel. Founded Chartio, YC S2010. TechCrunch.
twitter.com/daniel_levine
Also, hi Nik, been awhile!
The single most important part of investing in Sentry for me was the fact that it's Open Source and people love using it. The funding is intended to continue that tradition while also allowing Sentry to more aggressively invest in better mobile support, better support for other languages/environments like C# and SpringBoot, a deeper feature set (Breadcrumbs is a good example http://blog.getsentry.com/2016/05/04/breadcrumbs.html), better support, etc.
Once upon a time I wrote software and I was always annoyed that I couldn't only use Open Source tools so I could audit their code and fork/patch them more easily as needed. Part of the reason for that was that investors have often shied away from products that cater to developers dismissing them as bad business. I think that's bullshit. If everything is going to become software, then the people building software are the most important folks in the world. People like you willing to pay a fair price mean it's quite possible to build a huge business.
It's important for us to continue to build a great, Open Source product and offer a SaaS option that's cheaper than doing it yourself. We plan to continue doing that.
For now, the thing I don't understand is all the people using proprietary crash reporting tools. Our goal is to make Sentry (Open Source or Saas) the strictly dominant solution for crash reporting. If we can accomplish that and offer a fair service, I think we'll have a good enough business for me :)
One challenge is that when things aren't going well companies are much quieter than when companies are going well.
They're also so much further ahead on dimensions like performance, battery life, build quality, camera, apps, etc. Those things are so important, I think they're similar to "being first"
You are right that it does substantially change things for ownership conscientious investors.
There are myriad other issues as well, perhaps the two most interesting are:
1. When I went through YC, it was emphasized that YC had the same equity situation as founders. That's certainly not the case now.
2. Pro rata is often an actively managed situation, I'm curious how YC will handle situations where founders/future investors seek to retroactively adjust pro rata
You can also ping me at levine at dropbox
Perhaps my favorite is a mirrored workspace. An app like Asana could use the Shared Folder API to create a Dropbox shared folder that mirrors an Asana project. As you add or subtract users, those changes affect both. Similarly files added via the Dropbox folder appear in Asana and files added in Asana are instantly put into your Dropbox. A video conference has similar concepts.
But there are tons more and we'd love to hear ideas from other folks!
EDIT: For all you infra folks out there, imagine not being able to dynamically provision resources, no packet loss and worse, the packets can basically do what they want. That includes things like crashing into each other and stopping any other packets from making it through.