donnaoana

correction, maybe it's still alive? a friend shared https://x.com/lukexi don't know for a fact but i very much admire Bret and the entire team and I want them alive and working and I am happy to contribute any way I can

correct, here about my firm - 2nd quarter of being alive and it's just me https://motiveforce.ai/

The product is open source, I liked it in the article, you can set it up yourself or get help from Omar, no glasses needed. They also have a small portable hardware device, the one I was holding in my hand, happy to help lmk oana@motiveforce.ai

I agree. I occasionally use the fishing app

Yes sadly it’s no longer a thing, Bret is not a fan of LLMs. I’m trying to find a “director” to his “creative” someone who can help raise money and energize him. I don’t even know Bret personally but I want to see what comes next. Share if you know people oana@motiveforce.ai

Glad to hear I was able to spark some emotion. I’d love to chat oana@motiveforce.ai

it's not written by AI

I am curious, how would you use AI then, if not to make one more productive? The text is not AI generated, I came up with the questions, moderated the discussion, wrote a draft that the speakers red, added comments and the AI polished it, the AI was a custom GPT that I trained on my previous text from that substack. I am curious what would you have done differently or if you would refuse to use AI at all? I wrote the article, so I am genuinly curious. I didn't know someone posted on Hacker News, I knew people like to be negative here because there is no accountablity, I want to learn from all this hate. I am personally happy with the outcome, I gover over 30 notes from people who are building that this was useful to them, and the speakers were happy. So I am curious what could have I done differently from your perspective or what should be my learning from all these people who take time from their day to hate on this piece of writing instead of deciding not to read and moving on.

thanks for the hate, they did love it indeed, the questions I've asked them, the draft I wrote for them to read, and published only after they read and added comments. I am curious, do you not use AI? isn't the point to polish things and make it more efficient? I am curious if there was anything useful to you in the article or if you have constructive criticism? I was sad to read some of the hate, but overall, I am very happy with the many notes form founders and builders who found it useful.

glad it resonates, that was the intention

thanks, I used AI but aren't we all? I thought the point of AI is to get us to be more productive. But that's only after I came up with the questions for the speakers and I wrote a draft of the blog, and the penelists read it, added comments and I published. It seems I get a lot of hate here for it, but I am happy with the number of engineers and founders sharing feedback that this was useful to them. I'm not forcing anyone to read my content, but if people want to put the time to hate on it, it's their choice.

Lovable should allow max flexibility to its users, allow them to monetize

Lovable should be in the money flow, allow their users to monetize

Thinking the learnings of "operators" will translate 1:1 to your company is the source of all mistakes. Reflect on when you listened to your VC/experts and were so off; why? It's likely because you were listening to "experts" instead of being curious and introspective. The best thing you can do is speak with customers and listen to your intuition. They do not have the intuition of your customers.

if you don't know what brings you joy anymore, or you work on AI and you struggle to be productive as tech changes rapidly and you feel like you're fighting with never ending changes and you have to sprint just to stay in place, you might want to know about hacks that a top ML engineer uses to stay happy and productive amidst all of it - learnings and full recording

"open source my ass" :)) I don't want to argue with the ass/the gut, but perhaps I can offer an explanation as to why it might feel this way.

When open source started in the mid-70s, the ethos was: give software away for free. Money came in the form of university or corporate research grants, there was no business model. Only in 1998, the money came into picture once RedHat, MySQL, and many others started doing paid support and services on top of free software. And starting mid 2000s it became common to think about making money with open source, and that's because of cloud computing. In SaaS, the user does not know or care if there is open source or proprietary software under the hood, so it leveled up OSS, put it in the same game as the rest.

Why VCs like open source? (I'm a former ML engineer turned in-vest-er), well some of it is nostalgia in my case, I used awesome OSS software while in university like spaCy and i share the same values of community, transprency, giving back etc, and some of it is related to what the job of a VC is - makin' money.

In closed source companies, one invests a lot into sales and marketing. Developers generally don't like to be sold, they can't be sold they have to choose you/your product. So if a company manages to win the hearts and minds of developers, they will pull your software in to be evaluated by procurement for purchasing without spending millions in sales and marketing, it's more efficient as a business model. It's also a lot more defensible. Big corp can pur money into suits to sell their products, but you can't buy developer love, for that you need amazing DX and good dev rel. But making money in OSS is a lot harder than in SaaS. in SaaS people talk about product-market fit (find 5+ customers who use the same way, buy the same way, get the same thing out of the product - predictability so the VC gives money and scales sales). In OSS you've got the problem 3x: you gotta get to project-community fit (you measure GitHub Stars), then product-market fit (you measure downloads) and then value-market fit (you measure revenue, and the buyer might not be the same as the developer/user). Most amazing OSS products fail at the value market-fit section.

Most founders of OSS companies fail to extract value. Some of it is because it's so hard or because people feel like OSS should be "free software" that they postpone monetization. And then when they start to monetize it's too late. would you buy a cow if you've been getting the milk for free for years? The other reason they fail is they don't know how to do it. The typical 3 ways to make money with OSS are: support (you sell support and services -e.g. RedHat), open core (you sell propritary functionality - e.g. confluent, elastic) and SaaS (you sell hosting, tooling - e.g. databricks).

One simple way to think about it, based on the successful OSS companies I've see in, the free version of the product should have everything, all the bells and whistles that a single developer needs to get the job done. and the paid product has the extra features that are needed to get the job done as a team.

I love open source software and it pains me to see super smart founders and so many contributor put so much of their passion into building it but failing to scale it, commercial helps there, and failing to get rewarded for the hard work. But it's darn hard, it's like going against your nature, if you contribute to OSS and build OSS you care about community and want to give it for free. So making money with it, just thinking about it, makes you uncomfortable. And when people are uncomfrtable, they go do what they know, where their comfort is, and that is coding for most engineers. And that's how you end up with awsome OSS software with lots of cool features and a founder who postpones monetization so much for so long than at some point it passes the point of no return and that's how another promissing company dies, nobody wants to invest if they can't get their money back even if the product is really really cool.

Just because you work with someone does not mean you can start a company with them. This is a set of questions for founders to ask of each other.

I hope someone learns from my failed founder experience.

if the founder's priority is to “hire good people”, how come there is a monoculture in tech? and what can we do about it? https://www.ready2.build/about - free, no sponsors - made to support women in tech

what if you worked on a product that excites you? I created a simple website that helps product and engineering ladies find jobs in startups https://www.shesready2.dev/ there is also a slack community. This is a personal project that I do in my free time, does not have any corporate sponsors. DM and happy to share the list of 36 jobs, from entry level all the way up to head of product and head of engineering to startups of all sizes. I'm currently in VC, former ML eng and that's how I curate the jobs. Totally a passion project and free.

Founders can post a job for the community of 400 ladies to see or can get access to the airtable with the candidates who consented to be on the shared list.