I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?
I understand that money is at the root of the question. I don't see any problem with my strategy for making money, which is to win over all their users with a wildly better product.
Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their userbase until they could start to land corporate contracts.
Yeah I know that they didn't. Even though they didn't invent it and don't own it, it's still the cornerstone of the wall that has become the Github empire.
The specific problem is that all the competitors to Github have to use git, and that limits how different they can really be than Github and thus how aggressively they can compete to win users
Problem for whom? Users who are happy using git? Or conartist86 who is thinking about how to get money?
> the competitors to Github have to use git
Why? Syncing between various VCSes has been a thing since forever. If you can't handle a compatibility layer to support git+new-better-thing, you don't have the technical chops to build new-better-thing in the first place.
I do want forwards compatibility, I don't want backwards compatibility.
The way I think about it, if I make a backwards compatible product I might end up with users who never really wanted any change at all, and those people would be almost impossible to make happy. Those are the "faster horse" users. What I need is to find the people whose life would be changed by a car!
Why would users who never wanted change proactively switch to your product in the first place? And putting them aside, you haven't listed a single concrete technical idea that would indicate you have the vision for a car. Maybe you should spend more time on that than drumming up your grift-adjacent persecution complex.
They wouldn't. Every adoption curve needs early adopters, who will be people not satisfied with the current state of things. But obviously most people aren't early adopters.
If you would like me to list a single concrete technical idea, I am pleased to oblige. The idea is: universal gaps. Our syntactic-semantic documents can have holes in them, places where we know some content is missing. That allows a document to behave like a template which lets us fill in the blanks. In a text-editor-based IDE there is no equivalent, which means that when I go to make a new sticky regex in Javascript I type //y and the IDE thinks I meant to comment out the rest of the line. It has no way of expressing the concept that between those two slashes something is known to be missing, which is exactly what I want to be able to tell it so that it can understand the difference between the state when I'm about to write a regex body and the state where I'm about to write a comment body
That idea has nothing to do with source control that would replace git. It also already exists in the form of TODO tags and is handled exactly as you describe in JetBrains IDEs[0] (plus helpful semantic highlighting), and probably others as well.
I'm talking about a universal placeholder, something that you're free to use anywhere, in any language, for any part of a syntax tree that is missing.
A TODO comment can't do that because the syntax conflicts. For a regex the conflict would look like `//* TODO *//`, and for a comment it would look like `// /* TODO */`. Both have an existing meaning, and in neither case is that the meaning I want.
If I could have a magic "stuff goes here" character this would be solved. I often use · to represent the idea of this magic character. That gives you /·/ and //· at least, but of course it isn't safe to assume that no language will ever assign meaning to the · character so we can't literally use it as the universal gap. To get something universal, you need to move from using a sentinel token to using embedded/encoded data.
Maybe, but the way they captured the market was by offering a differentiated product. We already had cabs and buses, yes, but Uber wasn't just summoning cabs and selling bus tickets, where they? The core experience was still A to B but Uber discovered that there was a lot more consumer innovation possible within the confines of the A to B problem...
Yes, exactly? And closer competitors to Uber came later and are I assume successful. Just like there is Gitlab, Bitbucket, sourcehut, and several others all 'within the confines of the hosted git problem'.
There were players for hosted SVN too before git and Github came along. Github got big in part because they weren't in the same crowded market. That others eventually emerged to play in the market with them did little to hurt the return on their initial investment...
That is an empirical question answered by the market. The way you get your answer is to build it, get it in front of people, and see if they use it. Then you will know.
Note that if you want to be the answer, then you have to prioritize other things than the technology. You can have the best product, but if nobody knows about it you're stuck.
Sadly you can't, and this is a huge flaw in the venture capital model. They invest in people that they think other vcs will invest in. More often than not who your parents are matters more than anything (unless you've had a huge exit like the OP). They'll also throw money at you if you come from a rich family, not because they think you'll succeed, but because they want your family's money as LPs in their funds.
Well regardless of whether it's hard or impossible, I'm doing this. I'm going.
The problem they have is that they're betting git is a solid foundation to build on. A tectonic change like git actually being replaced wouldn't just eliminate their moat, it would leave them trapped on the wrong side of it.
It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense if you know that my name is Conrad.
It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.
> I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now.
Look, I'm not wanting to be rude here, and this is obviously all hypothetical since you're likely not actively pitching to investors, but if you were, being stubborn in this way would be a deal breaker for me as an investor.
I see all the reasons you have for keeping it, and they're reasonable, but the mere idea that that's a hill you're willing to die on is a red flag. I'd see this as one of many potential points of friction. Where else will you choose to not make compromises?
Maybe it's not rational on my part, but you're trying to convince irrational entities to part with their money.
You could look at it this way: if someone offered $17M to change it, would you?
I kind of am actively pitching to investors at this point.
I wouldn't say the username is a hill to die on. I can't hide that this is the online identity I used while working on this project. Trying to hide it would just feel sketchier, no?
And yeah, for 17 mil I'm willing to talk about most anything, but I still see a conversation with investors like going on a date. The red flags can go both ways...
I don't blame you for not wanting to change your name.
But fundraising is a game to be played, and part of playing the game is building credibility with VCs. It may be that a quirky name helps with that, but probably not.
From the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, where the old veteran is explaining to the newbie how to be successful:
"Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob."
If you already have a track record, then you can have a quirky name or personality. Until then, you've got to play the game.
I agree completely. However, this mentality is why honest people like you get pushed to the sidelines, and manufactured, perfect imaged, 1000+ referenced in LinkedIn types are more successful in getting VC funding. If this is seriously your goal, you are going to have to play the game. Remember, even when perfectly playing the game in your position you will likely fail. If this is what you want to do, do you want to be taken out of the running for something like a username?
I'm mystified by this argument, that the best way for me to play the game is how others are playing it. Investors don't all make the same bet, nor do they want to, so I'm going to do what only I can do.
Sure some people will rule me out for superficial reasons, but I also get some benefit in screening out people who want to kick the tires but aren't interested in building a real relationship, just like companies do when they screen job candidates.
Reach out to investors that you or your friends/family have an existing relationship with. If that's not an option your odds of being funded are slim. Consider going to Stanford or networking with them another way; the latter being much easier if you're already wealthy.
This might sound like a joke or overly cynical but I'm being totally serious. Merit and product quality are only very loosely correlated with funding success at this stage.
The vast majority of projects don't get VC funded and of the small number that do most have some sort of relationship or other in into the funding world.
This doesn't mean you can't get funded, but it's a huge longshot. If you already have an income and some savings consider bootstrapping the project yourself, at least until you have some traction in the market.
I appreciate the advice, but I'm a couple steps ahead of you. I spent 10 years mastering my trade (UI) working in San Francisco and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and that's when I saved enough money to allow myself to work on this for the last 5 years.
And fortunately I don't need anyone's permission. It's just too late to stop the wave of change that's coming now. After 5 decades, the punchcard is finally going to be retired as the primitive at the heart of all programming.
It's not that other people are famous. They have a track record in this exact field, where he produced results and made money for investors. His results help to shape how software development gets performed.
They are using fame and past success as a proxy. You would need to do it on the basis of your ideas and the work that you have done. Someone really knowledgable would need to dig deep on your work and then the VCs will need to trust these person(s). The other alternative might be to try to get traction with users like Linus did with git and hope that they like it enough that it becomes popular. But Linus had the advantage of being famous and highly respected already,
No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering.
Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?
I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).
It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git, and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants on:
- Will their version control solution fall apart if there are not enough line breaks in the code?
- Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict? Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.
- Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-grained level (per-second resolution)
- Will their solution's performance break down if there is too much code in one file?
- How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?
This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's serious about replacing git; it just seems like they haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.
The reality is that none of that shit matters if you can build a product that people use and want to pay for. I would back someone who has made a dollar off of a product over someone who has built a great product that no one uses 100% of the time.
The reality is that you can make a successful business with okay engineering and great product insight. It's much more difficult to build a successful business with great engineering and poor product insight. Getting people to use and pay for what you've built gives you the product insight that you need.
Yeah but that's the advice for 99% of people. The craziest things: things on the scale of digging through 50 years of compounding tech debt, they take time. Have you by any chance seen this talk? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
If yes, and you’ve solved them, people should be very interested in using what you’ve built. If people are using what you’ve built and are willing to pay for it, VCs will be interested.
If you haven’t solved them, but can validate they are real problems people care about, and have a path towards solving them, this should make a compelling VC pitch.
If they are real engineering problems but no one seems to care much about them, then it’s just a hobby.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?