Board

To me, a big source of accidental complexity in today’s software are implicit dependencies.

Solve your own problems. Rahul Vohra is himself highly representative of his targeted buyers — if you’re solving your own problem in a way that you’d be paying for it and there are enough “you” in the world, you might be onto something.

In the future, 80% of venture-funded software companies will be open core.

Open core is the medium between open source and closed-source proprietary software. It typically has more resources than open source software thanks to monetization strategies and it is more transparent than proprietary, closed-source alternatives. Security, longevity, modifiability, and R&D velocity are the main reasons the trend toward open core continues to rise.

With the open core model, there are four types of contributors: community, customer, user (non-paying), and even competitors. Anyone in the world can work on the code. The company can seed issues for the community to work on, and contributors can submit ideas. It’s the network effect at its best.

Like the original, tldraw is both an app and a library, designed for integration and extension. The new project goes further, introducing a custom engine for real-time collaboration.

From the beginning, tldraw was more than an app: it’s distributed as a React component that can be embedded in other apps; and, being open source, it’s been free to fork and modify to create new experiences. Developers have used tldraw to build some truly amazing things.

A surprise to me was that, with a few notable exceptions (such as the fantastic okso.app and Jordan Singer’s Macpaint app), most of these new projects were less about drawing or white-boarding and more about putting interactive widgets into a Figma-like interface.

Affine used tldraw to create their “edgeless” view of their Notion-style blocks. Legend Keeper and WorldAnvil both use tldraw to include characters and places from users’ story-worlds onto the canvas. Vidext is using tldraw to create AI-driven videos, BigBlueButton has reimplemented their virtual classroom’s whiteboard with tldraw, and Logseq is building their whiteboards feature on tldraw, too.

The new tldraw is designed to be a primitive for infinite canvas applications, providing the same type of infrastructure utility that ProseMirror provides for rich text editors or Mapbox provides for maps. Like text editors and maps, a canvas is a nightmare of internal complexity, both technical and in user experience design, together with a long list of table-stakes features that need to accompany any product.

It’s our belief that a canvas should be a thing you build with, rather than build yourself.

"Buying products that save developer time is no longer an argument you need to explain. People get it." — Executive, Developer Tools Startup

"In our sales conversation, we frame things in terms of productivity and developer time saved... You're comparing the cost of the product against engineering time saved." — Executive, Developer Tools Startup

"We're seeing lots of self-serve. Developers are getting more autonomy as buyers. Most of our sign-ups are via bottoms-up — people signing themselves up, after which our sales team eventually reaches out to them." — Executive, Developer Tools Startup

"The biggest trend right now is the move to serverless — functions as a service, hiding more complexity from developers. Serverless is a way for developers to just focus on stateless applications, to just focus on what they use most directly." — Executive, Application Infrastructure Startup

Software is not labor-intensive. Not many people are necessary in order to produce good software… What makes or breaks a project, it’s the amount of FOCUS developers can pour into it — RedBeardLab

Senior executives report that the lack of developer talent is one of the biggest potential threats to their businesses — The Developer Coefficient 2018, Stripe

Despite the number of developers increasing year-over-year at most companies, developers working on the right things can accelerate a company’s move into new markets or product areas and help companies differentiate themselves at disproportionate rates. This underscores the most important point about developers as force-multipliers: It’s not just how many devs companies have; it’s also how they’re being leveraged — The Developer Coefficient 2018, Stripe

We can quantify the impact of engineering time spent maintaining old code rather than writing new code. According to one analysis, an engineer engaged in purely non-innovative activity destroys nearly $600K in employer market value. On the other hand, the average engineer, working on a combination of maintenance and innovation activities, adds $855K in market value to their employer.

Now, what is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

A friend of mine once said that there are problems and there are difficulties. A problem is something you savor. You say, "Well that's an interesting problem. Let me think about that problem a while." You enjoy thinking about it, because when you find the solution to the problem, it's enlightening. And then there are difficulties. Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn't tell you a thing. It won't be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficu

I think that that's a breakthrough, because you are always taught to do as much as you can. Always put checks in. Always look for exceptions. Always handle the most general case. Always give the user the best advice. Always print a meaningful error message. Always this. Always that. You have so many things in the background that you're supposed to do, there's no room left to think. I say, forget all that and ask yourself, "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"

Coding up the simplest thing that could possibly work is really about this: If you can't keep five things in your head at one time and make a decision, try keeping three things in your head. Try keeping just one thing in your head, and see if you can make a decision. Then you can think of the next thing. And amazingly, when you write some of this dumb, straight-ahead code, it often turns out that it was all that was required. It works great. When a second programmer comes back later and reads the code she might say, "The people who wrote this are morons. They just wrote a simple linear search here. This thing's ordered, so they could have done a binary search. They could have used a hash table here. Why are they doing a linear search?" Well, because a linear search worked. And when the other programmer looked at the linear search, she understood it in a minute.

First entrants into a market can have a number of advantages if their product has a network effect or other lock-in mechanism.

Alternatively, if your market is undergoing consolidation there are times when being the last independent company standing can be to your benefit.  Acquirers often screw up mergers or destroy products.

Risk is uncertainty about the future. High technical risk means not knowing if a technology will work. High market risk means not knowing if there will be a market for your product. These are the primary risks that the VC industry as a whole contemplates. (There are other risks extrinsic to individual companies, like regulatory risk, but these are less frequent.)

Each type of risk has a different effect on VC returns. Technical risk is horrible for returns, so VCs do not take technical risk. There are a handful of examples of high technical risk companies that had great returns—Genentech,43 for example—but they are few.44 Today, VCs wait until there is a working prototype before they fund, but successful VCs have always waited until the technical risk was mitigated. Apple Computer, for example, did not have technical risk: the technology worked before the company was funded.

Market risk, on the other hand, is directly correlated to VC returns. When Apple was funded no one had any way of knowing how many people would buy a personal computer; the ultimate size of the market was analytically unknowable. DEC, Intel, Google, etc. all went into markets that they helped create. High market risk is associated with the best VC investments of all time. In the late ’70s/early ’80s and again in the mid to late ’90s VCs were comfortable funding companies with mind-boggling market risk, and they got amazing returns in exchange. In the mid to late ’80s they were scared and funded companies with low market risk instead, and returns were horrible.

More recently, the two big trends transforming the enterprise are (i) Nocode/Lowcode/RPA, and the (ii) Collaborative Enterprise[1]. Collaborative enterprise is an updated take on building collaboration and learnings from consumer products into SaaS.

Flight Simulator is a living, breathing thing that has never been possible before."

Microsoft created its own gaming operation more than 20 years ago in part because the company recognized that gaming presented an opportunity to bring together various esoteric technologies in a way that everyday people could understand.

Even now, most normal folks have no real idea what "cloud computing" or "machine learning" or "photogrammetry" mean. As they soar over the Kalahari, Hong Kong, Paris, Mumbai or Brooklyn (as they actually sit at home in quarantine), they won't have to. What they will understand is that Microsoft made it possible. The appeal of flying over Earth is so fundamentally human (I'm looking at you, Icarus) and extends so far beyond the stereotypical "gamer" that Flight also presents a powerful marketing opportunity for Microsoft.