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Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

techcrunch.com

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Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#31

Post by Impossible »

wmil wrote: post #10
duiker101 wrote: post #2

I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much money. I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that. I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things tha…

3D GUIs are a lot like graphical programming. Just a giant black hole that has been sucking up research and investment money for 30 years without much to show. You do get some neat demos, but not a lot else.

The game industry has been using 3D GUIs and graphical programming successfully for years. Graphical programming is also popular in some other fields (MaxMSP for audio visual, labview).

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#32

Post by aaronbrethorst »

At least the employees who got canned weren't being paid as poorly as Gumroad's employees: https://web.archive.org/web/20141224195227/https://angel.co/...

Of course, Famo.us' employees seemed to get a lot less equity, but let's be honest: I'd rather make $175,000/year and get 0.05% of nothing than $75,000/year and 1% of nothing[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517008

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#35

Post by trjordan »

adevine wrote: post #30
duiker101 wrote: post #2

I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much money. I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that. I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things tha…

I think that essentially their pitch was that they would become the development platform for building apps. If they had considerably grown the number of apps on their platform, and gotten lots of positive developer buzz, they would have easily gotten more funding, even if they weren't making any money yet. The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed. On…

> Perhaps more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross-platform technology either.

Ah, the problem with generalizations about large companies. http://flutter.io/, by Google.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#36

Post by aikah »

Uroboric wrote: post #21

I briefly contracted there and it was obvious to me that this would happen. The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.

My biggest issue with it is that they made a great demo yet they didn't really have a useful framework. They kept things hush hush for too long , with a lot of teasing and by the time they released something, people moved on.

Compare to what ionic did, and i'm not a big fan of it, but the ionic team demonstrated the usefulness of their framework quite fast with concrete apps.

As for making money obviously, you make money with consulting, cloud services,tools for professionals and co, but you need a community at first place. Famo.us never had a one.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#37

Post by JonnieCache »

Impossible wrote: post #31
wmil wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D GUIs are a lot like graphical programming. Just a giant black hole that has been sucking up research and investment money for 30 years without much to show. You do get some neat demos, but not a lot else.

The game industry has been using 3D GUIs and graphical programming successfully for years. Graphical programming is also popular in some other fields (MaxMSP for audio visual, labview).

Add TouchDesigner to that list, which is basically MaxMSP for demoscene-style visual effects. It gets used for fancy things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zMI-qbmIPk

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#38

Post by dmvaldman »

Hey all. I was the second engineer at famo.us and was later chief architect. I have many stories, but I won't go into any of them :-)

If you were interested in the library and are sad that this pivot means it won't be supported, I want to mention there is ongoing work in the OSS community outside the company supporting the pre-pivot vision.

I've personally been working on a fork called samsaraJS (http://samsaraJS.org), and there is another community effort at infamous.io.

These are both early stage labors of love, and always looking for contributors!

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