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Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

techcrunch.com

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Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#91

Post by vijayr »

samstave wrote: post #57
idlewords wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe their next pivot will be to print-on-demand motivational posters.

Heh, that reminds me of a few years back, when I was at Lockheed I printed several demotivatioal posters and quietly placed them up around the office. I got reprimanded by HR after they found this poster I put up in one of the interview rooms: http://i.imgur.com/dzk0YcA.jpg HR was interviewing someone who was seeking H1-B and noticed this poster hanging on the wall during the interview...

My boss (CTO !!) used to put up this poster with "I rarely test my code. When I do, I do it in production". Good times.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#92

Post by orthoganol »

n7c3c1 wrote: post #54

I will never understand how startups like this get money with such incompetent leadership. Look at how this Famo.us office tour showcases the waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4

Maybe because I'm no longer in my early 20's, something about agreeing to be an employee in that environment, e.g. staying late for "1st and 2nd dinners", for something you didn't found, just feels humiliating.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#93

Post by merb »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #75
bhouston wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also trying to be faster than HTML/CSS is a hard game, the developers of Chrome and Firefox, etc are constantly optimizing.

Just wait until you see what Servo can do. Parallel layout is sick. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for-pa...

Sorry but I try out servo EVERY day and it will take a long time until this will be stable.

It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant. It misses a lot of CSS2.1, CSS3 and JavaScript feature's. Static sites working better and better (and are way way faster than firefox).

However I think that servo is the right step, however I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#94

Post by stevebmark »

Famous never should have been funded. Not because of lack of talent on the team, but because it's an inherently unprofitable idea. The responsibility of knowing that should fall on the team, not the investors. I think it was disingenuous to seek funding for this idea. GitTip or another OSS funding model would have been far more appropriate. A cross platform animation library should not have paid employees, and was an unfortunate choice for investors. (They burned 30 MILLION working on an open source animation library?!). It sounds like a few dozen people were lucky enough to get Bay Area salaries to meander around a broken idea. I don't think an investor would have the technical experience to realize the technology both would not work well, not solve the right problems, and not be marketable. They fired a dozen people? How many more are left?! Anything built by the remaining team should not be done under the Famous brand. It was disingenuous of the founder to pitch it as a fundable, profitable idea and use techno-speak to wow investors for something that many developers in the industry could see right through.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#95

Post by ndesaulniers »

merb wrote: post #93
ndesaulniers wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until you see what Servo can do. Parallel layout is sick. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for-pa...

Sorry but I try out servo EVERY day and it will take a long time until this will be stable. It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant. It misses a lot of CSS2.1, CSS3 and JavaScript feature's. Static sites working better and better (and are way way faster than firefox). However I think that servo is the right step, however I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster.

> I try out servo EVERY day

Cool, thanks for helping out! I hope you're helping them by reporting bugs when you find them.

> it will take a long time until this will be stable

Sure, it's a WIP. That's to be expected. Expecting otherwise is unrealistic.

> It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant

https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/04/17/another-big-mil...

> and JavaScript feature's

Maybe DOM bindings, but Servo ships with bindings to SpiderMonkey, the JS VM used in Gecko, so all of the Language JavaScript should be there.

> I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster

Check out the top story on proggit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rqqvu/mozilla...

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#96

Post by Eridrus »

stevebmark wrote: post #94

Famous never should have been funded. Not because of lack of talent on the team, but because it's an inherently unprofitable idea. The responsibility of knowing that should fall on the team, not the investors. I think it was disingenuous to seek funding for this idea. GitTip or another OSS funding model would have been far more appropriate. A cross platform animation library should not have paid employees, and was an…

Not really sure why investors shouldn't be expected to be able to do due diligence on the startups they invest in.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#97

Post by lubos »

n7c3c1 wrote: post #54

I will never understand how startups like this get money with such incompetent leadership. Look at how this Famo.us office tour showcases the waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4

Office tour video nails it. Beer dispenser? 6-foot printer so staff can print their ideas in high resolution? Having 60 non-employees to live with them for free? And I'm pretty sure this is not even scratching the surface of non-sense that must have been going on there.

Even the TV host said it right in the video "This is crazy!"

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#98

Post by puppetmaster3 »

puppetmaster3 wrote: post #12
ThomPete wrote: post #6

Famo.us to me was always a platform/framework or even a language more than it was a product or service. I have no idea how they could have raised $31M on that. This could have been an amazing framework built by the open source community instead it's now just another growth before revenue scheme that went wrong. Sad.

"I have no idea how they could have raised $31M on that."

Downvotes for a quote?

I predicted they would not do good - easy to verify comment history.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#99

Post by puppetmaster3 »

puppetmaster3 wrote: post #11
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 can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that". +1

I predicted they would not do good - easy to verify comment history.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#100

Post by puppetmaster3 »

puppetmaster3 wrote: post #99
puppetmaster3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that". +1

I predicted they would not do good - easy to verify comment history.

Downvotes for a quote? Good job HN.
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