Actually where did they spend those 31m??
Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
101–110 of 154 posts
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#102Honest question: Is it normal for SV companies to be taking "beer breaks" during the work day?
I found that a bit strange.
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#103I predicted this:
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#104I 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
I've always disliked Techcrunch but I'm starting to realize how valuable their "Cribs" series is. They have the very best documentation of a dying culture of spoiled founders aimlessly running startups like a daycare for adults. I wonder how much longer people are going to be pulling this off for. Investors need to wise up and start giving their money to people who are mature enough to be modest and efficient with their company's resources before they've proven themselves as a business.
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#105Famous 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.
UI development is so specialized now that I bet you could sell enough snake oil to lots of investors who would have a hard time verifying if your idea has profit potential or not.
I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into paying employees. It's one thing to sell snake oil, it's another not to even try to build a working snake oil prototype on your own time without taking someone else's money and burning it.
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#106For a company that's building UIs their website in Firefox is unreadable due to the horrible font:
http://imgur.com/8ANC4bH
I don't hate thin fonts - for example in bigger sizes it looks good - but the thin an small combination is a bad choice. In Chrome it's a little bit better but I still won't read it.
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#107Famous 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…
1) They did not burn 30M (as stated in the article, most of it is still there).
2) You are conflating difficult to monetize with inherently impossible to monetize. They are not the same thing. Just because it's challenging and failure-prone, doesn't mean it's impossible.
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#108I 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
I've always disliked Techcrunch but I'm starting to realize how valuable their "Cribs" series is. They have the very best documentation of a dying culture of spoiled founders aimlessly running startups like a daycare for adults. I wonder how much longer people are going to be pulling this off for. Investors need to wise up and start giving their money to people who are mature enough to be modest and efficient with th…
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Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really sure why investors shouldn't be expected to be able to do due diligence on the startups they invest in.
UI development is so specialized now that I bet you could sell enough snake oil to lots of investors who would have a hard time verifying if your idea has profit potential or not. I also think it's deplorable that Steve Newcomb went straight to investors for this without putting any of his own money into paying employees. It's one thing to sell snake oil, it's another not to even try to build a working snake oil prot…
Do you have inside information we don't know about? You know for sure he didn't put his own money into the venture?
Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees
#110I 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…
The incentive for developers is that you don't write the same code twice.
Of course this applies to developers whose goal is to create software, as opposed to those whose goal is to bill hourly.