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AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

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Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#171

Post by ceejayoz »

asdff wrote: post #162
rfgplk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The calculus in “buy or build” has shifted for me over the last six months especially. If I can make an agent build it, I get the version that’s tailored for me. I feel like this is really going to change the software industry moving forwards. Historically it was tedious and time consuming to actually develop tailored dev tools which is why so many organizations relied on third party solutions. When nowadays you ca…

>When nowadays you can easily half bake something in a few hours and get it working, tailored _specifically_ to your needs. The thing is this requires you are given liberty to actually do this yourself. Think of something like say LMS software. Every college in the country is using what either blackboard or canvas. Could they make some bespoke LMS that works great for physics 101 at State university? Absolutely. But…

> Could they make some bespoke LMS that works great for physics 101 at State university?

That's way too narrow, though. It could be done at the department level, the university level, or the state level, right?

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#172

Post by christoff12 »

screamingninja wrote: post #151
gavinray wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born. For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late... Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe…

> For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late... These are not examples of in-born traits. While I agree that not everyone has the motivation to become a CEO, I would disagree that a person cannot learn and adapt.

well, actually - https://introvertdear.com/news/are-you-born-an-introvert-or-...

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#173

Post by christoff12 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #145
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many factors at play here but if I had to pick one... an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product. The AI market moves very quickly so it's easy to take a step in the wrong direction and fall behind. I might publish a long-form reflection when the dust settles.

> an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product. The only way this could be a 'lesson learned' is if you homehow managed to not pay any attention to what has been going on in the last 25 years with open source software companies.

It's possible to personally learn lessons that have been documented or articulated elsewhere.

That's why it's called learning.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#174

Post by zem »

LeonM wrote: post #4

The title makes it sound like they just did a seed round, but the seed round was announced in August of last year [0]. Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments. [0]: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/tensorzero-raises-7-3m-seed-...

thanks, that was really confusing me!

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#175

Post by oliculipolicula »

jdw64 wrote: post #19
dilawar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4483&mobile=1 couldn't resist. PS: Someone won't become a trillionaire with this attitude.

"I was assigned sucker at birth"

Most suckers are made, but some have inborn talent, yeah

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#176

Post by oliculipolicula »

jdw64 wrote: post #81
realsarm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe the same. Many VCs are obsessed with moat that they clearly got wrong. To me the value created at app layers are so much that gives them the flexibility to diversify their infra layers. Good harnessed do not depend on a specific model provider or memory layer or etc that when it is taken down like anthropic fable they get no risk exposure. Many even after growing train their own model like what cursor…

Due to the echo chamber effect, our opinions get reinforced, which can lead to biased conclusions, so it gives me pause. But your comment is so eerily similar to my own thoughts that I'm writing this reply. I agree that most people misunderstand the concept of a 'moat' and become obsessed with that misunderstanding. People tend to think that only technical 'coding skills' which they can easily understand constitute a…

Maybe 'habit-flow' or 'fart-flow'.

Moaty infra lets user take routine or even not-very-routine dumps (emo or brain) without issue..

[One muses that that also helps to manage "risk-exposure-flows"]

Then again VCs have their own habit-moats too, like some have the idea that anything "in the cloud" ---nowadays, "of the cloud"---must be easy to monetize (at the very least easier to sell to others like themselves). Or others, let's call them "edge-bros", that 'hard to understand' naturally translates into 'hard to copy (but hopefully easy to standardize)'.

Maybe what one needs to do is catch a VC as it is jumping from one moat to another

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#177

Post by Eridrus »

jdw64 wrote: post #134
Eridrus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you haven't talked to a VC. A better model for VCs is: companies are finding tons of budget to allocate to new AI spend. Besides the labs, who is going to be able to capture some of that spend while they're actively looking to spend it? Nobody at the seed stage is investing in things they think are "safe". They are investing in things they think have huge upside.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to mock your profession. Here's what I think. Most VCs and investors have their own success formula. There will be VCs who succeeded by investing in infrastructure. But the question is whether that same success formula applies to AI startups right now. Of course, from your perspective, it might look like 'this clueless kid is just being cynical without knowing anything.' I partly agree. But th…

I'm not a VC man, just someone who has raised funding recently. Nobody in the US is talking about the next Databricks atm, for better or worse, they are either trying to get as much allocation in OpenAI/Anthropic, funding random credentialed people to make neolabs, or funding people who are somehow selling into the massive AI coding/agent demand (or to the labs). Investors in the US currently do not care about safe bets, they want growth at all costs. Risk on.

Maybe in your country it's different, but this is what I see.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#178

Post by overfeed »

Schnitz wrote: post #123
Barbing wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never heard of this before. Anyone know if it’s uncommon? Familiar with creditors getting divvied in bankruptcies, but not refunds to investors… oh it’s because there’s never any money left when things wind down. (We hear of retail stores where employees discover closures posted on shop doors when reporting to work.)

This is super common with startups and is usually called an orderly shutdown. You don’t want to wait until you are insolvent, but stop when there is enough money left to pay all outstanding liabilities as well as the people that will shut down the business entity, do a final tax return and so on. Then whatever is left eventually gets paid back to investors, who usually have a liquidation preference requiring this as…

> This is super common with startups and is usually called an orderly shutdown

Perhaps now, but during the Zero Interest Rate era, the received wisdom was founders ought to keep going until there bank account was empty, in the hope that they may salvage returns for investors. Vendors, partners, clients and employees would be screwed, naturally, but it didn't matter because VC preferred it because losing all the money in a desperate gamble was preferable to lending money to startups at 0%

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#179

Post by TheTaytay »

GabrielBianconi wrote: post #83

I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero. We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount. Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.

I'm really sorry to hear that, and I wish you and the rest of the team luck. When you first came out, I thought the approach was really solid - particularly with regards to structured inputs and outputs.

Re: AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed

#180

Post by mrandish »

maxnevermind wrote: post #128
GabrielBianconi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly salaries to support a small team. We are returning the remaining capital to investors.

I thought usually founders try to pivot till they run out of money. I wonder if that is good or bad for a serial entrepreneurs if they decide to shut it down instead of pivoting?

Many founders do try serial pivots until the money's gone. An entrepreneur shutting down cleanly with half the runway still in the bank would be seen by future potential funders as a net positive. It's worse to grind through all the money trying increasingly extreme pivots away from the original.

It takes maturity and decisiveness to recognize when a startup's core idea isn't going to work. In cases where any pivot wide enough to get into different lane is essentially a whole other business, it's often better to just shut down. Even if the last desperate pivot starts to work, you often have some team members and investors who aren't a good fit for the new focus and, worse, the 'new' business that's finally starting to work is almost out of money and the cap table is messed up. It's usually better to shut it down and reboot cleanly.

Founders who've successfully raised millions and executed well are usually quite fundable, even if their first startup didn't work out. Sometimes the timing is wrong or the market evolves differently. The key is how well you think, execute and communicate through both the windup and the wind down.

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