It was very surprising to see how many people were buying into this (frankly awful) idea when it was posted here a year or two ago. Any one person criticizing it was immediately dogpiled on by 10 people telling them how wrong they were. Refreshing to see everything come full circle in the end.
I decided to stop working on Mighty
231–240 of 342 posts
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
That character is what I'd use for"x divided by y". Is it common use somewhere to use it for "between x and y inclusive"
The obelus, ÷ [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelus
I see, this is a novel use you have settled on. Thanks for naming the symbol for me.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#233Mighty was like compute arbitrage. The bet was that you could buy compute at cloud prices, resell it to end users, and since this is cheaper than buying consumer compute in the form of workstations, laptops, & tablets, you can pocket the difference. I can't think of a bigger slice of consumer compute than browser workload; so if the scheme doesn't work there, it won't work for anything. My conclusion is that compute…
Hasn't cloud compute always been far more expensive than local hardware? I don't see any arbitrage opportunity here. Twenty years ago VDI wanted to replace desktop PCs with VMware ($$$) running on quad-socket servers ($$$) with fibre channel SAN storage ($$$). I didn't understand the economics then and I don't today.
The idea is predicated on economies of scale and low utilization rates typical of local hardware.
The success of AWS and Azure show it can be done.
(You do have to avoid replacing cheap commodity desktops with exotic bleeding edge servers, it’s hard to make up for that)
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#234I actually thought about this company recently, because slack, zoom, Google suite, and all the other work apps perform so badly on my linux machine. Even with an i9 I get occasional full utilization. I thought I might just embrace the meme and outsource my browser. I only use chrome for work anyway. Too bad, Mighty, it is possible a similar business might work some day to centralize corporate work environments.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#235I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only…
> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Agree with this take. It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs. Props to him for the skill it took to get funding in the door.
I remember people being very impressed with the performance of the arm macs at the time. Maybe they were impressed that it met expectations though and correctly predicting it would be good.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#236I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only…
> $30/m
That price point was a serious barrier to entry.
I loved how fast Mighty was (even on M1 it was noticeable) but there's no way I could justify that expense and I'm a big early consumer of B2B SaaS tools.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#237Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.
Predicting failure is easy, though, because most things fail: you can predict everything will fail and be right 90%+ of the time. The venture capital model operates on that understanding: most things will fail, but in taking a chance on lots of things that will probably fail, you're exposed to the very small number of things that will succeed in a meaningful way.
Success is the aberration, and being able to identify the things that will succeed is where the challenge is. If you think you have talent in identifying things that will succeed, then invest in things, and if you're right, you'll make lots of money. Unfortunately, as you'll discover, predicting failure is easy because there's a million ways to fail and very few ways to succeed.
Mighty investors would have had 90%+ confidence it would fail, but that's fine, because it's the tiny chance it might succeed that mattered.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#238According to the final tweet in that thread [0] it seems like they are pivoting to a sort of AI generated art based social media platform. I’m curious why they think this has the potential to be a “mass market changing” business since the social media world seems pretty over saturated already [0] https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1591831193598963713
He says in his 4th tweet in the thread "I think there’s a large opportunity to make an experience using many advances in AI (not just diffusion) to make a new kind of Creative Suite. A different set of products with a brand new UX." He links to the prototype at the end of the thread - https://playgroundai.com/
The current site doesn't look very inspiring. Like you say, just another "AI generated art based social media platform". But if his plans are to develop it into some sort of After Effects competitor then ... maybe that's a market opportunity worth cracking?
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#239Honestly one of the most "But why?" startup ideas I'd ever heard of. I figured pg's hype for it was based in thinking it could someday be targeted for profitable acquisition by Google. But perhaps the current tech industry downturn (plus Stadia's death) made that obviously untenable. At $30/month, this sounded like something that could only be worthwhile for businesses (though I'm at a loss to imagine what size/indus…
There's no indication that cloud gaming is declining.
Xbox Cloud, Playstation, Nvidia Geforce, Shadow (even has streaming VR), Amazon Luna, Paperspace, Boosteroid, etc etc. There's no shortage of options.
Google shutting down a business isn't a good indicator of a market's validity.
The "Buy why?" was simple: it made the internet very fast and improved battery life of laptops.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#240Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.
> I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.
No shit? The vast majority of VC funded ideas fail, so you'd make money on almost every trade.
The issue is that your fund would blow up every time you shorted the next Airbnb/Uber (two companies that everyone agreed were terrible ideas at inception)