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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#261

Post by Jasper_ »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53
roflyear wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know to exist in the VC world you have to buy into insane shit and convince yourself you believe it is the next best thing, but this just seems so ludicrous to me. I don't understand it at all.

"the difficulty with finding truly transformative, great ideas is that they look pretty similar to bad ideas in the early stages" is one of pg's central theses that I couldn't disagree with more strongly, and the only conclusion I can come to is that pg's hubris is blinding him. I don't think it's so much that you can't tell the difference between crazy bad and crazy good ideas in the early stages, it's that you're a…

agreed, but on AirBnB, AirBnB was huge because it was cheaper than a hotel, they could ignore zoning laws, and it was meant to be for more personal & honest experiences. it's now far more expensive than a hotel, governments are restricting AirBnB subletting after complaints now, and the experiences are far more sterile with scams more common.

the complaints from the peanut gallery was always "this will work until it doesn't anymore", just like Uber, and that's exactly what's happening, it's crashing down now.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#262

Post by jbjbjbjb »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #73
Kwpolska wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.

I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer

I looked into this and found, annoyingly, that even if used the Remote Desktop rarely and I could deallocate the machine to not get charged, it was actually the price for storage that made it too expensive.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#263

Post by stephc_int13 »

TotoHorner wrote: post #240
stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail 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)

You are right.

But the trick, in this case is parsimony, the opposite strategy of what VCs do.

Only shorting when I am 100% positive the idea is a fail.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#264

Post by abhaynayar »

phphphphp wrote: post #237
stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail 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…

You're talking from a pure statistical standpoint. Yes, the probability that a random startup fails is higher than the probability that it succeeds. Nobody denies that. I doubt anybody said, "I predict Mighty is going to fail because most startups fail."

It's much better to argue on WHY people said that Mighty was a dubious product proposition -- from a first principles perspective. That way at least we can learn some lessons from it. Contrary to what people are saying, I doubt the reason for failure is that since Mighty's inception the browsing experience has gotten much faster. Because it really hasn't.

Mighty was as doomed in the beginning as it is now. -- and you know it if you've been using a web browser for the past few years. If you don't live in a bubble, you realize $30/month is absurd. These are the important points, not "most startups fail."

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#265

Post by leobg »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail 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.

It’s easy to do. Just tell the founder you’re willing to bet $10k that they will (define “fail” metric and time). Some will take you up on it.

(Though I bet your won’t do it as often as you would have thought, now that your money is on the line. Pun intended.)

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#266

Post by cowtools »

dmix wrote: post #239
danso wrote: post #152

Honestly 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.

latency

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#267

Post by kilroy123 »

I was a paid user, so I guess I'll chime in from that point of view. Why did I pay for this?

On my work computer, I keep everything separate. Chrome is work stuff. Mighty was my personal stuff, with little to no files stored locally. When I run all the docker containers to stand up the local server. My computer is very taxed for resources. Mighty was amazing and not bogging down my computer with a second browser open.

However, on my big beefy personal M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB of ram. It actually felt slow. I found myself reaching for regular Chrome more and more.

Very niche use case. IMO they needed to pivot to B2B and not some niche B2C play, like what they were pursuing.

Overall, it worked impressively so. Kudos to the team for shipping something so stable that worked.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#269

Post by xwowsersx »

Cyberdog wrote: post #248
xwowsersx wrote: post #114

What is Mighty?

I think the product in question is this: https://www.mightyapp.com/ It's basically Google Stadia for web browsers; do the computation and renderning in a far-away data center and stream the result as a video feed to a local thin client program. I suppose this is an idea that could work better for web browsers than video games, but modern web browsers and sites/"applications" require fewer resources than modern AAA vi…

Oh thank you. Given the discussion here, that has to be it. Thanks!

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#270

Post by funstuff007 »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #73
Kwpolska wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.

I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer

You could say that same about running off-line batch jobs on EC2 instances. Unless your co-located data sources are forcing you to do so, I cannot fathom why you would.
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