His new venture: https://playgroundai.com/
I decided to stop working on Mighty
51–60 of 342 posts
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#52Good pivot and a humbling reminder for us all. Jonathan Blow on the day this was announced, "Very hard to describe how embarrassing this is for everyone involved in the Web and, sort of, software more generally." https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387094702139142145 > Wait, Paul Graham supported this? Jonathan: Very vocally, to the point of insulting world-class programmers who think it’s dumb (he did not know…
Hmm, I'm not quite sure how to interpret Jonathan Blow's tweet. You seem to be saying that he is saying that the Mighty project itself is embarrassing, while I took it to mean the fact that today's beefy computers, with all their CPU and RAM, struggle to render web pages to the point that someone is considering doing a rube-goldberg-esque solution of rendering on a mainframe-equivalent and then streaming you the resu…
Yes, and from that perspective the fact that it didn't work and nobody actually wanted it seems to indicate that it shouldn't have been embarrassing after all.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#53In May 2021 Paul Graham wrote Crazy New Ideas [1], in which he explained that envy is the only reason people criticize ideas by "reasonable domain experts". This was widely understood at the time to refer to critics of Mighty[2][3]. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062713 [3]: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-mighty-pushback-isnt-all-...
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 asking the wrong people. pg loves to quote the mythos that AirBnB was such a "crazy" idea early on that big VCs couldn't see the potential. But even in the early years, I don't think AirBnB was a big leap at all. Couchsurfing was already big, and platforms like HomeAway/VRBO had received huge funding rounds. pg was just asking the wrong VCs - not surprising that a bunch of rich old guys would be put off staying in someone's guestroom. Indeed, my understanding is that the first investor to really see value in AirBnB was very familiar with the vacation rental space.
In my opinion, the startups that were wildly successful weren't so much because they had "out there" ideas, but because their execution was unparalleled. Dropbox, Stripe, Figma, AirBnB, etc. just came out with products that were a delight to use when you first tried them in ways their competitors weren't.
Trying to be introspective, I think the event that most surprised me and seemed "crazy" was the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But again, I think i was just asking the wrong people. My circle of college-educated urbanites was basically unaware of the depth of some of the discontent with the status quo that Trump tapped into.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#54The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…
Why stop at creative cloud… go after autodesk. Hire guys writing shaders to build productivity software better in browser. Figma showed it can work.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#55I 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…
> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance.
Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#56This is one startup I never "bought". Sure, they have an interesting product, but it is not something I would pay for
As other comment said, it's a vitamin, not a painkiller. And you can always buy a new computer or upgrade it. Would it really make me much difference to run a browser in a much more powerful computer than the one I'm at? Only in extremely limited situations
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#57Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path.
That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser would have had PM fit for.
A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In these cases, SaaS becomes risky if it can be accessed by anyone off their work computer.
The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible on VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled devices, and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned devices.
It would be a lot easier to just control the browser viewport and prevent data harvesting (essentially what Mighty was doing, focused on performance).
Sounds like a small change, but it makes a world of difference when it's not feasible to send a physical machine to someone (3rd party contractors, overseas employees, low wage employees, etc)... something I discovered when talking to lawyers about using contractors overseas for routine data entry tasks.
But that's definitely not the same kind of user, or tech expertise and would have been a big pivot in itself. Hopefully someone buys the IP and builds something cool.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#58The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…
> But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs.
Media creation maybe, but I feel like professional software engineering might move soon.
At the beginning of the year I moved from a company where I worked entirely locally, running a local stack, developing in a local editor, etc, to a company where I work almost entirely non-locally. That happens to be on a box under my desk, but I only use it over SSH. It's beefy, and I could get an even beefier VM somewhere if I wanted. All my editing is now in a web-based VSCode instance which has been much closer to desktop VSCode I was using before than I expected. All my builds happen remotely. It's honestly an amazing experience. I think things like GitHub Codespaces have so much potential here.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#59Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…
yes! this is the same reason I’m glad Stadia died. “cool demo” does not equal “practical business”, and local compute will always be superior to cloud compute.
Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say "what really happened" four times with four, to me, unrelated conclusions.
Trying again, there's one point: What really made Figma successful is design moving from being made in "professional software" (like say Photoshop, Premiere, Visual Studio, Maya) to "collaboration software" (like Slack, Google Sheets), and that this was made possible because "flat design" is less technically demanding than the "skeumorphic" design it replaced. (Sorry I wasn't clearer, I struggle on how to make points…
I agree with one of your points (that where Figma really succeeded is that it understood better than anyone else the collaborative nature of web design), but I disagree that flat design vs. skeuomorphic makes much of a difference. I've seen more "realistic" designs where the actual iconography/images are created in something like Photoshop and then just imported to Figma, and Figma handles it fine.
Point being that I think that even if all apps still had the design aesthetic of 2008 iPhone apps that Figma still would have succeeded.