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Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

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Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#61

Post by Uroboric »

aikah wrote: post #36
Uroboric wrote: post #21

I briefly contracted there and it was obvious to me that this would happen. The platform they built is really amazing, but there was no sense of how they could start making money in any reasonable period of time considering their costs. I'm sure everyone who was working there will be fine as they had some tremendously talented engineers.

My biggest issue with it is that they made a great demo yet they didn't really have a useful framework. They kept things hush hush for too long , with a lot of teasing and by the time they released something, people moved on. Compare to what ionic did, and i'm not a big fan of it, but the ionic team demonstrated the usefulness of their framework quite fast with concrete apps. As for making money obviously, you make m…

You basically hit the nail on the head.

That said, they were in fact making an effort to increase adoption with initiatives like Famous University, famous-angular and various project demos and usable widgets.

The answer to why they struggled to increase adoption so much isn't that clear to me, but what I do know is that they had a lavish office in an expensive part of SF, free food and a relatively large, well-paid staff.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#62

Post by k__ »

n7c3c1 wrote: post #54

I 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

One of the most cringeworthy videos I watched this year...

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#65

Post by cfontes »

samstave wrote: post #57
idlewords wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe their next pivot will be to print-on-demand motivational posters.

Heh, that reminds me of a few years back, when I was at Lockheed I printed several demotivatioal posters and quietly placed them up around the office. I got reprimanded by HR after they found this poster I put up in one of the interview rooms: http://i.imgur.com/dzk0YcA.jpg HR was interviewing someone who was seeking H1-B and noticed this poster hanging on the wall during the interview...

Fired?

Anyway bold move, my office need a couple to lighten things up.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#66

Post by ndesaulniers »

> Open Source ≠ Business

> Newcomb himself admits it was a “divergent brainstorming process,” saying “We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn’t do it.”

What a load of shit. This has nothing to do with open source.

It's more like people don't want to pay for another JavaScript framework that claims to be better than the current web stack which at the end of the day, ends up reimplementing most features a web browser already has, but in WebGL. In the article, Steve even admits "We built a shitty game engine".

Recently, there were a few other attempts at reimplementing most of the web in WebGL, I think Flipboard had an article.

Let me point out, this is hard. You wind up with some of the features HTML/CSS already has that's faster, but a ton of missing stuff you end up needing at some point.

For example in WebGL, layout is non trivial, rendering text correctly is non trivial, events are non trivial. These things are an afterthought when working with HTML/CSS.

People love to shit on HTML/CSS and blame it for their problems, but at the end of the day, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.

Don't blame open source because it can't rescue your product. Great products and care for the community foster great open source communities, not the other way around.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#67

Post by Maarten88 »

adevine wrote: post #30
duiker101 wrote: post #2

I 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 problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed.

Yes. We bought into it and did a proof of concept app with Famous. We did get it to work, but it cost way too much effort, there were way too many bugs, and it ran on way too few browsers.

We decided to not use Famous again. The proof-of-concept app lingers around, it's still cool and we're hoping for a new chance if a community version of (in)famous becomes somewhat more mature.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#68

Post by samstave »

cfontes wrote: post #65
samstave wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, that reminds me of a few years back, when I was at Lockheed I printed several demotivatioal posters and quietly placed them up around the office. I got reprimanded by HR after they found this poster I put up in one of the interview rooms: http://i.imgur.com/dzk0YcA.jpg HR was interviewing someone who was seeking H1-B and noticed this poster hanging on the wall during the interview...

Fired? Anyway bold move, my office need a couple to lighten things up.

Heh - no, not fired. A gentle slap on the wrist... the head of HR was a good friend.

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#69

Post by [deleted] »

cfontes wrote: post #65
samstave wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, that reminds me of a few years back, when I was at Lockheed I printed several demotivatioal posters and quietly placed them up around the office. I got reprimanded by HR after they found this poster I put up in one of the interview rooms: http://i.imgur.com/dzk0YcA.jpg HR was interviewing someone who was seeking H1-B and noticed this poster hanging on the wall during the interview...

Fired? Anyway bold move, my office need a couple to lighten things up.

[deleted]

Re: Famo.us pivots, fires 20 employees

#70

Post by AdrianRossouw »

Man, famo.us.

I dove in because i try to get a balanced view of things before I make up my mind about things, and there was some stuff in there that I really liked. I tried building something with it, and it didn't really work out.

But even worse was the way that they interacted with their open source community.

It was completely cathedral-style, for a long time. And just as they became more bazaar-like everything dries up from them. Nobody was on irc, nothing on the issue queues. The only thing we heard was more promises for x integration, and y integration.

Eventually the community got fed up and called them out on it, to which they finally admitted that they had started a complete rewrite behind closed doors to use 'mixed mode' css3d and webgl rendering. 6 months later, they released their new 'engine' rewrite, and an additional 'framework' on top of it, which really did not seem fully baked.

They subsequently made a really big deal of helping found the jquery foundation, and organized a jquerySF conference that had them on stage promising to replace major jquery widgets with drop-in famo.us ones.

And then nothing. Commits stopped, feedback stopped, slack channel was closed. News started filtering out of devs working there leaving one after the other.

The entire thing did teach me some important life lessons, though =) At least there's a few mistakes i won't make again.

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