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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#771

Post by mpeg »

TaylorOtwell1 wrote: post #191
mpeg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1]. Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies. [0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st... [1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwin…

Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.

I believe you, I'm just going out of the figures they have published. If they had "several times more" annual revenue, then not having a warchest for situations like this is puzzling.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#772

Post by [deleted] »

port11 wrote: post #440
freedomben wrote: post #6

Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you'…

I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer. Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. Tha…

[deleted]

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#773

Post by causal »

tills13 wrote: post #482
ericmcer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI". Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.

It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the business. Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.

I expect a lot of business disruption because of AI. Agree it's not the same as employee replacement, but it adds to the sort of fog of war around what effect AI is really having.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#774

Post by rambojohnson »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #722
jcattle wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's presuming humans don't need money to feed themselves and continue to work.

That's neither here, nor there. AI is destined to destroy software industry , but not itself. Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it. The current degree…

“Bit rot is a myth” is junior dev bro pedantry.

Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.

Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#775

Post by causal »

BoorishBears wrote: post #546
mmcnl wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.

I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend. Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their o…

I don't understand how a component library would be AI-proof in a way CSS templates are not.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#776

Post by mpeg »

bradly wrote: post #196
mpeg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1]. Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies. [0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st... [1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwin…

> 2020 they had $2m+ ARR You've got an extra "R" in there. In 2020 their only revenue from was non-recurring lifetime software purchases. Like SaaS if you had a 100% churn rate.

Very good point, and I imagine part of the issue here... everything they sell is one-time payment, more of a reason they should have been preparing for the music to stop

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#777

Post by mpeg »

freedomben wrote: post #88
mpeg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.

I don't disagree, but I think differentiating between Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit from more

Yeah, I was referring more to the fact that tailwind didn't have that many other ways to monetise compared to other OSS projects. Their paid templates and courses kinda fulfilled their goal in that way, they made the founders wealthy, but is there a sustainable business there?

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#778

Post by jcattle »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #698
matt-p wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo? AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something tha…

Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? AI training on your code is success if you care about your code being genuinely helpful to others. It's a problem only if you're trying to make money or personal reputation, and abusing open source as a vector for it.

> abusing open source as a vector for it

It seems like you are very against open source not being an altruistic endeavor. Or that you should not make money with an open source project. I would like to challenge you on that.

Would you say that the Linux Foundation is a net positive on the software ecosystem? How about big open source projects like curl or QGIS? How about mattermost or nextcloud? All of these have full-time employees working on them (The Linux Foundation generated almost 300 million USD of gross revenue in 2024).

I would argue that good monetization is paramount to a healthy open source ecosystem.

Both can be true:

- AI training on your code is success

- AI undermining the sustainability of your project by reducing funding is an issue

Also, I see you haven't changed your mind much on the training LLMs being one of the major benefits of open source since the last discussion we had ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44155746#44156782

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#780

Post by ifwinterco »

bilekas wrote: post #100

I can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?

I'm not normally one to do armchair psychology but from the way he posts I'm pretty sure he's just on the spectrum, obviously smart but total inability to read the room or understand other people's perspectives
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