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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

#791

Post by dormento »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #398
agentifysh wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0. i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.

> i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0. Because it's most likely in the training data. I.e., it stole it for you.

Y'know, this is the one time that i thought lawyers wouldn't let it slide. I still don't understand why apparently there aren't _massive_ class-action (or similar) lawsuits worldwide against AI companies. LLMs are full on copyright-removal machines.

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

#792

Post by naasking »

altmanaltman wrote: post #759
port11 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization" Who trusted you with hiring

Not wanting to hire a dick who can't keep a cool head and give constructive feedback is perfectly reasonable.

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

#793

Post by noobermin »

throw234234234 wrote: post #665
sosodev wrote: post #26

The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…

In the face of LLM's it won't be rational for many people to open source their work. People don't want their work/effort being used against them.

I've considered no longer uploading work I do to GitHub.

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

#794

Post by b34r »

lifetimerubyist wrote: post #755
b34r wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The “community” doesn’t decide what goes into the project, TailwindLabs does. Tailwind is not a community developed project. It’s a project that sometimes accepts outside contributors when they feel like it and the are under no obligation to do so. You did work that nobody from the project asked for and you’re throwing a fit because they have different priorities and said they don’t want it. They don’t owe you anythi…

[flagged]

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

#795

Post by lionkor »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #769
krageon wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He fired a shitload of people, of course we can criticise him

Three. He fired three people. Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.

He himself said "75%", nowhere in that thread does he say 3 people. That's why the headline is like that.

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

#796

Post by serbanghita »

yagizdegirmenci wrote: post #766
willio58 wrote: post #489

Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business. > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than…

This is the most pragmatic, non-conformist and rational comment here. Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream. So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the s…

Good analogy but it feels a bit different, in a sense that the LLMs index all your content and then you don't benefit from any of that outcome. You essentially had no saying to the process of indexing, whether it's MIT licensed or else.

I'd say that this is a very interesting situation, I would not blame it on the founder. Nobody saw this coming ...

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

#797

Post by ttcbj »

dfee wrote: post #384
Aurornis wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money. Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and simila…

alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down? i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment dow…

As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.

The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).

When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.

The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.

You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.

If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.

We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.

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

#798

Post by nananana9 »

sosodev wrote: post #26

The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…

> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily

The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.

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

#799

Post by throwacct »

_qswe wrote: post #688
mmcnl wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws are not intellectual property of individuals or companies, they belong to the public. That's a fundamentally different type of content to "learn" from. I totally agree that AI can save a lot of time, but I don't agree that the creators of Tailwind don't see any form of compensation. It does not feel not right to me that revenue is being taken from Tailwind and redirected to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic wit…

I see what you're getting at, but CSS is as much an open standard as the law. Public legal docs written against legal standards aren't fundamentally dissimilar to open source libraries written against technical standards. While I am all for working out some sort of compensation scheme for the providers of model training data (even if indirect via techniques like distillation), that's a separate issue from whether or…

>I see what you're getting at, but CSS is as much an open standard as the law

That's the thing, Tailwind is a layer on top of that to ease development, but almost all web development using LLMs is using Tailwind, not CSS.

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

#800

Post by throwacct »

geenat wrote: post #787

Tailwind was far ahead of its time in having an OSS business model overall friendly to users while still being able to fund development (Note: OSS projects like Minio, ScyllaDB and CockroachDB do a far more insidious "open core only", or "crazy licensing fees after x processes/users" , etc). It was great to see OSS succeed financially without ads or punishing users. "Information should be free", sure, but lets not ki…

I think it's too late for that. For new projects? Of course.
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