Makes me think about how Bluesky is also a Public Benefit Corporation and took $8m in funding.
Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it, or whatever the saying is.
That, mixed with "there's a sucker born every minute".
The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
91–100 of 264 posts
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing. True, but a little misleading. The majority of the co-founders of Ello, plus nearly all of its staff, were based in Colorado. Source: I worked for Ello.
Well now I have to ask - what was it like inside the cauldron? Any learnings you took into your next step?
It was my favorite job I've ever had. It was intense in the best way. I didn't have much contact with Budnitz, but the other 6 founders showed such a strong passion for the community, it was impossible for me to not to come to work excited.
I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started running out and interest started to wane, it was too late.
A few learnings:
- 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup.
- Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team, and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever been a part of.
- Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework ;)
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#93Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#94I'm a participant in a community that explicitly refuses money from outside its membership. If that means we can't grow fast, or have fancy digs, so be it. The reason for that, is to avoid having influence from outside. Even "angel" investment can be problematic, as the "angel" has the ear of the leadership. I have found that even well-meaning outsiders can have highly destructive influence, because they don't unders…
and how much do you know about the internal workings of that community? how much do you know about it's "future"? how transparent is it about how much time top level management and leadership are investing and how they are compensated for it? how much do you know about the financial sponsors of the members of your community?
Actually, a whole lot.
But that's a story for a different venue...
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#95> I felt sad for the guy. It’s awful going through life never believing in anything. Being an idealist is fine, but being a dick is not. This article took on some personal schadenfreude after I read this line.
It's funny, the author went out of their way to give the company the benefit of the doubt...but they come across extremely arrogant and sometimes vitriolic. I wouldn't have been so positive
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#96I started building an open source private blogging system[1] when my first kid was born, and it eventually evolved into the skeleton of a social network--but fully decentralized using RSS and self- (or paid-) hosting. I concluded the only way for a network to actually avoid selling out was for there to be nothing to sell. If I give away the software, and don't control the network then there is no need for users to tr…
Most of these platforms will never reach "popular" scale.
You need to think about the killer article or feature.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#97Looks like Archive Team didn’t manage to get anything before it disappeared :(
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#98> I figured I’d publish a short list of things Ello will never do:
> ...
> 2. Tolerate hate. Ello has many tools, some visible and others not, that help keep this network positive.
Geez, it's hard to take anything said as authentic with a statement like that. How can you talk about things without "hate"?
"I hate shoveling snow." "I hate terrorists." "I hate this political candidate." "I hate Taylor Swift music."
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#99Early on in Ello's life, possibly year 1, I interviewed for a job with them - back when their office was basically one floor of a residence, and all the engineers pretty much worked at a single dinner table packed with monitors. I probably scored the interview because of my previous experience as CTO of a startup social network for people who wanted social change (which we sold to Gaiam, and that's how it eventually died a few years later, but at least I ended up in the Denver/Boulder area).
Anyway, the code test part of the interview involved pairing with another engineer on a small portion of the ello User model (their application was built with Ruby on Rails at the time), and I remember being rather underwhelmed by what they asked me to do, at least in terms of whether it provided a decent test of my abilities. I ended up sending a follow-up email expressing that, along with numerous polished samples of other project work.
They ended up passing on me, but I stayed a member of ello for a while longer because I thought the idea might have promise. Maybe I left too early, but I eventually ditched it because... there was no "there", there.
I liked their general idea, but... they could have done so much more with it, even with a small team. As it was, I left before ello ever got out of its "tumblr clone with way too much empty space" phase - if it ever did.
RIP
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an argument for standards. You can switch messaging clients. Platforms own you.
Yes, and ̶G̶m̶a̶i̶l̶ email is such a successful example.
Imagine if the progenitors of email thought to require e-stamps, say a thousand emails for a buck. There's a parallel universe where 'Email co.' is a major tech player comparable to Google. Not sure it's a better universe, but bears consideration.