The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
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Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#2Social networks and marketplaces are the hardest things to get going
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#3> After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former president of blockchain gaming company Dapper Labs. They are now focused on “synthetic celebrities” and AI influencers.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#4Social networks and marketplaces are the hardest things to get going
*centralized and siloed social-networks
Federated, standard and decentralized network just live by themselves :)
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#5> After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former…
Grifting is more lucrative than ever!
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#6This post is a long-ass “told you so” and honestly, I’m here for it. I too had an Ello account and thoroughly enjoyed its minimalist nature.
VC money really seems like the beginning of the end.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#7"But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March."
People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing.
I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning millions of dollars making it into BRIDJ, which shut down a few years ago.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#8> After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former…
Grifting is more lucrative than ever!
I thought this recent article was so insightful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014737
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#9Even the supposedly indie anti-social social media outright violated their own manifesto. Is it any surprise that we're skeptical of the big promises of a bright future that corporations make all the time?
I'm curious to know if anyone has evidence of a post similar to this but for a company with a (so far) happy ending.
Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams
#10I 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 trust me. It continues to be an interesting journey as a side-project (not raising money means I'm still working a day-job).
[1]: https://havenweb.org