I continue to be amazed at American capital allocation. $17M for an idea to improve Git? For a fraction of that money Ukrainian housewives build anti-drone air defence systems in their garage that protect their country. For that kind of money you could build an apartment block to ease the housing shortage. You could invest in electricity resilience and build mini nuclear power plants or a small wind farm. Soviet capital allocation: while they were pouring money into their space program and building the "biggest baddest military helicopters" there wasn't enough bread in grocery stores.
It’s not 17m for an idea to improve git.
It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.
If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.
And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.
This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.
So it's gambling that they can extract money from open source project, by repackaging most of the existing features through a nice UX and hope business gamble their tech stack on it.
Great use of 17 million dollars.
I wouldn't say "buying software that saves us time" is gambling, but you do you.
It’s just gambling without the stigma of being called an addict.
After a decade of negative interest, there is still a lot of excess capital looking for high-risk-high-gain investments. Perceived future economic value is unfortunately not in the stuff we know and understand to be useful, essential.
Use value != sales value; hype sells.
Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.
Oklo’s Aurora was budgeted at around $10 million to build, with about $3 million/year to operate
I don’t understand the negative sentiment here.
What’s the problem?
Do you think less money should be going into VC?
Just some numbers ~1.5M housing units are built in the US with an approx cost of $300k - $400k. That is $450B to $600B going into housing units construction every year.
On the other hand VC has maybe $1T AUM in the US. Maybe 10%-20% of that is deployed every year? So $100b to $200B.
What is wrong with that ratio? Could there be better solutions to make more housing cheaper? (lower regulations, efficient permitting, etc)
Money moving from VC to housing seems without a first principled approach on what problem your solving and how is silly.
The problem is they’re pouring insane amounts of money into non-problems. I use Git every day. There’s no problem with Git. Real problems that people suffer with everyday like healthcare and housing and even defense are doing so pitifully and we’re spending $17M on improving Git? If you don’t see the ridiculousness you really are in a bubble.
You'd have thought the same about all the big tech companies when they were startups. Yet now they're making piles of money and contributing to America's overall economic success.
Back then the landscape was a different one.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon all were founded years or decades before Git was created and money had a different value back then. (Inflation)
For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands dead horses...
There are dead horses and unicorns, which turns out to be better than just living horses and no unicorns like Ukraine and Europe are more like.
> For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands dead horses...
Nicely put!
And it was 100% natural (un)intelligence. No "AI" involved! :)
So thanks, I take this compliment. You just made my day!
The worst part about what I see here is the inequity or imbalance of what we're seeing about where money gets allocated, and the material effects of what that inequity brings about. It's not "I have a good idea and a great team" it's "I am X, or know Y" and... ugh.
There's gobs of amazing technology being built by people who just love to build, have great ideas, and huge talent (now exponentially compounded by LLM assistance, even) -- and 99% of it is ignored by people with $$ and none of them will be paid to work on these things -- let alone get funded to build a business around them -- and the reason isn't the inadequacy of the technology or "lack of a workable business plan": it's lack of social connections or pedigree.
And what this tells me is two things
1. there's a fundamentally sickness to the VC culture coming out of Silicon Valley and it's gotten worse not better with the new restraints in the post-ZIRP era. It's an echo chamber and a social circle, not a means for creating new profitable companies or good infrastructure, and it serves mainly just to feed a pipeline of acquisitions into much bigger fish rather than building tomorrow's new businesses or ideas. This is very different from 80s, 90s tech culture that I grew up in.
2. there's clearly a desperate need for more actual incubators or labs for actual technology, paying people to build "good stuff" independent of the vagaries of what VCs and their ivy league friends are able to pitch.
Frankly: The $$ out there in heavy circulation has been mostly corrosive, not helpful.
But then again, for a fraction of the money US-Americans pay for health insurance, we actually have public health insurance here...
Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.
But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.
What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.
The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.
Europe is far from perfect though. In all the three countries I'm familiar with (UK, Sweden, Spain) the healthcare system is really struggling. Extremely long wait times are becoming more common, for more procedures, even in the emergency departments.
But the taxes remain very high, especially on income so it hits middle-class professionals the hardest. In some countries like Spain (and increasingly Sweden) they are contributing to a high structural unemployment, especially youth unemployment, too.
So in the end, the problem isn't just higher taxes, but higher unemployment and therefore lower gross salaries (before those higher taxes are even taken into account).
Long wait times are increasingly also a major problem in US healthcare, so I'm inclined to believe that the root causes behind wait time problems aren't related to public vs private insurance systems.
I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. We are definitely heading in the wrong direction. It's the same development here (not UK, Sweden or Spain)
I'm paying maximum social security and in previous generations the service you got in the public healthcare system was way better.
For some procedures I definitely go to private doctors as well nowadays. It's not a huge burden, but e.g. I will never go to a public skin doctor ever. The stories you hear about them are... brrr!
But overall the system is still miles ahead of the one in the United States. I've been there on multiple occasions and witnessed first hand, I have friends there and I know both systems. (Obviously I know the European system or rather the one in my country of residence even better)