I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?
Might want to change that username before you make your pitch
The trick to raising money is being able to convince an investor you are the person to build that platform, not being able to build the platform.
The question is not "will the product be better." The question is will you make the investors money.
I understand that money is at the root of the question. I don't see any problem with my strategy for making money, which is to win over all their users with a wildly better product.
Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their userbase until they could start to land corporate contracts.
I don't know if you wanted to imply that, but just to make sure no one misunderstands: GitHub didn't invent git.
I don't know if they were the first git forge, but they were certainly among the first.
Yeah I know that they didn't. Even though they didn't invent it and don't own it, it's still the cornerstone of the wall that has become the Github empire.
The specific problem is that all the competitors to Github have to use git, and that limits how different they can really be than Github and thus how aggressively they can compete to win users
That is an empirical question answered by the market. The way you get your answer is to build it, get it in front of people, and see if they use it. Then you will know.
Note that if you want to be the answer, then you have to prioritize other things than the technology. You can have the best product, but if nobody knows about it you're stuck.
Quite! It just happens that so far I've been stuck on purpose.
The nature of developing standards is that you can't have people start adopting them until they're done.
Step 1: don't pitch from a conartist6 username
It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense if you know that my name is Conrad.
It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.
> I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now.
Look, I'm not wanting to be rude here, and this is obviously all hypothetical since you're likely not actively pitching to investors, but if you were, being stubborn in this way would be a deal breaker for me as an investor.
I see all the reasons you have for keeping it, and they're reasonable, but the mere idea that that's a hill you're willing to die on is a red flag. I'd see this as one of many potential points of friction. Where else will you choose to not make compromises?
Maybe it's not rational on my part, but you're trying to convince irrational entities to part with their money.
You could look at it this way: if someone offered $17M to change it, would you?
I kind of am actively pitching to investors at this point.
I wouldn't say the username is a hill to die on. I can't hide that this is the online identity I used while working on this project. Trying to hide it would just feel sketchier, no?
And yeah, for 17 mil I'm willing to talk about most anything, but I still see a conversation with investors like going on a date. The red flags can go both ways...
I don't blame you for not wanting to change your name.
But fundraising is a game to be played, and part of playing the game is building credibility with VCs. It may be that a quirky name helps with that, but probably not.
From the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, where the old veteran is explaining to the newbie how to be successful:
"Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob."
If you already have a track record, then you can have a quirky name or personality. Until then, you've got to play the game.
No pilot has ever been a con artist...
I agree completely. However, this mentality is why honest people like you get pushed to the sidelines, and manufactured, perfect imaged, 1000+ referenced in LinkedIn types are more successful in getting VC funding. If this is seriously your goal, you are going to have to play the game. Remember, even when perfectly playing the game in your position you will likely fail. If this is what you want to do, do you want to be taken out of the running for something like a username?
They are using fame and past success as a proxy. You would need to do it on the basis of your ideas and the work that you have done. Someone really knowledgable would need to dig deep on your work and then the VCs will need to trust these person(s). The other alternative might be to try to get traction with users like Linus did with git and hope that they like it enough that it becomes popular. But Linus had the advantage of being famous and highly respected already,
I've considered trying to get Linus to be the knowledgeable person given his history. I haven't actually reached out though.
I badly want someone to take that deep dive given the work I've put in to be ready for it
Now you understand why people have non technical co founders!
It's not that other people are famous. They have a track record in this exact field, where he produced results and made money for investors. His results help to shape how software development gets performed.
>I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
This sounds like one of those "Hacker News Dropbox" comments...
No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering.
Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?
I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).
It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git, and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants on:
- Will their version control solution fall apart if there are not enough line breaks in the code?
- Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict? Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.
- Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-grained level (per-second resolution)
- Will their solution's performance break down if there is too much code in one file?
- How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?
This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's serious about replacing git; it just seems like they haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.
The reality is that none of that shit matters if you can build a product that people use and want to pay for. I would back someone who has made a dollar off of a product over someone who has built a great product that no one uses 100% of the time.
The reality is that you can make a successful business with okay engineering and great product insight. It's much more difficult to build a successful business with great engineering and poor product insight. Getting people to use and pay for what you've built gives you the product insight that you need.
Yeah but that's the advice for 99% of people. The craziest things: things on the scale of digging through 50 years of compounding tech debt, they take time. Have you by any chance seen this talk? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
Does anyone actually care about the above issues?
If yes, and you’ve solved them, people should be very interested in using what you’ve built. If people are using what you’ve built and are willing to pay for it, VCs will be interested.
If you haven’t solved them, but can validate they are real problems people care about, and have a path towards solving them, this should make a compelling VC pitch.
If they are real engineering problems but no one seems to care much about them, then it’s just a hobby.
Sadly you can't, and this is a huge flaw in the venture capital model. They invest in people that they think other vcs will invest in. More often than not who your parents are matters more than anything (unless you've had a huge exit like the OP). They'll also throw money at you if you come from a rich family, not because they think you'll succeed, but because they want your family's money as LPs in their funds.
Well regardless of whether it's hard or impossible, I'm doing this. I'm going.
The problem they have is that they're betting git is a solid foundation to build on. A tectonic change like git actually being replaced wouldn't just eliminate their moat, it would leave them trapped on the wrong side of it.
I can't win their game, so I'm changing the game.