[HN Gopher] Back to our roots
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Back to our roots
Author : saeedesmaili
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-07-28 09:32 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (honnibal.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (honnibal.dev)
| data_ders wrote:
| wow what a candid, and humble take! Really impressive. Lots to be
| learned here.
|
| However, one thing I am curious about is how their VC investor,
| SignalFire, is ok with this "back to it's roots" terminus. Do
| they still own the same amount of the company as before?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| There is some info on Honnibal's Twitter
| (https://x.com/honnibal/status/1813650728222880157):
|
| Delip Rao: Curious how do you go back from VC funded to
| bootstrapped? Did you return money to investors? And were they
| okay with just that? Regardless, I am happy you are doing more
| lib dev. You have very good taste.
|
| Matthew Honnibal: There's no change in ownership, it's just
| that we don't have any more VC money to spend --- so the
| operating reality is like it was before. We think it's helpful
| to explain this.
|
| Delip Rao: So if you consult and do other stuff as Explosion to
| bring money in, you have to pay distribution of the profits to
| the shareholders on your cap table?
|
| Matthew Honnibal: If we ever pay a dividend, all shareholders
| will get some, (and the VCs have liquidation preferences that
| mean they'd take a larger share than their ownership until the
| money is paid back). But we're some distance away from
| dividends -- we'd pay ourselves a salary from consulting
|
| Delip Rao: That's right. I am surprised your VCs were okay with
| this arrangement. Usually, they nudge the company towards an
| acquihire in such situations.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| The title is a little misleading. They raised $6 million from
| SignalFire (who also invested in Grammarly) for 5% of the
| company [1]. As SignalFire retains that shareholding, they
| are not less independent (nor more) than that have been in
| the past couple of years. They are just not looking for more
| investment and so are more "independent-minded".
|
| I used SpaCy quite expensively pre-2020. It still has a lot
| of great uses, and more predictable than LLM models. But now
| many NLP tasks that seemed near impossible, or required a lot
| of expensive annotated training data (which their product
| Prodigy is used for) can now be coded in very little time
| with LLMs.
|
| [1] https://explosion.ai/blog/weve-sold-5-percent-of-
| explosion
| jpgvm wrote:
| The bit that sticks out in the story is this:
|
| Justin and Sebastian left the company with the transition to
| investment
|
| Obviously a ton of context is missing but if you are planning to
| stake the future of your company on a product that had until now
| been developed by these two gentlemen why weren't they going to
| be part of that future?
|
| One thing I have grown an appreciation for over the years is the
| power of very small teams, i.e groups of less than ~4 or so. When
| you have a very small number of very capable people you can paper
| over a lot of deficiencies.
|
| Overall though a very realistic view into what it's like trying
| to scale up a startup. If it's any consolation most of them blow
| up just like this, don't feel bad if this is a pattern you
| recognise from your past - it's just how it is. The game is hard
| and failure is expected, scale ups are by far the most vulnerable
| time in a companies history and yet you need multiple of them to
| "make it" and each one is completely different from the last.
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