There are many factors at play here but if I had to pick one... an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product. The AI market moves very quickly so it's easy to take a step in the wrong direction and fall behind.
I might publish a long-form reflection when the dust settles.
It might come off as trite, but I genuinely am sorry that things didn't pan out for you
Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.
It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.
When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."
They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice
Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them
There’s a fallacy that successful companies are only successful because their CEO was a “rare breed” and that failed companies fail because their CEO didn’t have some innate quality.
This isn’t true. It’s easily shown to be not true by looking at all of the CEOs who had success with one endeavor and then failed all of their following startups, or the other way around.
A lot goes into founding a successful company. Not all of it is in anyone’s control. Not everything can be overcome by a CEO with powerful motivation.
Some times the market moves in ways nobody could have expected. I even worked at one startup that was destabilized and ultimately failed due to a natural disaster.
Looking back at the startups in my past, some of the worst CEOs were the ones who paraded around their ideals about failure not being an option or who pretended that they could get the company through anything through sheer force of their will and the power of their dream. One CEO who was all about “never give up, never surrender!” thinking ran the company into the ground because he refused to let us pivot after the initial idea didn’t get traction in the market but some other features were getting a lot of interest.
Some times knowing when to call it, move on to the next thing, and stop stringing your employees, investors, and customers along is an important CEO skill.
I know one who spends the days seemingly not doing antthing. He spends like a month with his own thoughts and comes up with truly bizare things that work.
In one instance he raised the price of something by 1000 times without adding anything extra. His explaination was that it would build the right community. In his opinion people were to negative/sceptical and talked to much about what things cost.
Cost him 90% of the customers innitially then grew by 100ish%. As if some high end comedy the 90% said it was to expensive and that it would never work. The other 10% really needed to see what would happen.
what do you mean a true "CEO"? Obviously there is a big difference between what someone like Satya Nadella does and what a CEO of a 10-person firm does.
In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO.
Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.
And yeah, not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly. There is always an element of luck in those that survive.
But the idea that you devote 24x7 of your life hence you must be a good leader is not accurate. In fact, if you press this culture downstream, you'll tire your workers and the rest of the team.
There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe for failure.
> not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly
Not everyone can be a CEO because not everyone is cut out for it. If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.
> For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
These are not examples of in-born traits. While I agree that not everyone has the motivation to become a CEO, I would disagree that a person cannot learn and adapt.
> > There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
> The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.
I don't get why one can't easily acknowledge the slightly weaker statement that traits that are inherent to successful CEOs might be positively correlated to being prone to a love for cocaine (which says nothing about any causality).
> first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product.
Is there a way to reach out to you as I would like to hear what you have to say about what I am working on. You can update your HN profile to include contact information or you can reach out to me using my HN profile.
I'm basically working on a portable intelligence layer for AI that I will be open sourcing and the commerical product will be to make the intelligence layer even smarter. I can share the Show HN post that I am working on that better explains the value proposition and would love to learn any lessons you have gained while trying to sell AI tools commerically.
Edit: In case somebody calls me out it. I didn't want to use the `tensorzero` email domain incase the domain was going to become defunct soon.
> an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product.
The only way this could be a 'lesson learned' is if you homehow managed to not pay any attention to what has been going on in the last 25 years with open source software companies.
Location: Hungary (CET)
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Senior Software Tester / Test Automation Engineer / SDET, with a full-stack engineering background. 10+ years in tech, with ISTQB CTFL certification.
I've QA'd SaaS products and complex, multi-system web platforms: the full manual and automated testing cycle, working closely with developers. I also build E2E test automation (Playwright) wired into CI and run production monitoring with on-call.
My edge is a user-focused, systems-level view: understanding how a feature should work and why, not just whether a test passes.
Its tangential, but: I’m currently doing a rewrite of the backend of a project, and the verifier is basically the instruction of “maintain v1 functionality if observed from the api side externally”. This allows making a lot of tests based on existing data in the system and how the frontend expects data.
> TL;DR: Coding agents generate better optimizations when they read papers and study competing projects before touching code
What made you think I hadn't read the article, let alone that TL;DR? I'm really curious. Jumping to an insulting "have you read the article" is a big step, so it'll be really interesting to see where your mind went.
That's like saying there's no point in attending a lecture on "how to get the best out of your time at University" because University courses are taught in spoken language so you could just ask the professors.
The idea that AI can write code like a seasoned software developer but not being able to use its own tooling that can be learned through 11 chapters tutorial doesn't make any sense.
"Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. Unerringly. Forever. Without a complaint.
And that’s interesting in itself.
But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likeable companion. What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how."[0]
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