it's the most ai-native tax experience for US citizens abroad

2021-2022 was a total blip on the screen zero interest rate era thing.

i'm not seeing considerable slowing of new startup development, quite the opposite actually w/ AI. this is for a few reasons:

- accelerators are filling the gap; the accelerator model is actually quite efficient in the early-stage spectrum (it needs some further innovation). there are a huge number of AI accelerators and programs now; and further

- most of the capital going into VC is just being further concentrated into the large Multistage firms like A16Z, Accel, Sequoia, General Catalyst, etc... all of these firms are realizing they need to win deals as early as possible so have multiple seed programs: accelerators, incubations, scouts, fund-of-fund allocation, geographic funds, university focused sub funds, etc...

- overall great founders & startups are truly just exceptional so statistically there just won't ever be that many. venture will always be a cottage industry of sorts. in this form - "venture" equates with "growth"; there can only be 1 category leader by definition and venture is meant to capture this. 2021-2022 overall venture market was too big.

- AI is making startup creation many multiples more efficient. we saw this w/ the advent of the cloud, where startups used to need $2-3M "to buy servers" and 2-3 years to ship a product in 2010, by 2015-2020, they really only needed $3-500k to get a product to market. we're going to see that number come down considerably (unsure if it will be 30-50k, but definitely a lot lower).

- we're also seeing the new wave of the 10-person unicorn (billion $ company); these companies will raise a lot less cash, so will result in higher multiples on the original investment.

- i think the overall distribution of returns will look different on a portfolio basis in 2025-onwards. with power law, we expect to see super long-tail concentration on the 1-2 companies that yield 99% of the return to a portfolio, but i suspect we'll start to see some mitigation of that effect with more companies yielding positive outcomes. this might mean that there's less of a reliance on portfolio construction to generate risk-adjusted returns and that there could be more of a democratization of early-stage investing where we see 10-100x the number of startups and founders. that warrants a longer analysis, but as someone just bullish on startups and everyone being a founder that possibility is very exciting to me.

To me, that's the most important consideration here. Are you targeting professional devs who are enhancing their current workflows iteratively with these improvements? Or re-thinking from the ground up, obfuscating most of what we've learned to date?

Maybe we need to trudge through all of these weeds until software creation hits its final, elegant form where "Anyone Can Code".

Maybe the old Gusteau quote is actually fitting here:

"You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true - anyone can ̶c̶o̶o̶k̶ code... but only the fearless can be great."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576816

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41832547

Points: 285

# Comments: 103

(aside: 51 points but only 1 comment? It's a front-page worthy article, but sort of feels like there's some vote gaming happening. I've never seen 50 points w/ 1 comment.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35750009

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23967372

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206722

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22163697

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21938657

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17784228

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17771391

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

They have recently been getting ddos-ed with robocalls for 20-30min periods and received an email with a ransom notice asking for BTC payment or that the calls will escalate.

They tried blocking a few of the numbers, but obviously the attackers are rotating lines regularly.

They can't only accept calls from a whitelist of callers as many customers are new.

Can you think of other solutions / services that can help out?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258175

Points: 5

# Comments: 5

When considering Nitrous as a viable business, I'd talk a lot about the "developer sophistication spectrum" and the challenges of one single product or service attempting to meet the needs of a lot of different types of developers.

On the newbie side of the spectrum, serving the hot "learn to code" market means scaling your potential market size by orders of magnitude. There is some product-market fit here as newbies don't really have substitutes ("what's a development environment?" they'd often remark), but the SaaS economics of selling tooling to newbies was atrocious.

Selling to learn-to-code means you're dealing with an incredibly fickle audience where 95% abandon their plans to become a professional programmer within a few months. The other ~5% who become full-time programmers are dedicated enough to their craft to learn about their OS and their options to customize the local development workflow. So they naturally also churn.

(I don't have any knowledge of the market, but I'd imagine courseware providers attempt to charge 100% up-front to account for the extremely high churn. At least, that's how I'd charge.)

So basically all the cloud IDEs are getting hundreds of thousands of signups from a lot of newbies saying "We love [Nitrous, Cloud9, Koding, etc...]!" but not wanting to pay for the infrastructure and churning at unsustainable rates.

On the less sophisticated side of the spectrum, I think there is potential for a viable cloud IDE business, but I think it needs to be closely coupled with a content platform like Treehouse, Coursera or CodeAcademy. I haven't looked at any of them recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have in-house teams working to improve the editor experience and provide stateful experiences with dedicated cloud compute & storage. We had a tightly coupled integration with the Flatiron School and it was a pretty solid experience but just wasn't a big enough business for us to scale. So in reality these businesses really just look like a content / courseware business that has a really great cloud development experience. But it's clearly built for people learning to code and they're paying for the courseware, not for the editor.

As you move up the sophistication spectrum, developers begin to experience "cognitive dissonance" when considering how much their time is really worth. That is, when they know how to setup, configure or troubleshoot something themselves, they underestimate the time they spend every month performing those tasks. We spent a ton of time doing deep customer research with excellent engineering teams at Airbnb, LinkedIn, Shopify, etc... You'd be extremely surprised at just how much time it takes for the average developer at a top-tier engineering org -- in some cases, new developers took 3-4 weeks to setup their dev environment. But after setting up a new environment the other dev ops problems start to spider into a web of complex and proprietary issues that are difficult to create compelling marketing / sales presentations. It's like - everyone knows it sucks and it's broken, but nobody quite knows the solution. Which is why a lot of the solutions emerge from open source projects that solve specific issues organically and then expand into powerful platforms that cohesively solve a set of interesting ops problems (e.g. Hashicorp).

This is an oversimplification of the complexities of the developer market - as there is also a spectrum of sophistication within the professional developer market itself. The "intermediate" professional developer tends to be the best market fit right now for cloud development / IDEs, as they often are self-taught and know how to code, but are often not as versed in debugging low-level issues, but usually are more price sensitive to their more sophisticated counterparts (who don't want to use the service in the first place).

In any case, I remember reading a HN comment about the nitrous.io shutdown [1] and feeling bad about not opening up more so I suppose this will provide some color. People loved our service and we honestly loved building it, but business is hard and we weren't able to uncover the right strategic focus. Hopefully Coursera, Treehouse, CodeAcademy, etc... will continue to fill in the gaps for the beginner market - but since those will be tightly coupled with their courseware, it's going to be a difficult spot to be in for the independent educator who is attempting to monetize their own material.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841858

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gliechtenstein

It’s easy to forget that good ideas take a lot of time and iterations until they become magical. Great things do not happen overnight and without much sacrifice. The majority of people would give up the first time the community dismissed their prototype.

Big props for not giving up.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168774

Points: 1

# Comments: 0