I know Chris already responded to some of your concerns, but I'd like to weigh in briefly as well.
> By bringing investors on board, and promising Hacker News they're going to change the world
a16z constitutes the majority of our investment, and Chris Dixon at a16z is rather well equipped to help us tackle this problem. It has also given us access to a rather impressive network of very smart people who can help us. Yes, there is a trade-off in that our investors have a say in what we do, but given the small number of investors, and who they are individually, there is a low probability of micromanagement from them. Secondly, we never promised Hacker News that we're going to change the world; we said we have some ambitious ideas, and that we wanted to pursue them. Might they change the world? Sure. Might we also die trying? Absolutely. That's a risk inherent to... well, everything. Certainly a lot of things worth doing.
> The fact that the LT team is giving up on Light Table/I think the LT team should have worked themselves into a crying, bleeding, starving mess
The last time we had office hours with pg about LT, we didn't exactly leave with a warm fuzzy feeling about continuing work on the project. But we did, for another year, spending the remainder of the Kickstarter money and approaching the end of the runway, staying as lean as possible, and continuing to develop a product that pg, James Lindenbaum, et al, all regarded as a nonviable business. We may have to agree to disagree on how plausible it is to make an open source IDE a commercial success, but there was plenty of crying and bleeding before we came to work on Eve.
At that point, it became what Jamie aptly described as a matter of return on effort. There isn't much sensibility in spending countless hours to solve the wrong problem, and running out of money didn't strike us as the optimal way to continue working on a problem we genuinely cared about. Instead, once LT became open source, we forged ahead into an area that Chris Dixon called a "Vietnam" of software, and while Eve may be particularly difficult, it brought us new funds precisely so we don't have to give up.
> By bringing investors on board, and promising Hacker News they're going to change the world
a16z constitutes the majority of our investment, and Chris Dixon at a16z is rather well equipped to help us tackle this problem. It has also given us access to a rather impressive network of very smart people who can help us. Yes, there is a trade-off in that our investors have a say in what we do, but given the small number of investors, and who they are individually, there is a low probability of micromanagement from them. Secondly, we never promised Hacker News that we're going to change the world; we said we have some ambitious ideas, and that we wanted to pursue them. Might they change the world? Sure. Might we also die trying? Absolutely. That's a risk inherent to... well, everything. Certainly a lot of things worth doing.
> The fact that the LT team is giving up on Light Table/I think the LT team should have worked themselves into a crying, bleeding, starving mess
The last time we had office hours with pg about LT, we didn't exactly leave with a warm fuzzy feeling about continuing work on the project. But we did, for another year, spending the remainder of the Kickstarter money and approaching the end of the runway, staying as lean as possible, and continuing to develop a product that pg, James Lindenbaum, et al, all regarded as a nonviable business. We may have to agree to disagree on how plausible it is to make an open source IDE a commercial success, but there was plenty of crying and bleeding before we came to work on Eve.
At that point, it became what Jamie aptly described as a matter of return on effort. There isn't much sensibility in spending countless hours to solve the wrong problem, and running out of money didn't strike us as the optimal way to continue working on a problem we genuinely cared about. Instead, once LT became open source, we forged ahead into an area that Chris Dixon called a "Vietnam" of software, and while Eve may be particularly difficult, it brought us new funds precisely so we don't have to give up.
> I truly hope they succeed
Thank you, so do we :)