On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 14:23:33 UTC, Joakim wrote:
The first search engines were created in 1993, google came
along in 1998 after at least two dozen others in that list, and
didn't make a profit till 2001. Some of those early competitors
were giant "billion dollar global companies," yet it's google
that dominates the web search engine market today.
Why is that? Well, for one, resources don't matter for software
on the internet as much as ideas. It's not that resources don't
matter, but that they take a back seat to your fundamental
design and the ideas behind it.
Google had a $100k angel round in 1998 and a $25 million Series A
in 1999. The difference between Google and the $12 billion-ish
valued Lycos of the time was not insurmountable, yes, but $25
million was enough to hire dozens of developers, lease offices,
and buy the hardware they needed.
Similarly, we don't need Google-level funding to produce a
developer ecosystem that's sufficiently polished not to be a
blocker for corporate VS-only types who rely on autocomplete. But
we need a bit more than $4k for that, or it's always going to be
someone's personal project that's mostly complete but might be
abandoned in six months.
