Burn rate says little about whether a startup is on track - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/05/burn-rate-doesnt-matter/#.v8qwt9:mjbl <comment><USER2> In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before they were profitable. Since you can only go public once, they had a finite amount of capital and a publicly known burn rate. Projecting that linearly allowed computing the company's death date. I had a site which did this.[1] It was surprisingly accurate. I used to get hate mail from CFOs.

Excessive burn rate led to the demise of basically good ideas such as Webvan, the first instant-delivery online retailer. Webvan, pushed by their investors, tried to operate in too many cities, and ended up with about 3% market share in 30 cities, instead of 30% market share in 3 cities. (The head of operations at Webvan went to Amazon, and is responsible for making Amazon a success in that industry.)

This time around, most startups monetize earlier, so we see less of that.

[1] [http://downside.com/deathwatch.html](http://downside.com/deathwatch.html)

<comment><USER3> It's somewhat amusing that Amazon is on the list with a death date of July 10, 2001. How were Amazon ultimately saved before that point?

<comment><USER4> Revenue growth, presumably. If you linearly extrapolate cash/burnrate, but revenue grows exponentially and eventually makes burn rate positive, then the prediction will be off.

It occurs to me that a lot of this bubble-like behavior may come from an initial market leader obscuring what they're _actually_ doing and then lots of followers jumping on. Amazon was profitable on a unit-sold basis from Day 1, even before taking investment, but they invested all the profits back into capital improvements for the business, which made it look like they were hemorrhaging large amounts of money. Investors and other startups saw this and their success and thought "The way to succeed in the dot-com era is to burn lots of money!", completely overlooking that Amazon had validated their business model _beforehand_ and showed it to be profitable, and then only expanded afterwards.

I believe that the trend toward "Just get lots of users, and the money will follow!" in the mid-2000s had a similar origin. People saw the Google founders say "We didn't know how we were going to make money when we started", it worked out for them, and so they all started businesses where they had no idea how to make money. I'm about 98% sure that the Google founders had maybe a dozen ideas about how to make money at the time they incorporated, they just needed to test them (so their statement was technically true), and it was highly likely that at least one would work out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paulg's recent tweet sums up the response to this [1]:

> If you're expanding too fast, don't count on your board to warn you. As VCs, > kill-or-cure strategies serve their interests.

VCs like high burn rate companies, because they are beholden to VCs. So in the case that it does work out, the VCs will own a large percentage of the company.

If you are founding a company and hope for the company to be successful and generate some wealth for yourself, high burn isn't necessarily the right strategy.

1: [https://twitter.com/paulg/status/584468037559918593](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/584468037559918593)

<comment><USER6> i completely agree - and the article clearly fails to make a point of this

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> High burn rates serve VC interests. Not surprisingly this article was written by a VC. High burn rates make companies desperate for more cash on worse terms, diluting founders equity and control. High burn rates also indicate the company is shooting for the moon. VCs want unicorns, not just successful companies. They don't want your careful 100M exit of which you own 30%. They want a billion plus exit of which you own 5%. The former is far easier to achieve and most companies aiming for the latter burn out.

So basically, this article is entirely self serving. Surprise surprise. Listen at your own peril.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is not a quality article.

Presumably, the author is responding to Marc Andreessen's comments here:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-on-startup- bu...](http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-on-startup-burn-rates- worry-2014-9)

However, the author has ignored the qualifiers and substance of Marc's comments. Marc specifically said, _" behind the scenes, they're plowing through that money either on marketing, overhead, or some other expense, which results in high burn rates."_

Marc is talking about companies like Pets.com blowing wads of cash on Superbowl ads. He's not talking about a company like Tesla spending a lot of money on battery innovation and other core research. I think Marc knows the difference between the "burn rates" of Pets.com vs Tesla.

<comment><USER9> > Marc is talking about companies like Pets.com blowing wads of cash on > Superbowl ads. He's not talking about a company like Tesla spending a lot of > money on battery innovation and other core research. I think Marc knows the > difference between the "burn rates" of Pets.com vs Tesla.

Who's to say Tesla is spending their money wisely on battery tech investments? Only time will tell if their battery R&D bets will pay off and if not, perhaps they would have been better off spending that money on Super Bowl advertising.

<comment><USER8> >Only time will tell if their battery R&D bets will pay

My comment was not about an omniscient oracle predicting the future of winners and losers. Yes, Tesla may ultimately fail. We don't know yet.

The article is bad quality because it _misrepresents_ the statements by the VCs he's responding to. The three VCs Bill Gurley (Benchmark), Marc Andreessen (AH), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) of all people would absolutely know that you have to spend money to make money. And yes, that would sometimes involve high burn rates.

The author sets up a straw man by implying those VCs are so financially inept that they only look at "burn rate" in a naked and isolated manner with zero context to what each company is doing with the money. Therefore, he's supposedly the lone voice of reason. He thinks he's doing us a favor by explaining to us that "high burn rate" can be good and we're now smarter than those VCs for being englightened with such knowledge. Really?! I think that's insulting the intelligence of HN readers.

Seriously, does anyone think that Marc Andreessen who lived through the zero- profit cash burning days of Netscape before & after the IPO has no clue about stupid-vs-smart high burn rates?

Tesla is burning a lot of cash, and they may fail. If so, they would have gone down in a blaze of glory by way of investing in their technology and betting wrong instead of spending stupid money on distractions such as Superbowl ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the analysis but the headline is wrong, it isn't that burn rate doesn't _matter_ , it does, it is that it doesn't tell you anything about the underlying company. So as an evaluation metric it is less useful.

That said, VC money is very expensive money, so getting the most out of it is essential. Being afraid to use it is self defeating, and taking it for granted is risky. But pretty much everyone knows that :-)

<comment><USER11> We changed the title to a sentence from the article that better expresses its point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Burn rate is one of the few variables a startup can control. It matters. A lot.

I know burn rate can't be analyzed in a vacuum (how many variables can be?), and a high burn rate can be a good thing, but my guess is more companies fail (partially) due to poor management of capital than fail due to spending too slowly.

Are there many examples of the latter that anyone knows of, even if somewhat anecdotal?

<comment><USER13> No examples, but the observation that a great deal of success depends on luck, or chance, or whatever you want to call it. Factors beyond your immediate control. The lower your burn rate the longer your runway, all else being equal. The longer your runway, the more opportunities you have for the dice to roll your way.

Admittedly, all else will not be equal as your vary your burn rate, but keeping it down the bare minimum required to do the essential technological development, business development, marketing and sales will always give you better odds of long-term success. That "bare minimum" rate may actually be very high, but it's still something any CEO should be paying careful attention to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I stopped reading when he said something about simple algebra proving his point, and then posted some nonsensical equation that involved the concept of "milestones per month" or something like that.

For those of us that lived through the first round of internet/investor blowhards and shady math[1] this style of article is depressingly familiar.

Although at least now when I read this kind of nonsense no trees are killed in its delivery, so we've got that going for us.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Dow-36-000-Strategy- Profiting/dp/06098...](http://www.amazon.com/Dow-36-000-Strategy- Profiting/dp/0609806998)

<comment><USER15> "internet/investor blowhards and shady math"

Exactly this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author of the post - partner at an investment vehicle that invests in startups - severely damages the credibility of this post to me. Burn rate may not be something VC's care a ton about, in fact, one of the most common complaints I've heard about raising too much money is that the investors pressure you to spend it faster than you want or need to. For the startup, however, burn is one of the most important numbers to care about, since it determines how long you can live before needing to either raise more money or become profitable (or at least cash-flow positive).

</comment><comment><USER17> The article misinterprets the Gurley/Andreessen warning call - high overall burn INDUSTRY WIDE is a fair cause for concern and indicator of sub-optimal investing/operating, both for individual companies and for the VC industry as a whole.

On this article's own terms, if everyone is burning like crazy, then it likely that companies in all four quadrants of the high/low execution/efficiency, which means there is bad burn going on.

If you are a company, this means time for self-reflection: (if you want to take the article's framework seriously) which quadrant are you in? are you burning cash smartly or dumbly? Do you have framework for determining this? do you really believe your revenue can grow faster than your costs? are there places you can reduce cost? how much are you paying for growth in each of your channels, and which are actually worth it short and long term?

If you are a VC, it is time for portfolio-reflection and (if your portfolio companies are lucky) some hands-on portfolio-company coaching: is a company you funded raising again 6 months later (and was this planned…)? have you asked for a burn report and/or a path to profitability? does the board deck summarize the company's return on spending and tie results to spending (not necessarily in $$ to $$ numbers, but to users, engagement, etc.)? do your CEOs know their main costs, both fixed and variable?

When $$ floods the early-stage market, both companies and VCs do not ask themselves these types of questions enough, and I think Gurley/Andreessen are trying to signal the industry to get more mindful.

</comment><comment><USER18> As the article states, general advice won't apply to every situation, but I'd advise any startup that generates revenue to consider that their last round of funding is going to be their last. The startups that don't generate any revenue or very little revenue and have a exit strategy that requires them to be acquired or to get critical mass in order to exploit network effects are the exceptions.

It's great to fund growth by burning money, but once the company reaches a respectable size I'd make a plan for how to reach profitability and update it periodically. That plan might be as simple as ceasing all hiring for a year while the revenues grow enough to overtake costs.

</comment><comment><USER19> High burn rate is good if you spend it on obtaining market share. The money influx will stop. The moment that happens -your revenue better be higher than your expenses.

</comment><comment><USER20> The money influx won't stop, it will get worse over the next few years.

Consider the case of Europe. Negative yield curves but trillions in pension funds that need a positive nominal return (5% or so). If they invest even a portion of their portfolios in negative yielding bonds they then need to buy assets with growth potential to even it out, with PE and VC being the most attractive due to their illiquidity ironically.

This isn't like 00 when you could sell NASDAQ and buy US government bonds yielding 6.5%..

</comment><comment><USER21> The thing I'd like the HN crowd to take away from the article is that spending money is fine if its being done prudently (or even what some might deem a little recklessly) to grow or build an asset. And in fact, if you have the rare ability to create value out of cash, you should do so. Being profitable is comparatively easy.

</comment><comment><USER22> I disagree with the article because so many of these "unicorns" (yet another term underlining the neoteny and magical thinking of the Valley) aren't building the future. Building the future can pay off at VC-acceptable levels in the long term, but does not consist of huge-in-four-years-or-dead gambits.

It's true that, in the Valley, burn rate doesn't much matter. Your one job as a VC-funded startup CEO is to keep investors interested in you and happy. Throwing them expensive bones is better than throwing no bones. With the former, you may need to raise money in 18 months instead of 24, and they'll ask you a lot of questions about why the bone you threw them cost so much. With the latter, they fund your competitors, and then it's over because they've found a shinier, newer toy and, while you might want to switch stage to a sustainable lifestyle business that doesn't need VCs, in practice it's hard to do that in a company that was never built to last (and that probably couldn't withstand an "oops, we grew too fast" layoff) and because investors often won't let you hold growth to a sustainable rate.

<comment><USER23> Isn't the one job of a startup CEO to keep customers happy? Pandering to VCs to the detriment of customers seems like a surefire can't miss recipe for failure. Compare the biggest exits with the biggest disasters and you'll find that's the main thing that differentiates them.

<comment><USER24> VCs pay the bills and call the shots. In a not-yet-profitable startup, customers do neither by definition.</comment></comment></comment>


Interview Question: How to check multi-threaded applications? - <AUTHOR>

All,
I was asked this by one of my friends.
In my experience, multi-threaded apps are usually built with a premise of fire & forget (process incoming orders & dump to database), or drivers. (In Windows kernel, Windows passes requests to registered callbacks, so all instances of the callback will use the same synchronization object (if needed), so race conditions do not arise.)
The other general answer is to use formal methods. For example, Windows provides StaticDV to check your driver for race conditions.
I am still unsure if the answer is complete. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Your perception of experience is flawed. Ever user interface application is multi-threaded. It's actually fairly rare to run across a single threaded application anymore. Most single threaded applications are going to be daemons (system services), and even then most are multi-threaded.

The question is ill-stated as well. "How to check multi-threaded applications?" Do you mean "How do you debug multi-threaded applications?" or do you mean "How do you verify multi-threaded applications?"

There's a little coverage of a Microsoft tool called CHESS that is designed to help with unit testing of multi-threaded applications. More information at <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chess/> if you're looking at Microsoft technologies. IBM has ConTest [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-contest.htm...](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-contest.html).

For more information on unit testing multi-threaded applications, see <http://goodliffe.blogspot.com/search/label/threads>.</comment>


Taking care of the elderly in Silicon Valley – a personal story - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/03/taking-care-of-the-elderly-in-silicon-valley-a-personal-story/ <comment><AUTHOR> Was a bit surprised to see this piece from VentureBeat (guess that's why they called it OffBeat). My family has been taking care of my grandmother who has Alzheimers and Parkinsons and it's taken a tremendous toll on everyone, especially my father who is the main caretaker.

As someone in tech, it's stories and experiences like this that make me wonder if we're working towards something that will help those in need or if we're investing our time/money/energy in the right places. After all, everyone is going to die so I'm wondering what we can do to alleviate some of the pressure + pain from this part of life.

In this vein, if you know of opportunities to help the elderly in NYC, please let me know. I'm open and willing to spend my evenings and full weekends helping out however I can. Have reached out to a few senior centers, but most have not responded, unfortunately...

<comment><USER2> There are services in NYC where you can volunteer to simply talk to lonely elderly (or play card games or some other activity) in your neighborhood. I can't provide a link right unfortunately. You have to sign up, they'll verify you and then they'll connect to some lonely elderly in your area. Loneliness and isolation is understated.

<comment><USER3> My wife and I did this as our first date when we first started dating; we're both Christian if you're wondering why someone would do this on a first date. Unexpectedly, the lady we were to visit literally lived her last hour before she passed away before our eyes. We listened and comforted her husband for the next hour or so. We also listened to the CNA make the difficult calls to her children, some of which were out of state. It was a somber and humbling experience. Our seniors need love just as much as we do.

<comment><USER4> _we 're both Christian if you're wondering why someone would do this on a first date _

What does both of you identifying as christian have to do with anything? Are non-christians less likely to do empathetic things?

<comment><USER5> It's certainly worth knowing that Christianity, like most religious beliefs or philosophies, does not have a monopoly on empathy, kindness, or service, nor is its profession a guarantee that someone makes those things a studied part of their practice.

But the commentor's claims seem limited to Christianity as a motivator for _their_ behavior, which is hardly objectionable and a very different thing from your challenge-reading of their words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why mixed use multi generational housing should be developed. You get a community essentially where people can look after each other. Obviously memory care and assisted living is a different ball game but you can still have those facilities in the community as well.

<comment><USER7> don't you mean "reverted to"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My Mother-in-law could never figure out how to use a touchscreen phone. Getting her own phone line was very difficult and finding a good flip style phone is getting harder and harder.

I found that many newer models of cordless home phones will bluetooth tether to a cellphone. This way we could keep her phone plugged in and charged and she could just use the cordless style phone she was already accustomed to.

<comment><USER9> I've found that change in general is the problem. My grandma was able to use her old tube radio no problem but when it broke she never used the newer stereo, even though she only had to push one button.

30 years later same issue with my mom, she can navigate very complex tasks no problem but has trouble with anything new, even if it's much "easier" to use.

The trick would be to have new tech perfectly emulate whatever the old generation grew up with.

<comment><USER10> I wonder at what age that typically (if there is a typical experience) happens?

My mother is in her mid 70s and very far from a techie or tech-interested (worked in textiles/fashion, never used a computer before the current century & then first only for making free international calls via Skype as was setup by us) & slowly but surely adapted to some small variety of new tech especially after retirement when she had more time on her hand.

She does nothing fancy with it but is e.g. using a modern android phone to make video calls & send messages via whatsapp, play casual games, etc.

<comment><USER11> I think your parenthetic comment hints at the truth. There isn't a typical age, rather a wide age band where individuals may experience different declines.

With dementia, the descent can seem very rapid. One year, they are functioning well and adapting, but suddenly you realize they are in deep trouble. For a while, their adaptive energy may be devoted to covering up deficiencies. So, when this coping mechanism fails, the struggle suddenly emerges for all to see.

But, some people may fit the description of "unable to learn new things" long before that sort of dementia is relevant. They may be depressed, or may have a prideful personality which avoids the unknown because any trial and error learning is embarrassing. Frustratingly, it can also be hard to get elders in this category to go anywhere near a doctor for a better evaluation. And without a better understanding of what is going on, it can be difficult to identify an appropriate intervention or care approach.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. My dad was a physics professor and researcher who started his career in silicon valley in the 60s. You'd think he'd be interested in computer stuff but he lost his interest or maybe, like you're saying, finds trial and error embarrassing.

My mom never went to college but does a lot better with at least basic stuff like email. Once she was super motivated to find a gift for my kids and figured out how to buy it on ebay, something I didn't think she'd be able to do so a lot of it is willingness and motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was having a conversation about this with friends last weekend. Compared to Asia and Europe, it's really hard to grow elderly in America. America is an atomized, individualistic society, for better and worse. Aging related loneliness hits much harder here than elsewhere. It seems that in both the NYC metro area and SV metro area, it's not great to be elderly, and people don't treat the elderly very well. This is not the case in Asia where my parents are from, nor was it the case in the countries in Europe I visited. I guess there are the notable exceptions in America IE Florida, but I'm not sure if there are any other places where becoming elderly is remotely pleasant or not isolating (and I'm making huge assumptions about parts of Florida here).

I don't know if there's an easy solution to this problem. It seems to be a very deep part of a trade-off made very early on in the development of America's cultural fabric. I'm not sure if (knock on wood that I ever get there) I'd want to retire in America. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the grass is that much greener elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> I'm a Filipino and I can say we do take care of our elderly. Culture and religion train us to do so.

Often times taking them in to our home. But it's not all colorful. The Philippines is a third-world country and such there would be conflict in financial matters but still, Filipinos can take a lot of beating and hardships before giving up.

I see a lot of Americans retire here with their Filipino wives. Their dollars are giving them a good buck i.e. nice houses, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _The AARP said in "2019 Tech Trends and the 50+" that 115 million Americans over 50 represent an enormous market for technology and that by the end of the next decade this group is projected to spend $84 billion on tech products._

Yet major technology companies continue to make it difficult for seniors to do simple things, even though they _think_ they're making things easier. The tech hipsters handling design for FAANG companies should follow around a group of 70-somethings for a week and try to see the world through their eyes ... and realize that a huge segment of the population is not being served.

<comment><USER15> A short list:

1\. fonts too small

2\. buttons that do different things depending on how long the button is held down

3\. chording - needing to hold down more than one button simultaneously to do something

4\. blink speed - slow blink means one thing, fast blink means another. Is that LED blinking "slow" or "fast"?

5\. labeling buttons with icons that have no deducible meaning

6\. modes

7\. having to do the next step within a certain number of seconds or it fails and you have to start all over again

<comment><USER12> Reading each one of these made me silently scream inside. I'm not elderly yet (on the outside, I suppose), but each one of these things is poor UX and makes me absolutely livid.

<comment><USER15> They're incredibly common. I can't get the radio in my car out of certain modes I accidentally get into. It doesn't even have an off button. I essentially have to wait several minutes until it times out.

Many devices I have, once I lose the manual, are simply impossible to use because of the points listed above. My dashcam is simply impossible to use because of this, even though it has a bitmapped display. All it needs is power, menu, up, down, select and with a bitmapped display you can do anything with that. But noooo...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >> My mother's housing costs are moving past $6,300 a month

Holy shit. I can't imagine how the author can afford that plus take care of his family.

<comment><USER16> "Lead journalist" at VentureBeat must be more lucrative than I thought.

Is this housing cost a Silicon Valley thing? Like rents are completely insane, so elder housing is also completely insane?

It's not like I live in a cheap city, either. Boston is pretty pricey, but wow.

<comment><USER4> I suspect it's a labor thing as much as anything else. My father lived out his life at home, so I didn't have to deal with assisted living. However, the IRS is crystal clear that domestic employees are in fact employees subject to all the things like overtime and UI. California has even more generous overtime rules, but even just the base pay gets expensive. $20 * 24 * 7 = $3,360 in base pay per week. Using an agency simplifies things but is usually a bit more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it interesting that most of my company perks apply only to the employee, their spouse or domestic partner, and their children, but not to their parents or grandparents.

Your "family" could be covered by a great health insurance plan through your employer, but you wouldn't get any financial assistance on the $6,300 a month that the author of the article is paying for his elderly mother.

</comment><comment><USER18> So many problems would be solved if we could only cure dementia. Just my observation having taken care of my mom and dad and hanging around a lot in hospitals.

[Edit] Sorry my comment should have been placed in response to the one comment about what SV should really be investing in. Imagine if we had companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon trying to solve dementia rather than get more revenues through ads.

<comment><USER19> Or perhaps allowed compassionate euthanasia in severe cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My father lives in a small town in Tennessee where a lot of people have started to go to retire. A number of neighbors who have moved there in recent years have been from California trying to escape the high cost of living.</comment>


Mattermost 1.0 released – open-source Slack alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-reaches-1-0/ <comment><USER4> [http://getkaiwa.com/](http://getkaiwa.com/) is another Slack alternative that uses an XMPP backend, which IMO is much better than a custom backend. So far the only open source Slack clone I've seen that uses an existing standard for the backend

<comment><USER5> There are a slew of developers who tangled with XMPP and came away with very negative, well-founded reasons to dislike the protocol. Do you want XMPP because it is a standard, or you also have a contrary experience to these developers?

[1] [http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber](http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber)

[2] [http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a- box/](http://josephg.com/blog/xmpp-in-wave-in-a-box/)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810)

[4] [https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp](https://www.reddit.com/comments/rvzdp)

[5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040302)

For some balance, there are contrary opinions. This one seems to revolve around project governance.

[6] [http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber](http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Technical_Issues_in_Jabber)

And links [4] and [5] have a lot of people piping up saying they like XMPP just fine.

To be fair to XMPP, I strongly suspect it is a protocol trying to solve a very large, very messy problem space, and too many developers are trying to wrestle with it "raw" in its totality, unaware that for their specific problem domain, they only need a subset, and a specialized protocol/library that exposes only that subset to them. It's almost as if too few understand that XMPP is kind of the assembly language (or microcode?) of its problem domain, and most people need a $High_Level_Language_of_Choice instead.

<comment><USER4> I just like jabber because it's a standard. I have an app on my phone that'll do Jabber already. There's a lot of server software already out there to host Jabber, it's pretty robust, all we need is a reasonable frontend for desktop

<comment><USER6> The counter to that—and no doubt a factor for many like Slack—is that when you use a custom protocol/API you get to control the whole experience. You don't have to deal with bugs in third-party clients, wait for clients to get emoji support, and can control the look-and-feel (many of the Jabber apps I've seen aren't great).

This is obviously not ideal for everyone, but I suspect that outside of tech that using a custom client is possibly even a plus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great. Also see: [https://zulip.org](https://zulip.org)

And the blog on why Dropbox decided to OSS it:

[https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing- zulip-a...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a- dropbox-hack-week-project/)

<comment> dj-wonk > Every conversation in Zulip has a topic, so it's easy to keep conversations > straight.

Threads! Hooray.

<comment><USER8> Also my biggest feature request.

I tweeted it at Slack and they seemed surprised actually. (I didn't get the vibe like they're shipping it anytime soon.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Props for open-sourcing, but I'm putting my money on [http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)

<comment><USER10> Matrix does look awesome.

<comment><USER11> There's also "friends": [http://moose-team.github.io/friends/](http://moose- team.github.io/friends/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's good to have options.

The takeaway I'm getting from this story, and Mattermost, is: 1\. Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without them. 2\. Test that this works before putting years of data into a service.

There's nothing wrong with SaaS services, they just mean users must do their due diligence in any business partnership. I can't see how a game company can put their resources into delivering this as an open source project with no future plans for monetization. Frankly, without monetization, open source projects generally wither up and disappear. Then you're no further ahead.

[http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open- sou...](http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack- alternative/)

<comment><USER13> _> Export your critical data from SaaS services if you're business cannot exists without them_

You know, my thinking on this has really changed. Consider how many relatively successful life-forms cannot exist without a very specific other species of life. It is _also_ a good strategy to be flexible with your dependencies - <USER2> I think nature proves it's not required to survive and thrive.

Taking the long view, it's interesting to consider the possibility (which I'm sure has already happened multiple times in tech and elsewhere) when a company has absorbed it's dependency, and also when a dependency absorbs what was, at first, it's host, and successfully so.

The one thing that throws a monkey wrench into all of this is centralized human control, and a single mind is notoriously ephemeral, changing, and emotional. The CEO of your dependency might wake up one day from a terrible dream of humiliation and failure, and decide that he can't and won't just exist to serve his wretched, ungrateful customers in some insignificant and petty way, and will instead take a completely different path! (This risk is why greedy sociopaths make excellent corporate leaders: their drives are stable, predictable and unemotional, which makes them both competent and, ironically, safe.)

<comment><USER14> > Consider how many relatively successful life-forms cannot exist without a > very specific other species of life.

Let's ignore how "many relatively successful [extant] life-forms" versus the ones that had "evolutionary challenges." There is an _enormous_ difference between a species survival depending on the existence of a prey species and a species survival depending upon the existence of another species for uninterrupted, cooperative and coordinated behavior. Your relation to your SaaS provider is not similar to the blue whale's relationship with krill, it is more like the goby and the shrimp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ju-st Why do I have to go to slack.com to learn what this is?

I clicked on this link, no explanation. I checked mattermost.org, no explanation. I went to slack.com, no explanation. Then I clicked on a "Product" link on top of the webpage. Finally some information what this actually is.

Even open source projects could benefit from a little bit of marketing.

<comment><USER15> It's marketed as an "open source Slack clone". I suspect that if you don't know what Slack is, you aren't really the target market (at least for this version)

<comment><USER16> Did Apple market the iPhone as "a blackberry with a bigger screen"? No, and by not limiting themselves to an existing competitor's market, they kind of crushed them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If what you really want is a pretty web-based way to access IRC, then you might want to check out Glowing Bear -- it connects to your WeeChat IRC client via websockets and works nicely on the Desktop and on mobile. It doesn't have a voice recorder, but it gives you the infinite possibilities of a mature IRC client. It's a project I've been contributing to for a while now and I still absolutely love using it.

[https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear](https://github.com/glowing- bear/glowing-bear) [https://latest.glowing-bear.org/](https://latest.glowing- bear.org/)

<comment><USER18> It also supports Matrix natively as well as IRC, which almost gives you best of both worlds :) [http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat- plugin/](http://matrix.org/blog/project/glowing-bear-weechat-plugin/)

<comment><USER17> Yep! It can do whatever WeeChat can do. Tor, who made the Matrix script for WeeChat, is also one of the core developers of Glowing Bear :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There was a time when I thought something like this was a good idea. But after using Slack for about a week, there's no way I would give up all the benefits of a well-integrated centrally controlled service. All the clients work together perfectly. We have Slack channels with customers. It just all works much better than I can imagine any self-hosted, decentralized service would.

<comment><USER20> How a self-hosted service prevents you from having channels with customers or whatever else Slack offers?

The only upside of third-party SaaS is that you don't have to bother yourself to set things up and maintain them. Otherwise, I really don't see any limits that Slack can do but a self-hosted system can't.

<comment><USER21> I'm involved in a few communities that have slack setups. One of the other nice things that Slack offers is that I only need to have one login to all of them. That's something that none of the self-hosted systems can do right now.

<comment><USER20> Not sure I understand.

What prevents you from using a same identity to log in to multiple self-hosted instances?

I think it's the same. As far as I get it - haven't used Slack much - <USER3> Slack you either have to use different email address to create account for each team (subdomain), or you have to be explicitly invited. Or maybe I got a wrong idea. Either way, while I'm not sure all self-hosted alternatives have options to consume external identities (be it third-party leased ones like Google account or self-originating ones), at least some have those. Which means the authentication is fairly transparent.

<comment><USER21> I'm talking about using slack as a member of various groups, with very different focuses. The fact that it is centralized means I don't need to have Yet Another Server I have to remember the address to, the username, the password, etc, and enter in on my desktop, my laptop, my mobile, etc. Plus, if one of those decentralized instances has a mobile app, chances are, I'd have to put in configuration info there for each and every service. Self-hosted communications services quickly become a pain in the ass when you end up needing to deal with more than a couple, and sometimes centralizing things a bit is an actual benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think Slack serves its stated purpose very well (smaller, business oriented teams), but many groups have started using it for larger communities, mostly because it has unlimited users for free. But it isn't made for that and there is no way that most of these groups would ever be able to pay for a premium subscription due to the per-user costs. 10K messages across all channels is surprisingly easy to hit, need the ability to ignore users, etc. I think this project has great potential to fill that niche if it is marketed properly. Slack is so close to working well in that area but really needs to pivot to be able to serve it well and make money doing it.

<comment><USER23> Yes, recently Slack even told Reactiflux that they need to move to another service as more than a few thousand users can not be handled by the Slack infrastructure.

<comment><USER24> That isn't true. My office slack has a few thousand users and it works just fine. I'm not saying it can scale to infinity, but it does handle a few thousand users without any issues.

<comment><USER25> I have no clue what the exact numbers are, but apparently it _is_ an issue:

[http://www.reactiflux.com/](http://www.reactiflux.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm trying to decide if this is better than Zulip. They're both open source, backed by someone trusted, and I can run it on my own server.

<comment><USER27> We tried Mattermost at work, and it was pretty terrible. Things like "show new messages" didn't work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a chat app. After that we tried RocketChat, which seems a lot closer to Slack in terms of features and appearance. From our perspective they were just too rough around the edges for functionality, with a lot of things almost-working-but-not- quite. The caveat to all of this is that we wanted something that JustWorks, so while we did put in some effort to fix configuration and even some bugs in the software, we didn't commit to them 100% so YMMV.

We started up on Zulip when it came out a few weeks back, and it's been much better and more consistent. Streams and topics take a while to get used to, but they make it easier to have public conversations with some semblance of organization. If you don't like / can't afford Slack, or if you have privacy needs that make it a non-starter, I would recommend giving Zulip a try.

<comment><USER28> do you know if Zulip exposes an API ? We are currently using Slack as a chat dashboard for operations .. and we do some funky stuff like create channels,etc through the API. I wonder if Zulip allows that.

<comment><USER27> Channels don't exactly exist, but you can programmatically create topics within streams. Sometimes it gets to be overwhelming, like out GitHub bot that posts every PR for every repo under its own topic within the GitHub stream. It's definitely a new way of thinking about chat, and there's a learning curve of about a week, but so far it's been fantastic.

I've used Slack and HipChat previously, and AFAIK the integration methods are all roughly equivalent - post a message to a URL with a token.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting that it will be a default feature of Gitlab.

That's a move that seems like it may push Gitlab ahead of GitHub in some ways (well, to me at least).

</comment><comment><USER30> There are many OSS alternatives to Slack. Some are clones and some are different approaches and many of them are quite good.

The thing these and all other similar efforts miss is the importance of network effects. Everyone uses Slack because everyone uses Slack.

The real problem that needs to be tackled is one layer down: providing an open, distributed alternative for authentication, identity management, and data interchange that is secure and robust enough to provide a backplane for things like this and that is easy enough for _anyone_ to use that it can be pushed out to the mass market. I can't stress the last point enough. It must be stupid simple easy to use or it will fail. It also must offer a good and simple _developer experience_ (DX) or it will fail. DX is part of UX. Things like XMPP are nightmares for devs and sysadmins and fail badly here.

This is a huge missing piece of the web.

</comment><comment><USER31> Well.... this is depressing -

Mattermost server is made available under two separate licensing options:

\- Free Software Foundation's GNU AGPL v.3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or \- Commercial licenses available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting firstname.lastname@example.com

"To simplify licensing, we've responded to community feedback and the _compiled_ version of Mattermost v1.0 is now under the MIT open source license" (Emphasis mine)

Why just the compiled version?

<comment><USER31> They also seem to use a hosted JIRA, but restrict some of the tickets from being viewed, and you need an account to file Jira's.

There is also no mention of it in the "getting involved" section, just a link to github issues

This is not how you do open source.

<comment><USER32> > This is not how you do open source.

Sure, maybe they should have never released this useful software at all. /S

Mattermost started, and is still developed AFAIK, as an internal app from a for-profit company, that they've generalized and started releasing to the community.[1]

Considering that they _only just hit 1.0_ , maybe your tone is a bit harsh compared to their ever-so-slight mis-steps.

Let's be constructive.

1 [http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open- sou...](http://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack- alternative/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Since we are talking about open source software, maybe the guys that own the Mattermost account on Github could create a placeholder repo for Android (I wonder if this idea would work for iPhone, too) and accept Pull Requests until there is at least a beta native app.

</comment><comment><USER34> Would be happy to move over to an open source alternative, but at the moment they don't seem to support mobile apps.

It would be very difficult for us to move because of this, we talk a lot on the move.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how this compares to Rocket.Chat, another open-source alternative: [https://rocket.chat/](https://rocket.chat/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Doesn't this have some heavy hardware requirements? Three machines with at least 2 GB of RAM? Is that really necessary if I'm going to chat with five people?

</comment><comment><USER37> This looks very nice. Is there any plans for an API/client protocol? Web client is all well and good, but I'd want to have a solid console client, as well as some command line tools (eg: "echo "Some message" | xmpp user@host -- where the equivalent for Mattermost would allow to set the topic, or message a group via a bot etc.)?

<comment><USER38> Thanks e12e!

We're working on shipping a high quality set of APIs. We're doing these in parts so we can design and document them well.

Mattermost v1.1 ships on October 16 and offers incoming webhooks as a start: [http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/](http://www.mattermost.org/webhooks/)

You'll find a link there to an open source sample app for customizing how you want webhook events from GitLab to appear.

Mattermost incoming webhook support ships with GitLab 8.1 on October 22.

For Mattermost v1.2 (November 16), we're working on outgoing webhooks, which could offer the ability to fire off console commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Overall I like it because they closely follow Slack's UI. However I question the choice of fully supporting Markdown. A comment isn't supposed to be documentation. Supporting things like bold, italic makes sense for emphasis or making code easier to read. But headings? When would one ever want really large text in a comment?

<comment><USER38> Mattermost team here,

We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we added it because it made sense.

Now we really love it and can't go back: [http://www.mattermost.org/open- source-slack-alternative-adop...](http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack- alternative-adopts-markdown/)

Headings have a lot of uses for emphasizing text, and there's fun uses too like creating different sized emoticons: [http://www.mattermost.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.p...](http://www.mattermost.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/sheep.png)

##### :sheep:

#### :sheep:

### :sheep:

## :sheep:

# :sheep:

<comment><USER39> > We had dozens of community members upvote a feature to add markdown and we > added it because it made sense.

What made sense? Is there a use case that requires full Markdown support? If so, what is it?

<comment><USER40> I use Slack's 'Posts' feature which is a full Markdown post that you can embed in a chat in Slack.

The reasons I use these are: 1\. Rich content, organized & clean lists with outbound links for status updates about things I'm working on, linking to Asana/Github 2\. Notes from one on ones, or general progress updates that I keep in a private channel and save basically as a stream-of- consciousness/reality log, having them there makes them readily accessible in product and having them in Markdown makes them very readable when I'm browsing through.

In short, I treat Slack rooms almost like I would treat a folder in Dropbox, they just happen to also include some chat between people :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In my past job, I was desperately looking to get an open source Slack alternative. The ones I tested then (few months back) didnt hold up nicely against Slack. I'm happy to see that finally there's some good competition.

<comment><USER42> did you ever come across matrix.org? We are similar to mattermost in that we are open source and you can host your own server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If it supports SSL XMPP it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of companies.

</comment><comment><USER44> Feature idea: a canvas where people could draw instead of typing a text.

</comment><comment><USER45> The blog post is dated October 2nd; Is HN just learning of this announcement late, or is their blog displaying the draft date rather than the publication date?

</comment><comment><USER46> So, what does this offer over Slack, besides being open-source? I see no mention of any actual features, besides basic chat features.

<comment><USER22> open-source, self-hosting, non-english channels, better markdown support. No limits on searching and self-hosting I think are the biggest things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've spent a couple of hours trying to get Docker running on my linode Ubuntu server to no avail.

A non-docker implementation would be nice.

<comment><USER48> I consider myself to be a person of reasonable competence and I find Docker to be confounding.

<comment><USER47> I have 30 years in IT, my friend who is a sysadmin also tried to get Docker running on my server. He gave up too.

<comment><USER49> Maybe give CentOS 7 a try? It's literally install the rpm, start the docker service, then run whatever container you want to run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Besides being an excellent application, this is a valuable resource for anyone studying Golang.

<comment><USER38> Pull requests from Golang community highly appreciated, you can view our process and tickets accepting pull requests at: [https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/devel...](https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/master/doc/developer/Code- Contribution-Guidelines.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Does anyone know who the old provider was that locked in their data?

</comment><comment><USER52> Why not just use IRC ?

<comment><USER53> Why not use horses instead of cars?

Note, I'm not especially praising for this product, but I am for slack vs irc.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Is IRC supposed to be the car or horse in this analogy? I'm convinced of the former.

<comment><USER54> The main issue with IRC is that you have to stay connected all the time to recieve messages, and you have to leave your IRC client to see and search the logs (unless you have some intermediate IRC client server that runs all the time). It's just not as nice.

<comment><USER55> > intermediate IRC client

A bouncer? Usually pretty straightforward to install, and quite mature in features.

<comment><USER56> Yet it's not something that IRC provides out of the box.

I've got no issues running my own ZNC bouncer, but when you're choosing a product that an entire organization will use (including people who have no idea what "ZNC" means other than 3 letters), IRC is lacking a lot of features that get mentioned in every HN chat solution thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Can it send push notifications or other alerts to my phone?

</comment><comment><USER58> Congratulations, Mattermost team! Huge accomplishment :)

<comment><USER38> Thanks mholt!! We're working every day to make something people want,

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Just what we need, another solution to a problem that was solved two decades ago!</comment>