If you can't communicate that you are on to an actual win before the cash runs out that's failure, pure and simple.
I've seen more than a few of these 'oh, if only we had more money we'd have surely made it' or even 'the shareholders killed our company by refusing to invest any more' but that's in all of the cases that I've seen simply a company that is on life support from day #1 but refusing to admit the reality of the situation: that it's time to move on.
Been there, done that, and I totally sympathize with how it feels but coming up with a realistic time-to-market and an actual working setup is part and parcel of success, the lack thereof is highly correlated with failure and/or acquihires.
VCs don't have a set timeframe for your success, you set that timeframe yourself when you go and ask for money in the first place. There are some exceptions to the rule (Cisco comes to mind) but in general this is just another form of failure. Getting funding is to get someone to write a lottery ticket, they are under no obligation to provide more funding than that particular time and failure to raise more money from existing investors or new ones is strongly correlated with an inability to admit to failure and/or pivot fast enough that you can still land on your feet. This sort of introspection is a massive advantage for founders that are capable of doing that, and a huge hindrance for those that believe so strongly in their vision that they can not depart from their tracks until they hit the wall.
Failure as a VC-funded enterprise != failure of the underlying 'thing' as a concept. A programming language seems to be a weird fit for the VC model in the first place, no?
Yes, that's true and that's why I state my position: the choice to bring in foreign capital changes the equation drastically. They were lucky to get funded, and burned through the cash at a higher rate than they should have to make it to the finish line.
I don't see how you can blame the VCs for that. I've seen a couple of VCs invest in language eco systems and/or language related products and some of those are quite successful but they had a working product and paying customers, they decided to use VC as an accelerator which is perfectly ok.
If you need VC to do your basic research and you are pre-product with all kinds of unknowns then that's a bad match regardless of the field, unless you make it perfectly clear up front that you expect that follow on rounds are going to be required.
As for outcomes: there are successes, soft landings and failures, I have not seen a fourth case in practice across many, many companies. Not as many as YC but a fairly representative fraction of that number.
I interpreted the title of this submission to mean "Has anyone exhaustively tried out Bret Victor's ideas?" With respect to Eve, the answer is that although we tried many things he demoed, we didn't try them all, and therefore I characterized it as not being a full attempt at his ideas. And to be clear, I don't want to sell Chris short by implying that Eve was just some attempt at reifying Bret's ideas, because Eve did have a lot of ideas that didn't come from Bret (or that Bret himself got from others like Kay).
Whatever failings of Eve a business idea (admittedly many), it didn't prove that these ideas are a dead end. Far from it, we arrived at the best ideas toward the end of our runway. Early on we spent a lot of time trying things out that seemed cool in Bret's demos, but didn't really scale to being an actually useful tool, either because the demo was too niche (e.g. the Mario jumping thing), or because it wasn't actually a useful thing (e.g. live coding by recompiling a program on every keystroke). That's what the 2mil actually bought I think.
In the end, we abandoned the business but not the ideas. The Eve v0.6 runtime was forked into Mech, and although that's been largely replaced by now, it still maintains the spirit. Chris has been working on his own project for a while now based on the final Eve prototypes that we demoed right before we closed up shop.
> burned through the cash at a higher rate than they should have to make it to the finish line.
We were actually very frugal with the money, and set the burn rate as low as we reasonably could. Most of it went to our 5 salaries, which were far below market in SF; and our rent, which was pretty reasonable for SOMA. Like I said, Paul took a different more drastic approach with Dark to set their burn rate even lower, but Chris (and all of us really) didn't want to go that way because it was better working on Eve as a team. The best thing we could have done actually would have been to leave SF, but that wasn't really an option for many reasons.
The problem with determining burn rate to make it to the finish line is: how do you a priori figure out where the finish line is in such a nebulous space? We went home in the end, because the entire idea of Eve was essentially about trying to identify that line. How far did we need to push in order to get to a business that empower a billion to code? We identified several viable businesses along the way (you can see companies like Wix and Miro becoming large in this timeframe, and Eve could have been something like that), but they weren't the business, the one that would bring a billion other people into coding. Low-code isn't the way.
I'm sure we could have convinced some VC to fund a low-code SAAS at the time -- we had the team to build it. But it was a decision we made to actively not do that thing, and shoot for the moon. Can't blame VCs for not funding that kind of ambition in perpetuity, but I still can't characterize the effort, not having realized its full vision, as a full attempt.
Excellent comment, thank you for the additional insight. In my opinion - but feel free to ignore it - you either start such a project from within a university, a large company that then funds it all the way through (though the project can still get axed) or you bootstrap it whilst being extremely frugal. VC is an extremely bad match for such a project for many reasons, just when in the life cycle of a fund an investment is made can have a very large effect on the outcome.
Betty Blocks comes to mind, they are funded and Mendix eventually got acquired by Siemens so there are some examples of success stories in this space but also many failures and compared to those two this is a much more ambitious project and much more risky as well.
And I agree that you can't a-priori determine how much cash you will need but you can make sure that you either have plenty or nothing at all assuming that the finish line is achievable in the first place, which I'm not necessarily sold on.
I've seen more than a few of these 'oh, if only we had more money we'd have surely made it' or even 'the shareholders killed our company by refusing to invest any more' but that's in all of the cases that I've seen simply a company that is on life support from day #1 but refusing to admit the reality of the situation: that it's time to move on.
Been there, done that, and I totally sympathize with how it feels but coming up with a realistic time-to-market and an actual working setup is part and parcel of success, the lack thereof is highly correlated with failure and/or acquihires.
VCs don't have a set timeframe for your success, you set that timeframe yourself when you go and ask for money in the first place. There are some exceptions to the rule (Cisco comes to mind) but in general this is just another form of failure. Getting funding is to get someone to write a lottery ticket, they are under no obligation to provide more funding than that particular time and failure to raise more money from existing investors or new ones is strongly correlated with an inability to admit to failure and/or pivot fast enough that you can still land on your feet. This sort of introspection is a massive advantage for founders that are capable of doing that, and a huge hindrance for those that believe so strongly in their vision that they can not depart from their tracks until they hit the wall.