Incredible quality! I also expected a time lapse, but the variety and consistency while maintaining beautiful composition & colour is truly impressive.
Great to see more support for Godot! The lead VC and the company pledges bode well for keeping the bulk of the new tech open I think.
Biggest red flag is the lack of anyone with games pedigree. If the goal is to crack the duopoly with a great FOSS engine supported by paid BaaS + enterprise support plans, you’re going to need strong connections, partners, and knowledge of the real product requirements. First sales will be pretty challenging, but if they can get traction and ship great games there’s certainly an opportunity
How have you communicated your cap table and investment activities to the lead? Does the lead want the whole round? Did the higher valuation come from the lead or you? Provided you aren’t trying to shift their stake or acted as n bad faith, a reasonable VC should be fine with adding valuable people to help the company.
SAFE that basically auto executes sounds like a strong option to me
Tough situation, clearly lots of emotions which is understandable. As others mention, startups are high risk, don’t let cofounders manipulate your thinking on that.
Re:launch cost & funding, I’d ask if you actually need that money. Can you get any customers with what you have? Investors are spoiled for choice, and can afford to make startups hit higher burden of proof before funding. Regardless of market challenges, showing sales & fit is a big deal. Getting that could change your fortunes.
If you do shut down, take pride in what you tried to do. Be sure to do a post mortem and take the learnings with you in your career. Startup or not, you’ve done something very hard that very few try. It will serves you well as n future work
I agree the first two points are more about understanding trade-offs - but the result is still focus. Overall I thinks it’s a good articles about achieving goals. Focus can be an overused word, but still works well here IMO
If your org is 10 moving to 50 in a few months then you have a BIG change ahead. The good news is that you are responsible for how your team operates. You've identified problems, and now you get to fix them - not by coding, but through leadership & culture. This isn't to say it's easy, it's a massive challenge, but it is yours to solve and does require technical knowledge and skill.
No first time CTO's had it figured out either - continue to show the courage to ask advice (as you've done here) and figure it out bit by bit. Nobody has made your org before - there's no playbook only prior work.
The flip side is if that is of zero interest, you're likely in the wrong role. No shame, depends what motivates you.
Absolutely, I hope we get to hear the story at some point - so much bad blood between AL and IS. With this proposal coming on the day of Unity's shareholder meeting, and sending weak signals about AppLovin's outlook, it's such a weird play. I'm too much of a rube to know if it's brilliant or desperate, but I'm sure it's a good story regardless
A four month old company worth 4B would feel like an invincible rocket ship. Hard to be rational in that case. I’m sure they told themselves the story of Facebook turning down the 1B acquisition way back and saw themselves with the better story
Waterloo region is building density, despite complaints (1), because there’s no supply. People claim to want all of: affordable housing, no sprawl, no community impact - but that’s not possible. Glad they prioritized units, although a lot are still condos which are not quite ‘affordable’, but the supply will help
