Comment by sxiao
5 years ago
Am I the only one?
Next just bought its biggest upcoming competitor—SvelteKit. Next is the best that React has to offer but it still has flaws. Svelte and SvelteKit are so awesome you cannot believe it before you've built something bigger and so much ahead of the entire React ecosystem. We migrated a huge/complex React app in a month and the difference is night and day (performance/bundle size/dev productivity). React was great but it's time to move on.
I'm disappointed by Rich. Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)—he just cashed out (sky-high compensation and ESOP). Not a rant and to give you some background, one major reason we went with SvelteKit was not to rely on the Next team. And now, I am again with them...
Now we have a monopoly of rare, modern SSR frameworks.
I understand this perspective! But as anyone who knows me will tell you, I would be the worst person in the world to try and build a business around Svelte. As others have said, the expectations from investors would make it far less likely that Svelte could remain a community-centric project.
It's important to clarify that Vercel (which has earned its open source bona fides) hasn't 'bought' Svelte or SvelteKit. It's more accurate to say that they're supporting Svelte's development by paying for a full time engineer to work on it. There's a healthy core team of developers who certainly won't relinquish _their_ independence because of _my_ career choices.
It's fair to be sceptical about all this! But I've had multiple conversations throughout this process where the importance of maintaining independence was expressed by both sides, and I truly believe this is the best outcome for Svelte and its community.
Congrats on the job, Rich! I've been using Svelte, Typescript & Babel in the past couple of months to build a set of TV apps targeting some fairly slow and ancient devices and it's been brilliant. Totally impossible to do that with React, I do know some people who tried it though.
Rich, I know where you come from, and I wholeheartedly believe what you say. But this is just the start of a relationship between you and Vercel. And you know that relationships will change over time and so on. And you won't.be.independent. There is just too much money on the table. Nobody will give you orders, there are much smarter ways.
The point is, Vercel did everything right, no blame to them, great CEO, awesome Tim, they are masterminds and their great social media army does their best to celebrate this event in all social networks atm. But you know yourself very well that one player just left the market. We will face less competition and possibly stagnation in some areas. This doesn't hurt Vercel nor you but us.
Ofc you will be dependent, they pay you, you want Vercel to be successful (ESOP). We will see, e.g. that Vercel will be a first-class citizen as deployment option. There are many more fields where Vercel can/will get a special treatment, so subtly that nobody will get it. Business is more sophisticated than many might think.
Or think this the way around, there endless possibilities to drive somebody down, demotivate and degenerate him to a point where he looses all his drive and motivation. Look at yourself today, look how much energy and charisma you have when holding speeches about Svelte. In 2 years, go back to this comment and ask yourself if you are the same energetic Rich, if you are happy and if sold out too early 2 year ago.
> I would be the worst person in the world to try and build a business around Svelte.
No you just underestimate yourself. What are you doing right now? Giving talks, writing, communicating. People, masses follow you not just because Svelte is great, no because you can communicate well and know how to lead people. This is what a CEO is doing 99% of his day. This is building a business, communicating, finding and winning the best people.
You found already the best people, just look in your repos and look which contributors work for Svelte! And you were the leader, had an as good team as Vercel and follow now...
And if I watch you talking there is a strong desire to be more (not that a dev is less!). Whatever, I'd have expected that you at least went shopping with Vercel's offer to CloudFlare. I mean they do real rocket science (Durable Objects) and you opt for Next which started to renovate their stack (esm, swc) just recently after years.
Oh man, I like you too much to be too angry but yeah, not happy.
We're all lucky that you got a polite, substantive reply, but please don't cross into personal attack like this in HN comments. It generally causes discussion quality to tank drastically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
@dang, second reply and apologies, now I know what you mean, I edited some part away which you probably meant and which is still in quotes of others' comments. Sorry, I'll try to improve and thanks for the hint!
Can't follow you, what do you mean/where did I cross into personal attacks? I highly appreciate Rich but the elephant in the room had to be addressed, especially on HN.
I wonder that I am the only one that questions his move and that you also approach me instead of welcoming a healthy debate. Whatever, I guess you just do your job.
Btw, when does HN get proper pagination and a darkmode?
Do I get shadowbanned now for asking too many questions?
This is the part I meant:
> I'm disappointed by Rich. Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)—he just cashed out
That includes a lot of assumptions and is unduly personal. I realize you're coming from a place of being a fan, but still, there's an ordinary human being on the receiving end of such comments.
Of course I'm not banning you, just trying to persuade you to post more in the spirit of the site! But please stop taking the thread further in this off-topic and personal direction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191992 are definitely not helping.
> Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)
In no world would taking VC funding have been easier. They’d want cash returns and hockey stick growth, and soon. So instead of focusing on making the framework as good as it could be, Rich’s attention would be diverted.
When SvelteKit becomes a framework impossible to run on anything that isn’t a Vercel platform, then maybe I’ll be outraged. Until then, subjecting an incredibly talented developer to the day-to-day whims of VCs seems like just about the worst outcome for everyone.
I don’t normally mean to sound uncharitable but your original comment is pretty uncharitable to Rich, so: if you want a stable platform that will live for many years to come, the absolute last thing you want is for it to take VC investment. That you don’t see this speaks volumes to your understanding of how any of this works.
> In no world would taking VC funding have been easier.
Did I say that? Or that Rich should have taken the easier path? No, everyone should always take the harder path. But this is a deeper discussion.
> I don’t normally mean to sound uncharitable but your original comment is pretty uncharitable to Rich,
But your tone towards me is better?
> That you don’t see this speaks volumes to your understanding of how any of this works.
If you think so, fine, but I'm pretty sure that I've raised more money and more rounds than you but this shouldn't qualify me to be right or wrong. I focus on what you write and what I've written and I think I brought good arguments that a market turned into a monopoly and this is not great. Can we blame Rich, probably not. Can be disappointed and still respecting him? Yes.
interesting that you think talking to a VC and starting a startup (where he would be spending >50% time on business things and be forced to come up with a monetization plan) is better for svelte than getting fulltime sponsorship to solely work on Svelte and working with the top tier talent at Vercel.
Exactly. I think the OP does not know what it means to "raise money" and go at it. It would turn that person into a full time business owner.
Svelte and Vue got started when someone just went and did it. If you think it's so important to have many competitors in this space, just go and do it :)
This is all that’s wrong with open source free software. You’re disappointed by how someone chooses to give you free stuff.
I built this to avoid this exact problem: https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick.
No desire to be acquired (open to investment but that's it), just build a business around accompanying features/services.
Goal is fast, simple, and friendly regardless of your skillset. No lock-in as the entire thing is a thin abstraction over Node.js/Express.js and components are built using plain HTML, CSS, and JS (no special languages or syntax). Also adding in a lot of helper stuff so you're not stuck cobbling together random packages for common stuff (i18n, form validation, etc).
Feel free to email me if you or your team have questions: ryan.glover@cheatcode.co.
Feel free to make your own alternative, the world's your oyster.
The framework appears to have an MIT license and lots of contributors so I wouldn't worry too much.
> I'm disappointed by Rich. Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)—he just cashed out (sky-high compensation and ESOP). I lost all my respect. Not a rant to give you some background, one major reason we went with SvelteKit was not to rely on the Next team. And now, I am again with them.
Who the hell do you think you are? You don't know his situation. You don't know anything. How do you know he doesn't have a gravely ill family member and needs a steady income more than he needs to "think big" about a fucking javascript framework? How do you know he's not deeply in debt from a past mistake? How do you know he doesn't find the tech obsession with "VC" funding repugnant? No one needs sxiao's judgment.
Please don't respond to something bad by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only makes things worse.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....