Comment by tiffanyh
2 days ago
A lot of people seem confused about how they raised the money, but it’s actually a pretty easy VC pitch.
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?
Might want to change that username before you make your pitch
The question is not "will the product be better." The question is will you make the investors money.
I understand that money is at the root of the question. I don't see any problem with my strategy for making money, which is to win over all their users with a wildly better product.
Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their userbase until they could start to land corporate contracts.
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That is an empirical question answered by the market. The way you get your answer is to build it, get it in front of people, and see if they use it. Then you will know.
Note that if you want to be the answer, then you have to prioritize other things than the technology. You can have the best product, but if nobody knows about it you're stuck.
Quite! It just happens that so far I've been stuck on purpose.
The nature of developing standards is that you can't have people start adopting them until they're done.
Reach out to investors that you or your friends/family have an existing relationship with. If that's not an option your odds of being funded are slim. Consider going to Stanford or networking with them another way; the latter being much easier if you're already wealthy.
This might sound like a joke or overly cynical but I'm being totally serious. Merit and product quality are only very loosely correlated with funding success at this stage.
The vast majority of projects don't get VC funded and of the small number that do most have some sort of relationship or other in into the funding world.
This doesn't mean you can't get funded, but it's a huge longshot. If you already have an income and some savings consider bootstrapping the project yourself, at least until you have some traction in the market.
I appreciate the advice, but I'm a couple steps ahead of you. I spent 10 years mastering my trade (UI) working in San Francisco and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and that's when I saved enough money to allow myself to work on this for the last 5 years.
And fortunately I don't need anyone's permission. It's just too late to stop the wave of change that's coming now. After 5 decades, the punchcard is finally going to be retired as the primitive at the heart of all programming.
Step 1: don't pitch from a conartist6 username
It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense if you know that my name is Conrad.
It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.
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It's not that other people are famous. They have a track record in this exact field, where he produced results and made money for investors. His results help to shape how software development gets performed.
They are using fame and past success as a proxy. You would need to do it on the basis of your ideas and the work that you have done. Someone really knowledgable would need to dig deep on your work and then the VCs will need to trust these person(s). The other alternative might be to try to get traction with users like Linus did with git and hope that they like it enough that it becomes popular. But Linus had the advantage of being famous and highly respected already,
I've considered trying to get Linus to be the knowledgeable person given his history. I haven't actually reached out though.
I badly want someone to take that deep dive given the work I've put in to be ready for it
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>I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
This sounds like one of those "Hacker News Dropbox" comments...
The trick to raising money is being able to convince an investor you are the person to build that platform, not being able to build the platform.
No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering.
Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?
I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).
It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git, and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants on:
- Will their version control solution fall apart if there are not enough line breaks in the code?
- Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict? Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.
- Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-grained level (per-second resolution)
- Will their solution's performance break down if there is too much code in one file?
- How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?
This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's serious about replacing git; it just seems like they haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.
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Sadly you can't, and this is a huge flaw in the venture capital model. They invest in people that they think other vcs will invest in. More often than not who your parents are matters more than anything (unless you've had a huge exit like the OP). They'll also throw money at you if you come from a rich family, not because they think you'll succeed, but because they want your family's money as LPs in their funds.
Well regardless of whether it's hard or impossible, I'm doing this. I'm going.
The problem they have is that they're betting git is a solid foundation to build on. A tectonic change like git actually being replaced wouldn't just eliminate their moat, it would leave them trapped on the wrong side of it.
I can't win their game, so I'm changing the game.
You can stop at bullet #1 and that's plenty to raise $17m on right there. No questions asked.
I use Git as a deduplication compressing backup tool. Git is fine and useful for a multitude of uses both manual and automated. Maybe the UI aka. porcelain is a bit clunky, but Git was explicitly intended to be separated into porcelain and plumbing, so that you can use the plumbing to make your own porcelain.
From git(1):
I watched video to see where my prompts etc are stored in a way that makes sense. But no, this is just a nicer git. We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.
Another comment [1] has a solution - a new tool called pit, it just throws the whole 10k loc PR in a pit and forgets about it :p
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713650
> We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.
One of the most idiotic things about the whole LLM craze is the idea that we have to change all of our infrastructure to accommodate LLMs instead of figuring out how to train LLMs to make better commits.
Agreed. Although I’m not sure what’s nicer about it. It’s in color. But I failed to understand why I’d want any of those features.
Makes sense to me. The new coding agents are drastically changing software development, and I think there's a lot of space for innovation in how version control tooling works in this new world.
Why should ai need this? A linear backlog is enough, a cache, for everything else they can create it new in a short time.
Another commenter explained it: It's about working on multiple branches in parallel. You can only check out one branch at a time currently in git - but with "but" you have all the changes just in memory so different agents can work on different branches at the same time.
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They actually started before the LLM craze. The original pitch was just better Git.
put differently: there's already a lot of money moving from A to B as people use AI & agentic coding. Find a way to get yourself in the middle of that cash flow and suck out a few percentage points of it .. profit!
Put another way: the idea didn't raise $17M, the team did. That's usually the case but you can fully expect a pivot in their future.
Once open source spreads into an area, it tends to kill (commodify) commercial software in that space.
For example, with databases, MySQL and Postgres "won". Yes, there are commercial databases like SQL Server and Oracle but they largely exist through regulatory capture and inertia. It's highly unlike anyone will ever make a commercial general purpose database again. There are always niche cases.
Same with operating systems. Yes we have MacOS and Windows but what are the odds we get another commercial mass OS? I'd say almost zero.
It's the same for source control. Git "won". There are a handful of others (eg Mercurial). But gone are the days of, say, Visual Source Safe.
But when people talk about "what comes after Git" they really mean (IMHO) "what comes after Github", which is a completely different conversation. Because Github absolutely can be superseded by something better. Will it though? I don't know. It has an incredible amount of inertia.
As for AI and anything related to source control, I'd have a hard time betting against Anthropic. But remember the exit could be an HN post of "We're joining Anthropic!". Side note: I really hate this "we're joining X" framing. No, you took the bag. That's fine. But let's be honest.
For people with a proven track record, AI is a gold rush of acquisition more than creating a sustainable business, let alone an IPO. I think that's what this bet is.
GitHub has already been bettered - gitlab is much better, in my opinion.
And Self hostable.
wasn't there another GitHub cofounder that recently also had some similar product launched?