Remember, this is the project that raised ~$30m from Benchmark and Sequoia.
There was a controversial "quality doesn't matter for software products" post and discussion[0] here on HN a few days ago and this is a beautiful example.
Product may matter eventually, but you can sure surf the hype for a long time before the reckoning comes (and if you're lucky, you may even be able to get someone else to hold the bag then).
Thanks for this post, I hadn't seen the linked conversation when it happened. Here's my reading. The conversation blog post you linked begrudgingly points out that companies aren't sunk by bugs, technical debt, or inefficient development practices. If you have a good sales team and a product that people want, need, or will be forced to use, you can succeed even if you have to burn money on dev, ops, customer support.
However I think what this langchain conversation is about is overeager VCs and a product that maybe doesn't do anything we need. It's not that langchain is slow or hard to use; it's that we can just do this stuff with Python or whatever. I don't have enough langchain experience to substantiate these claims but I think that's what I'm reading here.
Sequoia never figured out their edge in the enterprise world. They likely won't fall from grace since they're still investing in the space, but their filter is certainly poorer than their other areas of investment.
I’m curious - who gets screwed over the most here? Is it investors who got tricked into over valuing? Or langchain who now can’t meet their expected revenue targets and will be forced to pivot?
Speaking in hypothetical terms of course. I’m assuming the langchain folks are probably paying themselves pretty well and not working super hard (at least not on engineering stuff)?
Usually the investors - the funding amount means that the founders and early employees can get paid a living wage at least (as a former VC-backed founder I can say that they probably don't get paid exorbitantly). But investors will get rinsed if the company can't either reach IPO or raise a subsequent round at a higher valuation. This becomes very difficult when the company is already worth $200M on paper, and need to get the revenue to a point where that valuation is justified.
There was a controversial "quality doesn't matter for software products" post and discussion[0] here on HN a few days ago and this is a beautiful example.
Product may matter eventually, but you can sure surf the hype for a long time before the reckoning comes (and if you're lucky, you may even be able to get someone else to hold the bag then).
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36615286