Flutterby™! : Pyra gone

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Pyra gone

2001-02-02 19:21:56+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Pyra is no more. Blogger will stay around as long as Evan Williams can afford to keep it running. Todd and I have been talking funding structure with a lot of people on both ends of the spectrum recently, and it seems like there's a need for capital in the "just want to make a comfortable living and do something cool" space, not the "need to grow fast and hard and fleece pension managers with a big IPO" space, but as long as the big capital markets are artificially protected I don't see that happening.

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:04+00 by: TC

Hmmm wow. I don't know Ev personally but feel as a kindred spirit. He doesn't gain my sympathy but my respect. He is the defenition of a true entrepreneur and I know he will succeed...

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:04+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Jack Saturn's take on the shutdown is interesting from a "who feels vested how, and how do we build company spirit" perspective.

i never felt like an "employee" of pyra up until a few months ago, when ev made it clear that he would keep on going, trying to negotiate deals for the company, even if everyone else on the team left or was let go. negotiating deals for a company of one, basically. and that really, really bugged me. when i found that out, i felt like a lackey, basically. i think ev even realized that i (we?) felt that way.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:04+00 by: DaveP

You mention a need for capital in the "just want to make a comfortable living" space. That's exactly the space I've been living in for the past two years. My solution has been to do contract programming to make a living, but to keep enough free time to cover the wanting to do something cool side, too. So far it's mostly working - the only real problem is having the idea for something cool at the same time as the time to work on it. It seems that most of the time when I have the cool idea, a client needs a bunch of work done. When I have the time, my mind goes blank. I guess there's a detail or two that needs to be worked out. I'd be interested to hear from other folks working on this approach.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:04+00 by: Dan Lyke

That's what we at Coyote Grits were doing that for a while, and we'll probably be doing more of it, but I find it pretty unsatisfying. I like being emotionally vested in a project, I like believing that what I'm working on is going to have a positive influence on the world, and my experience with much of the lucrative contracting stuff is that that's the model for companies which don't have the internal software development processes or acumen to do it themselves. So it becomes working for managers who don't know how to manage software products for companies who feel that product development takes a back seat to marketing. Great for the money, but I'll have to get better at compartmentalizing my life to do it effectively.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:04+00 by: ebradway

I agree with Dan here. I've been trying to years to make myself 'comfortable' with work so I can focus my creativity on my own projects at home but I never quite have the same drive and overall immersion in the projects like I have when I'm WORK working on a project that I find meaningful. Game development was the best for this and I'm trying to steer myself back to a point where I can do it again. Micheal Abrash wrote a great piece about this very subject on Gamasutra recently.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:05+00 by: Mars Saxman

DaveP: I did that for several years, and it worked pretty well. I did contract work to pay the bills, then spent my free time writing cool stuff to give away. These projects tended to stretch my abilities while simultaneously drawing in more contract work. It was a real blast; I had time and freedom to spare. There were always half a dozen or so projects queued up in my head waiting to be worked on; I never really had the problem of figuring out what to do with free time! It was a passion, a compulsion; an irresistible drive to master the machine and understand its every detail. I don't think I could go back to it now. I've lost the faith; left to my own devices I wouldn't write any code at all. -Mars