> Investors: We've raised several million dollars from amazing VCs like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins, and angels like Jason Warner, Adam Gross, Olivier Pomel, Scott Belsky, Will Gaybrick and a handful of other impressive dev tool founders and executives.
The fact that a CLI tool raised millions of dollars while also being basically powered by open-source contributions is also kind of a wtf moment to me, but what do I know.
There has to be some grand vision behind this, presumably large-scale data capture. At the end of the day, the terminal is is to the dev what Google is to the internet user: the point of entry where many journeys begin, with dozens or hundreds of interactions every day. And while devs are a niche market compared to Google's userbase, they are a lucrative and strategic one nonetheless.
Casting aside the environment of low-interest rates and massive inflow of investment in startups, how does a product like this otherwise raise several millions? The pitch sounds like something that a competent indie dev studio could sell on the Mac App Store...
When you’re using the terminal, you’re mostly manipulating your own data, often in ways that would reveal sensitive information if your terminal history was leaked.
Any attempt to collect data from users’ terminal interactions is indistinguishable from keylogging.
Can NOT this tool say to my employer - How many times I compile my code in a day ?
When I get a compilation error - how quickly it gets to compiling state again ?
Was the compilation error a trivial mistake ?
How much time is spent between each commands ?
How productive I am keying in command one after another ?
Also can NOT Fig figure out current apps Im running on my machine ?
What is the current app in foreground ?
How long I run each app ?
When I log off ?
How many times I log off ?
It is getting interesting! Can anybody help with more usecases.
But yes that's basically it. You have _all_ of this already and all it needs is for whatever tool you have to provide the "completion" definition file. The graphical nature of this makes it _less_ useful (as others have pointed out w/ regards to no Linux support). How this would sell to enterprise I do not get.
Kudos to them for getting funding for this tho. I wish I had the guts to take something that already exists better and free and ask for someone to pay me money to try and sell it to other people instead.
There are other ways to support developers thru honest tooling (eg IntelliJ).
That would be a completely useless metric.
Also, don't you have a daily build pipeline anyways?
Maybe the founders sold this as a way to get dev telemetry data + a subscription.
I think people forget that IDEs (which is essentially what this is) are a stupid amount of work. Then you have to add the rest of the business: sales, leadership, support, hr, ops. I mean a 25 person company $200k average total comp is 5mil annual burned cash just on salary.
There's probably more money than people know what to do with. So they might be investing in completely crazy ideas hoping that the founders figure it out along the way.
Not really, in the bay area engineers make $150K-500K/year (closer to the $150K end for startups) and office space costs upwards of $200K-300K/year.
Here's one: you wasted a perfect opportunity to feast on that sweet investor's money.
Autocomplete is our first product. The bigger vision that Fig can enable an ecosystem of terminal extensions. Here are some early prototypes we built [0] and here is the discussion from when we were posted on HN last summer [1].
> Is the business model just selling our data?
We will never sell data. That just isn't the business we want to build - Brendan and I like hacking on the terminal because it's interesting and we get to solve our own problems.
We've been lucky enough to find investors, most of whom have an engineering background, who understand how important the terminal and believe there is a lot of room for improvement.
Obviously, we would like Fig to become a sustainable business. We plan to monetize in the short term by offering autocomplete for internal CLI tools and scripts. Longer term, we think that there is a lot of stuff that developers do in the browser that make more sense in the terminal. Fig's autocomplete product is powered by an API that lets anyone build graphical extensions that are connected to the terminal.
These are just words from strangers on the internet. You're offering a free and auto-updating app. You don't give me a contract guaranteeing anything. Most terms of use/privacy policies have a clause stating it can be updated without notice and when you do have actual policies on your site I'm sure they will be similar.
At any point you can decide that actually, you do want to share my data, or share access to it through one of your products. Maybe you won't call it "selling" (the same way Zuckerberg can tell Congress that Facebook doesn't sell anyone's data).
Maybe you don't decide to share my data, but Fig gets acquired and the new management decides to. Maybe an attacker gains access to the data and shares it. Maybe an attacker compromises an update, turning all Fig instances into keyloggers, and paired with the required email addresses uses it to compromise other data.
You are aware any shop with a modicum of competence is already doing what Fig does, right? Usually on a central or bastion server? What kind of TAM did you put in the pitch deck? People who can’t read man pages or pull apart an RPM to see how, for example, git’s completions work?
You’re probably going to price shell autocompletion per seat and you expect people to not think VC has jumped the shark? What’s your exit?
What about when that is no longer your call (e.g. the VC's want returns, you sell to Facebook, etc.)? Is there anything in place to protect us then?
> We plan to monetize in the short term by offering autocomplete for internal CLI tools and scripts.
I'd love to hear more about this. Sounds like the GHE model?
No, No, and no. matter fact, it earned itself a forever no. thx have a crap product launch.
You can start by allowing to download the app without asking for email.
Agreed. Take a look at Nabu Casa, the developers of Home Assistant and Home Assistant Cloud. They are 100% self-funded by their revenue from HA Cloud and the hardware they sell.
Because of this, I don't have to worry about investors demanding a return on investment by any means necessary and potentially generating revenue from users' private data.
I don't know anything about this product's intentions, but it's easy to imagine the possibilities once you start getting permission to pop something up in someone's terminal window.
Canonical already does this.
> 3. Requirement of email.
> 4. Telemetry and privacy concerns raised by others.
Dovetailing on these...
Like why is a CLI tool VC backed? Is the business model just selling our data? Is the VC backing for another product and the CLI tool is just a PR thing?