Only real metric I see is 800 monthly donors and $7500 from them ($10 per person) - that's what that business is worth, those are really people that want (they pay so that's what matters).

Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again - creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you are missing.

If it’s two million churned out dead accounts, non-replaced, and 800 actual people who care then the author of the post was posting in bad faith and I’d retract my remark.

To get from 800 real people to two million user id rows one would be running some kind of spam scam, and if that’s the case I apologize.

I don't think it is case of spam scam.

I do think they really can have legit sign ups, but people "wanting to learn code" usually fizzle out quick. I have my experience as a dev when friends/family/colleagues ask for guidance, I provide them with links resources and some mentoring and after 2-3 days they don't follow up ever again.

But not using metric like daily active users, returning users, might indicate that they want to inflate their worth or they convinced themselves to believe in the wrong metric.

Oh I don’t doubt for a minute that there’s some gap here. But the key people are serious enough to list rigorous code review as a core value in the next breath after “I just stopped paying everyone including myself.”

If the millions of users thing is even a little real, that’s a galactically less risky play than friggin LangChain for Pets or whatever.

I hope I’m being paranoid but I get the sense that someone pissed off someone important.

Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK" according to the footer of their website.

Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied to my comment.

OpenAI is a 501c nonprofit. Doesn’t stop Sam taking big time meetings more often than he checks his email.

Part of OpenAI is a nonprofit, not in its entirety.

Matt Levine uses a diagram to allude to the complexity. And that was before Larry Summers and the National Security Administration got involved.

A better term for OpenAI would be “rogue state”.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...

They're not officially a non-profit, they're a limited company. Obviously they can still operate as such - that's down to the board how they distribute profits via dividends, so they might choose to do so.

A true non-profit company in the UK would be a registered Community Interest Company, or a registered Charity.

Hello. This isn't actually correct. Exercism is a Company Limited by Guarantee. It has no shareholders. It can't pay dividends.

Community Interest Companies do have sharedholders and can pay dividends. CIC's are definitely not charities in the scope of the word that you're using it.

They've not set up the structures for it to be not-for-profit here, they're just an ordinary registered company.

Typically you'd form a Charitable Trust or Charitable Incorporated Organisation, and Exercism isn't listed as either on the Charity Comission website.

I've replied to this further down. Exercism is a nonprofit - we have no shareholders. We've had many large organisations donate to us (including Mozilla and Google) who have vetted all this.

There's nothing special about a VC. It's just someone with money to allocate. Go ask them to give you a big chunk of the company for $25k if you think this is just a few steps from being a blow-up success. Being able to differentially detect when a company is successful is a pretty good skill. If you think you've found a diamond in the rough, you should go in.

This absurd hagiography about efficient markets allocating capital will be viewed by future historians like some kind of flat earth theory. Eugene Fama himself is walking back the idea and he won a Nobel Prize for asserting it.

Markets are what people do when they’re not having sex. No sense in fighting markets.

Cartels and market failures are what happens when the holders of capital aren’t terrified of Lina Khan or Maximilian Robespierre for longer than 12 seconds.

The Battery Club is for kingmakers who decide things together for their mutual benefit behind closed doors. They learned their lesson after Don’t Poach Gate: it’s not in writing anymore.

> Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet?

Busy investing in AI?

These guys should "pivot to AI". Should be able to get a full B for an Ai company with 2 million users.

Fuck I’ll train a LLaMA tune for them on Saturday(s) gratis.

So Exercism AI?

Sell the code submissions as training data.

Well, the standard quote leaves out "and will pay for"