Another ex-famous person here (again, short-term-contractor).
The folks focusing on the techcrunch cribs video and drawing damning conclusions from it are, rather predictably, chasing a red herring.
For what it's worth I actually felt more productive, focused, and relaxed (in a good way) in that office than in any I've ever worked in before or since. The high ceilings made a remarkable difference. The mix of open and private spaces worked. Going to work in a place that felt like a higher-class version of your home but where you could collaborate with your coworkers was pretty amazing. It was basically what co-working spaces always try to be but can never fully pull off. It doesn't make sense to complain about the damage open plan offices are doing to productivity and then get angry at someone who does the opposite. Granted, you don't need a semi-luxury penthouse. :) But I think the office was an under-appreciated reason why they were able to get (and retain) a lot of great engineers. It was in general a very sane, reasonable environment to do good work in, in contrast to most offices.
jondubois, aikah, and others are on the right track. Making money off a front-end framework is a long shot. The monetization plan (to the extent there was one) was always heavy on optimism and reliant on a lot of things going very very right.
That's not to say it was impossible, though.
The reasons famo.us failed are the reasons most startups fail:
1. They didn't do nearly enough to truly understand their users and meet their needs
2. They didn't communicate or collaborate well or consistently enough internally.
I could say more about both 1 and 2, but I'll wrap it up there. The real narrative of what went wrong is one that's familiar and pretty generic. The subplots of what they were trying to build and who was involved just makes it all a bit more interesting to speculate about.
p.s. dmvaldman is the man – you should check out his framework and say hi.
The folks focusing on the techcrunch cribs video and drawing damning conclusions from it are, rather predictably, chasing a red herring.
For what it's worth I actually felt more productive, focused, and relaxed (in a good way) in that office than in any I've ever worked in before or since. The high ceilings made a remarkable difference. The mix of open and private spaces worked. Going to work in a place that felt like a higher-class version of your home but where you could collaborate with your coworkers was pretty amazing. It was basically what co-working spaces always try to be but can never fully pull off. It doesn't make sense to complain about the damage open plan offices are doing to productivity and then get angry at someone who does the opposite. Granted, you don't need a semi-luxury penthouse. :) But I think the office was an under-appreciated reason why they were able to get (and retain) a lot of great engineers. It was in general a very sane, reasonable environment to do good work in, in contrast to most offices.
jondubois, aikah, and others are on the right track. Making money off a front-end framework is a long shot. The monetization plan (to the extent there was one) was always heavy on optimism and reliant on a lot of things going very very right.
That's not to say it was impossible, though.
The reasons famo.us failed are the reasons most startups fail: 1. They didn't do nearly enough to truly understand their users and meet their needs 2. They didn't communicate or collaborate well or consistently enough internally.
I could say more about both 1 and 2, but I'll wrap it up there. The real narrative of what went wrong is one that's familiar and pretty generic. The subplots of what they were trying to build and who was involved just makes it all a bit more interesting to speculate about.
p.s. dmvaldman is the man – you should check out his framework and say hi.