Shades of Razorfish

In the late 1990s, one of the darlings of the Dotcom boom was a company called Razorfish.

It all came crashing down in 2000, when its hipster founders appeared on CBS, and they were incapable of describing what their company actually did, despite thousands of employees worldwide and a market valuation in the billions.

In a very real way, it was a seminal moment in the dotcom boom became the dotcom bust, because suddenly it became clear to those ordinary people for who the whole "Internet thing" went from a dazzling mystery to a bunch of hipster snake oil.

The Dotcom bubble, like bubbles, had run out of stupider people who would buy their crap,

Well, I just came across this profile of Famo.us, and I think that it is a clear indicator that it is time to head for the exits, because if this nothing burger can get this sort of funding, the inmates are running the asylum once again:

Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps.

The startup changed its website to famous.co, stuffed its old open source information on famous.org, and laid off a big chunk of the team, including its VP of Engineering, Head of Open Source, and a dozen engineers. But at least now Famo.us has the runway to take another shot at the spotlight.

 ………

Famo.us’ 15 minutes of open source fame have come to an end. JavaScript rendering engine Famo.us has pivoted away from its hardcore open sourced engineering platform which had raised over $31 million. It’s now refocused on commercializing the idea of powerful mobile web apps with a content management system for branded marketing apps.

The startup changed its website to famous.co, stuffed its old open source information on famous.org, and laid off a big chunk of the team, including its VP of Engineering, Head of Open Source, and a dozen engineers. But at least now Famo.us has the runway to take another shot at the spotlight.
 ………(emphasis mine)

Though it was tough to tell if Famo.us would work, investors gave it the benefit of the doubt. That was in large part thanks to Newcomb, who had sold his last startup, natural language search engine Powerset, to Microsoft for $100 million. In early 2013, Famo.us added a $4 million Series A from Javelin Venture Partners and Samsung to its $1.1 million in seed funding from Greylock, Naval Ravikant, Roger Dickey, [and, disclosure, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund].

But Newcomb’s quest to redefine mobile with open source threatened to make Famo.us unsustainable. He told TechCrunch when announcing the funding, “That lean startup style — I don’t believe that” and that he was purposefully trying to be a perfectionist.

Newcomb knocked down the wall between his San Francisco penthouse apartment and the one next to it to create a lavish office for Famo.us. When TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha visited, Newcomb pointed to some desks that seemed adequate, but insisted they would be replaced soon because they weren’t the right kind of wood.

He told Ha that since Famo.us was a platform for building beautiful apps “everything we do has to represent perfection and elegance.” You can take a tour of the office in TechCrunch’s Cribs video above.

 ………


By August 2014, Famo.us had grown to 25 employees and had 90,000 sign-ups for the platform, still awaiting the finished platform’s public open source release. It managed to raise another $20 million plus $5 million of debt from New York’s Insight Venture Partners. Newcomb told VentureBeat it planned to hire up to 40 more staffers with that cash, though Fetterman departed.

Finally, in June Famo.us “launched.” From a different site Famous.org, it fully open sourced its Engine that improves performance for hardware, and its Framework for integrating Famo.us into apps with blog posts by Myles Borin and Zack Brown.
 ………

I spoke to Newcomb, who confesses that for six months the company struggled to come up with a way to actually earn money. A source close to the company tells me Newcomb pushed the engineer-heavy company into “ideation mode” that made some employees feel like the startup lacked direction. They described engineers as being “fed up.”

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There the company laid out an entirely new business: “Our mission at Famous is to empower digital marketing professionals to build beautiful branded apps that amplify every aspect of their digital marketing campaigns.” The product is a content management system for digital marketers. It allows them to create “micro-apps” that are basically mobile-optimized websites that can be easily shared and opened without being installed like a native app.

(emphasis mine)

Look at the highlighted portions.

Venture capitalists are throwing money at this, because they believe that there are bigger suckers willing to take a piece of this.

At some point, you always run out of pigeons, and Famo.us is an indicator that the supply is getting thin.

I'm not saying that it's time to put your money in a mattress, I'm just saying that keeping it in San Jose might be ill advised.