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Comment by digitailor | Hacker News Reader

A case study of the pandemic speed of capital:

  May 2020- $1M Pre-Seed
  Sept 2020- $3.7M Seed
  April 2021- $20.7M Series A
  Dec 2021- $68M Series B

How can so many rounds be condensed so quickly for a business like this? Is the number of Homebrew downloads (37k as advertised on the home page) a metric that can lead to an 18 month ramp to Series B now?

I think there's a trend at play here I'd love to hear more about.

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Maybe it's a lot more simple, like they have someone that's ridiculously good at raising venture capital, like the Posthog guys.

TBH not really. I've talked to the founder a few times. He doesn't want to put his name on things, as he's kind of a private person and really wants to direct the spotlight at his employees. But he's just an engineer who has spent a lot of time working with Protobufs, not a sales person at all.

(Disclosure: I was the maintainer of Protobuf who put together the first open source release at Google, and I made a small investment in buf early on.)

Ok now I'm pretty interested in this company:

1. Very technical founder at the bleeding edge of the field. 2. Many people against this idea

Usually a sign there's something really good here... or at least something that is super non-obvious to most people.

I'm curious to learn what I'm missing... mind if I reach out?

I think the negativity here is just because fundraising announcements (especially massive ones) tend to attract that kind of response. Admittedly fundraising announcements are not very interesting to an audience wanting to know what the product actually does. But I think what buf is building is not very controversial, it's just developer tooling that obviously should exist and doesn't for some reason, maybe because Google owns Protobuf but Google doesn't really have a strong incentive to make sure external developers have everything they need here.

Happy to answer emails but can't guarantee I have anything interesting to say.

The exuberant behavior of the VCs is really what's being noted. The core business could very well be sound. One just has to hope the very technical founder is being well advised.

This is a press release after all

While the rest of the world is in a depression, Tech is in a bubble due to a ton of money being shifted over here since there was nowhere else to go.

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