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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

They’ve raised $23m?!? Uhhh

I think you could build a really good terminal if you had $23M to piss away.

I strongly doubt you can create a good terminal if it also needs a business model that can recoup $23M.

I don't doubt you could have a single, family supporting business supporting a piece of software. Like, I am rabid to pay $20 for a license to any software I can run by a small guy.

If you squint this isn't that far different from rundeck, ansible tower, etc. or other devops platforms that focus on collaborative management and maintenance of machines, services, etc. If they market to the kubernetes space in particular I suspect there's a market for devops teams there--the ecosystem is flooded with CLI tools and best practices but very little primary panes of glass to manage them all or tie them together. It's not too far of a jump to start offering a managed cloud service with these services.

I know, right? What’s some random, core, local utility that we rely on every day that we can cloudify and attach a service fee to?

puts on thinking cap

At least it’s not electron

Yeah it might seem like a crazy amount.

Building a terminal is hard. We have to build feature parity, maintain a stable terminal-shell interface, on top of modernizing the product experience. The money allows us to hire engineers to work on this project full-time and create a great product experience.

I don’t doubt any of that. The amount seems crazy not because of the potential costs, or ability to invest in the product, but rather due to TAM.

But nobody would lead a round of that size without a decent monetization strategy. I suspect enterprise focus around security / IAM integrations (hence all the telemetry).

I think putting real enterprise focus on the terminal is a good thing but I'm not sure that's the right place for IAM or other security integrations. The terminal is just the GUI rendering on top of the actual tool (bash/zsh etc.) The security probably needs to be at the door (ssh/https etc).

Cool.

Actually the telemetry has nothing to do with our monetization.

Enterprise is right. We are monetizing through team and enterprise features. We are planning to build among others:

- Sharing hard-to-remember workflows within your team

- Wikis and READMEs that run directly in the terminal

- Session sharing for joint debugging

How are you going to get a return on that money though? Sell an enterprise version, or do a free / professional model?

This is what stunned me. Apparently a bunch of SV rich people have so much cash to light on fire that they are funding stuff like this.

Jeez, I have a crap-ton of half baked ideas and a bridge that I would love to sell.

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