I thought there were two fundamental ways to make a business: 1) You build a product/service and sell it. You sell the company for market share and revenues. I think everyone understands this.
2) The second way is more like a financial derivative, it's a bit more risky, a bit more complex, a bit more limited in terms of exit strategy, but you build a technology company and you sell the company for the technology itself and team that invented it. In this world, patents and actual IP matter more. It's a technology play, not a product play.
Apple and Google buy these companies, ARM, Qualcomm, Rambus are some examples of big ones.
I could see Hippy positioned 2 ways, 1) product, it's going to take 2 years to build (and that's probably really ugly to most of the hipster/cool kid VCs right now) it's going to be some kind of proprietary PHP VM that's 2x to 10x faster running unmodified code. It's going to cost $x per core or host or something. You're going to build it, you're going to market it and you're going to sell it. Maybe there will be a free community edition to help market it. I don't know, but that's the rough outline of the story. Hopefully PHP is still really popular in 2 years... Long lead time, product, then presumably you'll know how to market and sell it. Maybe my cold meds are fogging things, but that's kind of ugly but it seems almost palatable, these guys build compilers, without Pypy it's super ugly.
Alternatively you could position it like a technology company. This seems a lot more compelling, these guys have a great track record of doing great technology. They're doing legitimate cutting edge compiler stuff, routinely delivering it, routinely making improvements.. Tackling hard problems (like the GIL) and making headway. If you've got technology to make unchanged php 2x to 10x faster, you can't tell me there isn't a market for that, Facebook is building that for themselves. I'm sure Yahoo and others would be interested. There are existing php accelerators on the market. Plus, you're only funding the development team so it's a bit more inexpensive. What you need is like a VC backed by Facebook or Yahoo one of those interested parties already looking at this stuff or a VC with the right kinds of connections with other tooling companies that might be interested in buying this kind of technology. With their track record, it seems like a fairly safe technology play, they just need to find the right investors. Now asking them why Pypy doesn't accelerate certain types of code would be part of the process, perhaps understand their strategy to avoid that problem with PHP would come up.
2) The second way is more like a financial derivative, it's a bit more risky, a bit more complex, a bit more limited in terms of exit strategy, but you build a technology company and you sell the company for the technology itself and team that invented it. In this world, patents and actual IP matter more. It's a technology play, not a product play.
Apple and Google buy these companies, ARM, Qualcomm, Rambus are some examples of big ones.
I could see Hippy positioned 2 ways, 1) product, it's going to take 2 years to build (and that's probably really ugly to most of the hipster/cool kid VCs right now) it's going to be some kind of proprietary PHP VM that's 2x to 10x faster running unmodified code. It's going to cost $x per core or host or something. You're going to build it, you're going to market it and you're going to sell it. Maybe there will be a free community edition to help market it. I don't know, but that's the rough outline of the story. Hopefully PHP is still really popular in 2 years... Long lead time, product, then presumably you'll know how to market and sell it. Maybe my cold meds are fogging things, but that's kind of ugly but it seems almost palatable, these guys build compilers, without Pypy it's super ugly.
Alternatively you could position it like a technology company. This seems a lot more compelling, these guys have a great track record of doing great technology. They're doing legitimate cutting edge compiler stuff, routinely delivering it, routinely making improvements.. Tackling hard problems (like the GIL) and making headway. If you've got technology to make unchanged php 2x to 10x faster, you can't tell me there isn't a market for that, Facebook is building that for themselves. I'm sure Yahoo and others would be interested. There are existing php accelerators on the market. Plus, you're only funding the development team so it's a bit more inexpensive. What you need is like a VC backed by Facebook or Yahoo one of those interested parties already looking at this stuff or a VC with the right kinds of connections with other tooling companies that might be interested in buying this kind of technology. With their track record, it seems like a fairly safe technology play, they just need to find the right investors. Now asking them why Pypy doesn't accelerate certain types of code would be part of the process, perhaps understand their strategy to avoid that problem with PHP would come up.