Oddbean new post about login | logout Some thoughts as a mutiny angel investor. Open source wallets are hard. They’re even harder to monetize. The samourai/wasabi shit made that monetization even harder. Having seen some of the financials, I feel confident stating the team isn’t/wasn’t “pocketing money”. They are a small scrappy startup team working with limited resources. I believe they are doing their best / did their best with the wallet. I don’t believe anything nefarious is going on. Startups are just fucking hard.
“We’re still early” also means we’re still learning and will fuck up things until we’ve figured them out. I celebrate everyone who’s helping us to fail upwards.
Give up after less than a year = scrappy? I think they got fat from the money raised and ran
Thanks for investing and for sharing these thoughts.
Spend time on the ground floor of a startup, and you'll quickly learn how difficult they are. Most weeks you'll wonder how you still have a fucking job. nostr:nevent1qqsyyaz2xwl8ehtqnjukjcwf59egzfyjgxczacfcktlqvpzmke3c4ysppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsp4lsvwn3aw7zwh2f6tcl6249xa6cpj2x3yuu6azaysvncdqywxmgrqsqqqqqp4h9wlj
Or if your check will clear
Thank you this is helpful feedback. I applaud their effort and talent. The announcement was sudden and out of the blue, and not in line with their messaging since launching a year ago. I think any company building a product that people rely on for using money ought to carefully consider how they make decisions and changes and how they communicate those out to users.
I feel like that’s fair criticism.
🤝
Honestly I feel they tried to do too much too soon. Hopefully their next endeavors will bring them more success.
I have not found a single open source toC application case. ToC applications lack a positive incentive mechanism for open source. Zuckerberg open sourced Llama because Meta missed the best time. He was forced to open source by competition and surpass OpenAI by imitating Android. The other reasons are all high-sounding. He is not an open source advocate. These vested interests who advocate open source are also unwilling to open source their current successful applications. The successful open source companies I have seen are toB companies. Most of the successful open source software companies open source some common tools in some emerging industries. For example, the big data and AI industries. After more companies use this tool on github, they provide value-added services around the tool. For example, Databricks. Starting a business is difficult. You have to face team salary and product revenue issues every day. Lightning wallets also need to face legal risks. I understand Tony's pressure, but this is the price of creating new things. You can take a break if you feel you can't stand it. This is a rare opportunity to reflect and grow. It is common for startups to fail, and failure is a way to find the right path. But Tony needs to consider his future direction. "I've fallen out of love for Bitcoin and the industry."
I was with Tony, Ben and Paul in Bitcoin Commons in Austin when they were launching Mutiny & explaining how they'll monetize... and that you're in. I though it was quite good play considering the talent of the team.
I felt good about it. Still do.
Way better than 90+% of the bets I've seen in startup land over the last decade+. Also, they're shutting down the product, not the company... have been hard at work for quite a while. I had no idea there was this much discussion on it. From what I read today, it seems to me more about people caring about their success and struggling to express it than anything else.
Absolutely. I think that’s the correct read. It just goes to show what a passionate customer base they built. Which is a testament to the team.
Awesome product. Great team. Passionate, but small customer base. Perhaps too focused on “western” adoption? Cool product for their passionate customer base, but a “nice to have” vs a “need to have” when focus of primary base is on SOV vs MOE.
I think we all want to see self custodial lightning succeed with a degree of ease on par with custodial lightning, especially where it intersects with nostr like Mutiny did. It was an exciting and promising product, and I think the hopes of it getting better with time kept people on board even with the channel closures and other issues. The ecash integration was exciting. The fact that it runs in a browser was exciting. And all you had to do was download an app or save a PWA to your phone. The hiccups were frustrating but perhaps tolerable as their work continued. But then this announcement came out of the blue, and speaking for myself it felt like they weren’t saying everything. I respect what they built and the talent it took to do it. It felt like they spent the last year building huge momentum and everyone’s trust, and abruptly pulled the plug on the very thing they built that trust on. It’s just very disappointing.
With the very recent change in leadership, including Marks as new Chief Product Officer, my guess would be that they have a new product or direction already in mind and just not ready yet to announce what it is. If I had my druthers, it would be web of trust related.🤞🏻
I’m curious. Tony said in an earlier reply that they weren’t building another wallet, so I’m wondering what else they may be working on.
I'm honestly sad to see Mutiny shut down. Startups are super hard. Businesses targeted toward power-users are even harder. From the outside, if there's something I think we can learn from this great work, I think there's a lesson in that. We need to know our customers. Most customers aren't power-users. Mutiny was really growing on me in the past few months. I featured it heavily in my recent Nostr article. I was an active user. As a literal user I'm sad to see it shut down. What a great wallet it has been. Great work from the team.