Hey everyone - this is Michael Seibel - I'm one of the group partners for Peer5 and I'm really excited they have launched. If you have any questions for me - feel free to ask :)
I doubt you remember, but you responded very briefly to a YC application about nearly the exact idea complete with prototype work a couple years back. Didn't get any real interest or feedback from you though.
Has the game changed to make webrtc P2P platforms more palatable to VC (cough Trump = end of net neutrality cough) or did these guys just feel like better "founder material" to y'all? I mean, we weren't ever going to propose selling other's people bandwidth as a profit method for our tech, so maybe that's the problem.
FWIW, we've since moved on to something better. Realized that VC shouldn't be involved with every piece of tech, and that peer-distributed networks is probably one of those. I'm sure you'll see it show up on HN before too much longer though.
Glad your onto something better, but I think you know it's absolutely unproductive to try an infer anything from any single VC decision, for a variety of reasons.
To start they are wrong most of the time (just like we as entrepreneurs are wrong most of the time). Most unicorns have investor rejection stories.
If they were not wrong and there was a flaw with your plan/product or team, that kind of thing you can find out easily enough from people you trust and respect, and who won't feel bad about damaging a potential future business relationship.
I was (and truthfully still am) a little bitter over the whole experience (watching Silicon Valley for the first time was sort of a cathartic experience). So many people seemed interested at first, but it was so hard to get real feedback. Out of about 10 or so meetings, only one VC (depressingly it was the very first one we met with) listened intently and asked good questions. He gave great feedback but didn't want to pursue it because his tech consultants didn't think WebRTC was mature enough to work as we described. Every other time it was "Can you just go over the deck you sent 2 weeks ago? (which we did as they looked at their phones the entire time)" or "Great, but can you make this more enterprise-y by adding SLAs? (yes, their tech person asked if we could add enterprise SLAs to p2p video streaming)".
None of us were people with a wealthy or well-connected family, a degree from an elite school or even from a state with much of a culture for entrepeneurship or technology. So setting up meetings, building a deck and pitching it, the whole thing felt so extremely foreign. What I would have given for someone who we could trust or respect to give real feedback.
Nice thing about software though, as long as you have income to support yourself and are adequately skilled at your craft, you can just build it yourself. Which fortunately is the case here.
Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP?
I can only think of one, that being Skype. Of course that doesn't mean Peer5 can't do it, and I sincerely hope they do because I always root for entrepreneurs.
However there seems to be this weird disconnect between p2p architectures and profitable companies, even though the theory is so powerful. I can only guess as to why:
- The illegal stuff has somehow unfairly tarnished public opinion
- It's too low level and is only suitable for standards like WebRTC where lots of people buy in at once to provide enough momentum
The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down.
So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down.
Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p.
p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).
Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace. So overall companies pay more for CDNs for video :)
The thing is, even if CDNs would be free, they have limited capacity and they saturate during large live events. That's one of the reasons we still watch sports on pay-tv.
Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace
Not true. It varies based on what's in vogue on the content side, quality requirements, and the state of technology at a given moment in time.
As one point of reference, Flickr posted an analysis here recently that discussed how their architecture has evolved over time based on variable ratios of usage requirements and hardware costs.
Comments
Hey everyone - this is Michael Seibel - I'm one of the group partners for Peer5 and I'm really excited they have launched. If you have any questions for me - feel free to ask :)
I doubt you remember, but you responded very briefly to a YC application about nearly the exact idea complete with prototype work a couple years back. Didn't get any real interest or feedback from you though.
Has the game changed to make webrtc P2P platforms more palatable to VC (cough Trump = end of net neutrality cough) or did these guys just feel like better "founder material" to y'all? I mean, we weren't ever going to propose selling other's people bandwidth as a profit method for our tech, so maybe that's the problem.
FWIW, we've since moved on to something better. Realized that VC shouldn't be involved with every piece of tech, and that peer-distributed networks is probably one of those. I'm sure you'll see it show up on HN before too much longer though.
Glad your onto something better, but I think you know it's absolutely unproductive to try an infer anything from any single VC decision, for a variety of reasons.
To start they are wrong most of the time (just like we as entrepreneurs are wrong most of the time). Most unicorns have investor rejection stories.
If they were not wrong and there was a flaw with your plan/product or team, that kind of thing you can find out easily enough from people you trust and respect, and who won't feel bad about damaging a potential future business relationship.
I appreciate your response. You're 100% correct.
I was (and truthfully still am) a little bitter over the whole experience (watching Silicon Valley for the first time was sort of a cathartic experience). So many people seemed interested at first, but it was so hard to get real feedback. Out of about 10 or so meetings, only one VC (depressingly it was the very first one we met with) listened intently and asked good questions. He gave great feedback but didn't want to pursue it because his tech consultants didn't think WebRTC was mature enough to work as we described. Every other time it was "Can you just go over the deck you sent 2 weeks ago? (which we did as they looked at their phones the entire time)" or "Great, but can you make this more enterprise-y by adding SLAs? (yes, their tech person asked if we could add enterprise SLAs to p2p video streaming)".
None of us were people with a wealthy or well-connected family, a degree from an elite school or even from a state with much of a culture for entrepeneurship or technology. So setting up meetings, building a deck and pitching it, the whole thing felt so extremely foreign. What I would have given for someone who we could trust or respect to give real feedback.
Nice thing about software though, as long as you have income to support yourself and are adequately skilled at your craft, you can just build it yourself. Which fortunately is the case here.
The following article should relief your cough: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-th...
Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP?
I can only think of one, that being Skype. Of course that doesn't mean Peer5 can't do it, and I sincerely hope they do because I always root for entrepreneurs.
However there seems to be this weird disconnect between p2p architectures and profitable companies, even though the theory is so powerful. I can only guess as to why:
- The illegal stuff has somehow unfairly tarnished public opinion
- It's too low level and is only suitable for standards like WebRTC where lots of people buy in at once to provide enough momentum
- It's not easy to do right
I used to work at Joost. Culturally, it came fro the Skype world, and I worked on the p2p engine used for both on-demand and live streaming of video:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost
The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down.
So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down.
Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p.
p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).
Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace. So overall companies pay more for CDNs for video :)
The thing is, even if CDNs would be free, they have limited capacity and they saturate during large live events. That's one of the reasons we still watch sports on pay-tv.
Not true. It varies based on what's in vogue on the content side, quality requirements, and the state of technology at a given moment in time.
As one point of reference, Flickr posted an analysis here recently that discussed how their architecture has evolved over time based on variable ratios of usage requirements and hardware costs.
I can't speak to Flickr's use-case specifically, but generally speaking the content delivery market is growing.
In terms of usage - Skype, Bit Torrent, and Bitcoin come to mind (last two aren't commercially successful yet...)
No reason you can't be the second one. Good luck to you and the team.
How do you evaluate something like this at YC? Do you bring experts in the field or is the decision based on team, idea, and traction?