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GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
I'm the co-founder and CEO of TensorZero.
We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount.
Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.
bel8 23 hours ago [-]
Hi! First of all, congrats on getting much further than any of us will ever be able to dream. Having a well funded startup is no small feat.
Now one question that you probably get a lot and I must ask: why not pivot?
22 hours ago [-]
22 hours ago [-]
iwontberude 16 hours ago [-]
A distilled model for specific domains is both nearly free and commodity. There is no money in AI outsourcing businesses at scale. If anything you are just a cost center that companies want to squish because your value a negated by the amount of effort it takes to evaluate it’s effectiveness.
News like this is reinforcing the narrative that frontier models and AI outsourcing generally is on the way down.
carterschonwald 22 hours ago [-]
i had the very strange experience last week of a recruiter listing your org as an example client, and when i looked stuff up i saw the current state.
cluckindan 1 days ago [-]
What did you spend the money on?
The other half goes where?
GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
Mostly salaries to support a small team.
We are returning the remaining capital to investors.
herodoturtle 24 hours ago [-]
Kudos to you and your team for not burning through the rest. Hope you have better luck with your next project.
GabrielBianconi 24 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
maxnevermind 23 hours ago [-]
I thought usually founders try to pivot till they run out of money. I wonder if that is good or bad for a serial entrepreneurs if they decide to shut it down instead of pivoting?
mrandish 10 hours ago [-]
Many founders do try serial pivots until the money's gone. An entrepreneur shutting down cleanly with half the runway still in the bank would be seen by future potential funders as a net positive. It's worse to grind through all the money trying increasingly extreme pivots away from the original.
It takes maturity and decisiveness to recognize when a startup's core idea isn't going to work. In cases where any pivot wide enough to get into different lane is essentially a whole other business, it's often better to just shut down. Even if the last desperate pivot starts to work, you often have some team members and investors who aren't a good fit for the new focus and, worse, the 'new' business that's finally starting to work is almost out of money and the cap table is messed up. It's usually better to shut it down and reboot cleanly.
Founders who've successfully raised millions and executed well are usually quite fundable, even if their first startup didn't work out. Sometimes the timing is wrong or the market evolves differently. The key is how well you think, execute and communicate through both the windup and the wind down.
hn_throwaway_99 21 hours ago [-]
I feel like pivoting got unwarranted hype in the 2010s or so, possibly because Slack was an outlier in how successful they were.
Major pivoting is almost always a really bad idea. (I admit I'm doing a bit of weaseling using the "major" qualifier, but when I searched for examples online, a lot of the ones that came back weren't major pivots, just slight refinements of focus to find better product market fit). Pivoting usually carries a lot of baggage - better to just give the money back and start afresh most of the time.
latchkey 22 hours ago [-]
He might not have had that choice. Investors can put money into a bank account, and just as easily take it out. This is what happened in the 2000 dotbomb.
gtm1260 21 hours ago [-]
not really true unless you raise on terrible terms.
Barbing 24 hours ago [-]
I’ve never heard of this before. Anyone know if it’s uncommon?
Familiar with creditors getting divvied in bankruptcies, but not refunds to investors… oh it’s because there’s never any money left when things wind down. (We hear of retail stores where employees discover closures posted on shop doors when reporting to work.)
Schnitz 24 hours ago [-]
This is super common with startups and is usually called an orderly shutdown. You don’t want to wait until you are insolvent, but stop when there is enough money left to pay all outstanding liabilities as well as the people that will shut down the business entity, do a final tax return and so on. Then whatever is left eventually gets paid back to investors, who usually have a liquidation preference requiring this as well. The alternative, running truly out of money, no one shutting down anything, a ghost entity that continues to accumulate taxes and penalties, creditors chasing whoever they can get a hold of, is much worse. Just because everyone quits doesn’t mean the entity ceases to exist.
killingtime74 23 hours ago [-]
Worse and also most likely illegal too (sometimes jail or ban on running companies). Depends on where you do it.
overfeed 14 hours ago [-]
> This is super common with startups and is usually called an orderly shutdown
Perhaps now, but during the Zero Interest Rate era, the received wisdom was founders ought to keep going until there bank account was empty, in the hope that they may salvage returns for investors. Vendors, partners, clients and employees would be screwed, naturally, but it didn't matter because VC preferred it because losing all the money in a desperate gamble was preferable to lending money to startups at 0%
GabrielBianconi 24 hours ago [-]
It's pretty common. If a startup winds down before it runs out of money, it typically returns whatever is left to the investors. We didn't have any debt.
hn_throwaway_99 24 hours ago [-]
It actually happens a lot. Sometimes founders may pivot when the original thesis isn't working out, but a lot of times the prudent thing to do is to just say that it didn't work out and return investors' money.
Honestly, I was close to flagging this story because the title is deliberately manipulative - it makes it sound like the founder did a rug pull. But I was really glad to see the founder come in to these comments and just say we tried, but the market shifted under us. Happens all the time.
GabrielBianconi 24 hours ago [-]
Thanks, that's exactly what happened.
The title is misleading unfortunately but that's how social media goes...
mikeocool 24 hours ago [-]
It’s not atypical when a startup figures out things aren’t going to work while there’s still money in the bank.
Early stage startups tend not to have a lot debt to pay off, because there aren’t many places willing to offer them much credit.
QuantumNomad_ 24 hours ago [-]
When I was in university I unsuccessfully attempted to start a company with two other students. We had a small amount of capital from a single investor. We did not pay ourself any salary. We had spent money on incorporating the company and buying a couple of iPads, and not yet spent money on marketing etc.
When after a few months we accepted that it wasn’t going to work, our investor got basically all his money back.
It was pocket change amounts compared to the sums of money that they deal with in Silicon Valley. But the point is the same anyway, the investor got back basically everything.
purple-leafy 21 hours ago [-]
I had a similar thing happen, made a startup when I was 18 and incredibly dumb. Half my money and half an investors.
Ended up having to wind it down because it was a stupid idea and I realised quite quickly after spending money on it. Was a small amount of money but a lot for me. Luckily the investor never asked for money back.
Wound down my second one too but lost no money.
Then came into some money through a software sale about 7 years later, and offered to pay the first investor their full investment back, which was about half the money from the software sale (my only sale ever).
They really appreciated it but declined and instead said no, they want to invest in me AGAIN in the next one.
Felt really nice to have someone believe in you so much they would open themselves up to money risk again rather than take their initial investment back
theendisney 19 hours ago [-]
Education costs time and money.
It would be depressing if your first painting was your best work.
faeyanpiraat 1 days ago [-]
Are there any lessons around the why which may be publicly shared ?
GabrielBianconi 24 hours ago [-]
There are many factors at play here but if I had to pick one... an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product. The AI market moves very quickly so it's easy to take a step in the wrong direction and fall behind.
I might publish a long-form reflection when the dust settles.
gavinray 23 hours ago [-]
It might come off as trite, but I genuinely am sorry that things didn't pan out for you
Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.
It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.
When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."
They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice
Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them
Aurornis 19 hours ago [-]
There’s a fallacy that successful companies are only successful because their CEO was a “rare breed” and that failed companies fail because their CEO didn’t have some innate quality.
This isn’t true. It’s easily shown to be not true by looking at all of the CEOs who had success with one endeavor and then failed all of their following startups, or the other way around.
A lot goes into founding a successful company. Not all of it is in anyone’s control. Not everything can be overcome by a CEO with powerful motivation.
Some times the market moves in ways nobody could have expected. I even worked at one startup that was destabilized and ultimately failed due to a natural disaster.
Looking back at the startups in my past, some of the worst CEOs were the ones who paraded around their ideals about failure not being an option or who pretended that they could get the company through anything through sheer force of their will and the power of their dream. One CEO who was all about “never give up, never surrender!” thinking ran the company into the ground because he refused to let us pivot after the initial idea didn’t get traction in the market but some other features were getting a lot of interest.
Some times knowing when to call it, move on to the next thing, and stop stringing your employees, investors, and customers along is an important CEO skill.
theendisney 19 hours ago [-]
I know one who spends the days seemingly not doing antthing. He spends like a month with his own thoughts and comes up with truly bizare things that work.
In one instance he raised the price of something by 1000 times without adding anything extra. His explaination was that it would build the right community. In his opinion people were to negative/sceptical and talked to much about what things cost.
Cost him 90% of the customers innitially then grew by 100ish%. As if some high end comedy the 90% said it was to expensive and that it would never work. The other 10% really needed to see what would happen.
what do you mean a true "CEO"? Obviously there is a big difference between what someone like Satya Nadella does and what a CEO of a 10-person firm does.
In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO.
Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.
And yeah, not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly. There is always an element of luck in those that survive.
But the idea that you devote 24x7 of your life hence you must be a good leader is not accurate. In fact, if you press this culture downstream, you'll tire your workers and the rest of the team.
fennecbutt 5 hours ago [-]
True CEO. An actual leader who takes responsibility.
I.e. Not the majority of celebrity CEOs with golden parachutes and underpaid employees. Only in the position thanks to "my dad knows his dad and we went to the same school" nods and winks. It is the objective truth for most executives.
gavinray 22 hours ago [-]
There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe for failure.
> not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly
Not everyone can be a CEO because not everyone is cut out for it. If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.
windexh8er 27 minutes ago [-]
CEOs will often have unfavorable characteristics. From startups to billion dollar corporations I've experienced far fewer "genuine" CEOs than narcissistic assholes. The latter are so prevalent because they take the valuation of the company as one of their primary drivers. This means that, for them, removing any obstacle (customers included) is the path they will traverse.
I think the problems with "successful" CEOs don't paint the complete picture. Many CEOs come in after the hard work has been done and "final phase" CEOs enshittify the product and treat their partners and customers vastly differently than they did during their build phase. I experienced this first hand at Palo Alto Networks. At the time their second CEO (Mark McLaughlin) had just come into the org. Mark was one of those few genuine CEOs I experienced, probably one of the least narcissistic I've seen at that point in a young company's trajectory. However Nikesh Arora (Mark's successor) is a complete narcissistic asshole. I still talk to many in leadership there on the regular and the consistent theme is he's surely the reason PAN support and product quality has taken a dive compared to the engineering focus on product and customers back in the early 2010s.
There are a lot of papers surrounding CEOs and many look at the narcissistic angle [0][1][2]. The reality is a lot of these companies could operate just fine without a CEO. I find it hard to believe CEOs are even remotely worth their compensation packages given most of them have zero clue about the product or customs they serve anymore. This all flows back to the "shareholder value" bullshit the US economy is built on. If corporations had more restrictions in financial engineering maybe, just maybe, they'd actually try to better compete within their product/service space.
> For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
These are not examples of in-born traits. While I agree that not everyone has the motivation to become a CEO, I would disagree that a person cannot learn and adapt.
I've known introverts that were performing musicians.
gopher_space 17 hours ago [-]
> There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.
aleph_minus_one 16 hours ago [-]
> > There are personality traits inherent to successful CEO's that are in-born.
> The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.
I don't get why one can't easily acknowledge the slightly weaker statement that traits that are inherent to successful CEOs might be positively correlated to being prone to a love for cocaine (which says nothing about any causality).
james_marks 18 hours ago [-]
> If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.
Being a bit delusional is a critical quality of some CEOs, so the distinction hardly matters.
sdesol 22 hours ago [-]
> first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product.
Is there a way to reach out to you as I would like to hear what you have to say about what I am working on. You can update your HN profile to include contact information or you can reach out to me using my HN profile.
I'm basically working on a portable intelligence layer for AI that I will be open sourcing and the commerical product will be to make the intelligence layer even smarter. I can share the Show HN post that I am working on that better explains the value proposition and would love to learn any lessons you have gained while trying to sell AI tools commerically.
Edit: In case somebody calls me out it. I didn't want to use the `tensorzero` email domain incase the domain was going to become defunct soon.
DANmode 19 hours ago [-]
He’s a cofounder,
and domains are cheap.
I’d shoot the note now if the feedback could be valuable.
cbsmith 23 hours ago [-]
Are there other OSS LLMOps projects that have overtaken you? I couldn't think of one.
KennyBlanken 22 hours ago [-]
> an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product.
The only way this could be a 'lesson learned' is if you homehow managed to not pay any attention to what has been going on in the last 25 years with open source software companies.
christoff12 16 hours ago [-]
It's possible to personally learn lessons that have been documented or articulated elsewhere.
That's why it's called learning.
beachy 19 hours ago [-]
Not really - survivorship bias means that the open source companies you are referring to have all already passed the first hurdle.
TheTaytay 13 hours ago [-]
I'm really sorry to hear that, and I wish you and the rest of the team luck. When you first came out, I thought the approach was really solid - particularly with regards to structured inputs and outputs.
ianm218 1 days ago [-]
Is there anything your willing to share on what went into the decision/ what you learned about trying to build this kind of product?
GabrielBianconi 24 hours ago [-]
See my sibling comment
jacobgold 16 hours ago [-]
Well, that explain things. Good luck on your next thing.
devops000 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
bicx 24 hours ago [-]
The story of literally 95% of tech startups
GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
Turns out I was wrong :)
Barbing 24 hours ago [-]
Most people “can’t” say this. If you’re quite serious then I am too saying: refreshingly mature!
fatata123 24 hours ago [-]
[dead]
debarshri 1 days ago [-]
Things change, situation change. Life is not constant. In business, it is even more Tumultuous.
I would applaud that the fact that found took bold decision to think out of the box and take action towards it.
satvikpendem 24 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn is the worst platform to get accurate news as everyone is only incentivized to hype themselves up. Lots of examples abound in r/LinkedInLunatics
LeonM 1 days ago [-]
The title makes it sound like they just did a seed round, but the seed round was announced in August of last year [0].
Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments.
The company was started in January 2024, so the seed financing is likely a roll-up of two years of fundraising. $7m for ~30 months of running an AI startup in NYC is not that unusual.
RobotToaster 1 days ago [-]
Burning through $7m in 9 months? That's an impressive amount of avocado toast.
rfgplk 1 days ago [-]
$7m actually isn't a whole lot, especially if they hired a (larger) engineering team. Assuming their cali based, that's easily 150-200k per engineer, a team of 20 easily eats through that. Idk the specifics, but I don't the organization was fradulent, it could also be that they're going commercial and no longer want to maintain their oss stack
wtfleming 1 days ago [-]
150-200k is also just the employee’s salary, the actual cost to the company is significantly higher, you need to multiply that by something like 1.5 to get the fully loaded cost, people are expensive!
DiggyJohnson 1 days ago [-]
20 engineers would be incredibly aggressive growth for such a young company with that amount of capital, no?
SR2Z 1 days ago [-]
The real number is probably closer to ~13 engineers, because it costs a company the worker's salary _again_ for benefits, payroll taxes, etc., etc.
GabrielBianconi 24 hours ago [-]
Our team was much smaller. We didn't spend all the capital.
j45 24 hours ago [-]
Tokenmaxxing makes startups even leakier if they don't find token traction.
whateveracct 1 days ago [-]
if you hire 20 engineers with your seed round you are either very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon
or you're incompetent
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
> very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon
That is indeed how the VC funding game is played. If you don't raise another round, you are dead anyway, so you spend down your seed round to try and justify that following round...
vips7L 1 days ago [-]
I thought ai was writing all the code. What do they need engineers for?
GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
We raised in 2024 and only burned through ~$3m of it, mostly on salaries to support a small team.
yett 1 days ago [-]
And AI tokens
api 1 days ago [-]
That would be a lot still. That’s a lot of money.
I’d bet on extreme irresponsibility.
mmaunder 1 days ago [-]
And poached eggs.
user_of_the_wek 1 days ago [-]
Don’t forget the candles
RobotToaster 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Noaidi 1 days ago [-]
Please don't bring Reddit brain here...
raverbashing 1 days ago [-]
Those Claude tokens are not cheap you know /s
zem 15 hours ago [-]
thanks, that was really confusing me!
hoppp 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jnovek 1 days ago [-]
Were the thousands of commits and hundreds of feature branches over the last 9 months just to keep up appearances, then? Were the 850 people who forked it in on the scheme, too?
pqtyw 1 days ago [-]
Well.. if that's it it's not really much to shown for if you spent $7 million on it.
dpkirchner 1 days ago [-]
It's not even clear they spent all the money. Maybe it just wasn't a viable product.
GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
Yeah exactly. We didn't spend the majority of it.
armchairhacker 1 days ago [-]
Did Claude make the commits and branches?
(Honestly I don’t think so here, but I predict that will happen eventually)
Blackthorn 1 days ago [-]
Sometimes things just fail.
1 days ago [-]
sailingparrot 1 days ago [-]
Do you understand that when you raise money it doesn't go into your personal account?
Its not like you can move this money in your retirement account and sail into the sunset.
realsarm 1 days ago [-]
You can call it a bait but where is VCs due diligence for this. Most VCs where out there defending their infra layers investment. Just look at YC batches and see the inflated number of infra startups.
jnovek 1 days ago [-]
Right? I’ve been through due diligence and it’s neither a quick nor simple process, even for seed.
Noaidi 1 days ago [-]
A great way to launder money then?
jazzyjackson 1 days ago [-]
Which step of “VC firm with millions to invest” and “fresh grads blow millions on AWS bills, sushi delivery and ketamine” is dirty money being washed?
root-parent 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
CuriouslyC 1 days ago [-]
Only if the CEO is the first man to step foot on mars. He gets to be immortalized, we get to watch him die living his best life.
DiggyJohnson 1 days ago [-]
Please follow the HN guidelines.
DiggyJohnson 1 days ago [-]
Please follow the HN guidelines.
ant6n 24 hours ago [-]
Follow them uself
ajross 1 days ago [-]
"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"!
The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerks and/or grifting losers. It's not the VC's fault.
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
It's not on anyone to set up your favourite "governance" system. If anyone honestly wants to keep maintaining or using it the code is still there.
ajross 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
skeledrew 1 days ago [-]
No, there is no social contract here. Microsoft gives free hosting because it's cheap and also provides a path to their paid offerings. People share stuff they work on for fun, to help flesh out their resume, to get help, etc. There's no reason for a maintainer not to drop a project in a heartbeat if it becomes the slightest bit of a burden.
marssaxman 1 days ago [-]
There are no maintainership obligations unless someone pays you for them.
Verdex 24 hours ago [-]
No it's not.
Also read the link. This is apache 2 licensed. Even in whatever imaginary world where there is such a social contract, there is thankfully a legal contract that includes disclaimer of warranty.
jazzyjackson 1 days ago [-]
Sorry but this is an outrageous perspective, at no point does git init / git push am I committing myself to a social contract, in fact there’s probably a license that states no warranty and no support is to be expected… maintainership obligations gtfo if you’re not here paying for support
jnovek 1 days ago [-]
While most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent.
Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.
realsarm 1 days ago [-]
That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers.
gwerbin 1 days ago [-]
Are there cases when VC investors actually went after founders for fraud or embezzlement or misrepresenting the business or something like that?
skeledrew 1 days ago [-]
At least the repo is still available. Anyone can fork and carry on, create a community, etc.
hoppp 4 hours ago [-]
If the creators could not do anything with it after raising funds, then why is it expected that somebody will fix it for free?
Forking only makes sense if the creators are also monetising it successfully.
skeledrew 57 minutes ago [-]
If people are complaining then it means that they must've found it to be of value. If they found it to be valuable enough that they really want work done on it again, they can always do that work themselves (or hire someone to). There is 0 connection between forking and successful monetization.
thih9 1 days ago [-]
Which toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing?
kaonwarb 1 days ago [-]
In response to sibling:
> It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want
Yes, that's exactly what it means!
ajross 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
skeledrew 1 days ago [-]
The project is Apache2 licensed. You can literally do anything you want with the code. Stop trying to push guilt on people for no longer providing free services.
thih9 1 days ago [-]
I suppose you can ask them for a refund.
em-bee 1 days ago [-]
the only reason to ever fork a project in earnest is because the original project owners are not willing or able to cooperate or accept patches. in other words you fork because you have nowhere else to go. exactly the situation we have here.
agentifysh 17 hours ago [-]
I've forked this and will be updating and fixing issues going forward.
For now I will just open this up to see if there is any interest if so I would be spending whatever free time I get to fix issues and open it up to other contributors so we can keep going.
I think its important to have an LLM gateway tool like this to remain open source.
kmac_ 1 days ago [-]
About one year ago, I created an LLM gateway with metrics, provider fallback and switching, tools support, injecting, etc. etc., and unique features like acting as an MCP tools client and server, all streamed, with low latency.
It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity. I didn't publish it as I counted several similar projects in the field.
Putting $7.3M into such a project would make sense only in the case of a precise growth plan with already declared customers and an promising sales funnel. There is no technical moat.
jnovek 1 days ago [-]
The calculus in “buy or build” has shifted for me over the last six months especially. If I can make an agent build it, I get the version that’s tailored for me.
> It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity.
That’s the thing, though. The version I build for myself sheds all the features that get in my way. I don’t share them either because they’re only useful for me.
Perhaps in the future big tech projects will be delivered with a common “core” and the expectation that agents fill in the use-specific stuff.
rfgplk 1 days ago [-]
> The calculus in “buy or build” has shifted for me over the last six months especially. If I can make an agent build it, I get the version that’s tailored for me.
I feel like this is really going to change the software industry moving forwards. Historically it was tedious and time consuming to actually develop tailored dev tools which is why so many organizations relied on third party solutions. When nowadays you can easily half bake something in a few hours and get it working, tailored _specifically_ to your needs.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
>When nowadays you can easily half bake something in a few hours and get it working, tailored _specifically_ to your needs.
The thing is this requires you are given liberty to actually do this yourself. Think of something like say LMS software. Every college in the country is using what either blackboard or canvas. Could they make some bespoke LMS that works great for physics 101 at State university? Absolutely. But they don't, because the course director for physics 101 does not care or have the time to muck around with LMS prototypes. They barely have time to learn how to use their paid for LMS for anything but hosting the slides and syllabus.
So on the one hand, yes, there is massive creative potential for people to roll their own tools. But this is not often met with the required time and liberty to then go on to roll their own tools. Buying off the shelf still serves the organizational need it ever did: defer the creating to "someone else" who has been anointed by marketshare as the thing to do already, so that if shit really hits the fan you can just say you did what anyone would have done in your position. Same function as management consultancy: insulating fallout from bad ideas from the people who could be fired for it and give them essentially an out where they won't get browbeaten over it.
I think our culture around work and responsibility and "free time" needs a revolution for the LLMs to take off as promised as this playdoh tool.
ceejayoz 16 hours ago [-]
> Could they make some bespoke LMS that works great for physics 101 at State university?
That's way too narrow, though. It could be done at the department level, the university level, or the state level, right?
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
> Perhaps in the future big tech projects will be delivered with a common “core” and the expectation that agents fill in the use-specific stuff.
I suspect so, the headless / "api/cli only" tools like CRM are pretty big right now and I don't think we've seen the end of that trend, probably more like just beginning.
zackify 1 days ago [-]
That's literally every project around AI. All the agent sandboxes. Hosting cron jobs that just hit ai rest endpoints for model completions etc
knightops_dev 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
indigodaddy 1 days ago [-]
Just use Plexus [1]. The maintainer is not trying to be a hero or raise seed dollars or even really trying to promote it. He's just making an excellent, useful product. (Unaffiliated, just a happy user). It's not a full-on "LLMOps" platform (whatever that is), it's just a proxy that works very well and has some nice features.
Thanks! That's exactly what we need for our 6 ppl team.
jdw64 1 days ago [-]
VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,'
so they invested in AI infra.
"infra is safe"
Hmm, but that wasn't a good idea.
because if an open source infrastructure project like TensorZero gets shut down this quickly, won't they start to realize that those investment theories are also risky?
The difficult thing about AI infrastructure is that, unlike other industries, it will not become fragmented. It will likely remain tied to specific big tech models. What does this mean? It means that because AI models are not yet standardized, the infrastructure itself is actually riskier. In other words, the privatization of standards is happening.
The challenge with AI infrastructure is that an independent, stable standard layer has not formed, unlike in other software infrastructure markets such as databases, web servers, cloud, and containers. Over time, those ecosystems developed relatively standardized interfaces and operational layers. But the LLM ecosystem is still evolving rapidly. Models themselves change fast, APIs differ, pricing differs, context windows, tool calling, structured output, evaluation, fine tuning, caching, routing, everything keeps changing.
So even if an infrastructure startup tries to build a common abstraction layer across multiple models, before that common layer can stabilize, big model or cloud providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS, or Azure can just absorb the same functionality directly. In the end, AI infrastructure is at high risk of becoming an attached feature of model providers rather than solidifying as an independent layer.
But if a startup that raised 7.3 million dollars fails this quickly, who would trust and invest in such things? That aside, it seems AI startups are all the rage these days. I also want to learn AI and get funded like that. Does anyone here trust me enough to invest? About one hundredth of that would probably be enough
rfgplk 1 days ago [-]
A few comments.
> VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra.
First off, this isn't even infra in the infra sense of the word. Infrastructure implied something physical, a pure software product can almost never be considered 'infra'. A tool maybe, but not 'infra'.
VCs can also be irrational and driven primarily by personal connections rather than reason. I didn't do a deep dive in this project/leadership, but often who you know is some important than what you produced. There's a reason why a lot of VCs go for the old motto of "I'd rather invest in an A team with a C product; than invest in a C team with an A product".
realsarm 1 days ago [-]
I also believe the same. Many VCs are obsessed with moat that they clearly got wrong. To me the value created at app layers are so much that gives them the flexibility to diversify their infra layers. Good harnessed do not depend on a specific model provider or memory layer or etc that when it is taken down like anthropic fable they get no risk exposure. Many even after growing train their own model like what cursor did with composer. There’s many more examples in other verticals like manus, superhuman, fireflies, lovable, replit, cursor, nouswise, cline windsurf and kilo but many are concentrated in coding because again I think VCs have preferred this definition of moat.
jdw64 1 days ago [-]
Due to the echo chamber effect, our opinions get reinforced, which can lead to biased conclusions, so it gives me pause. But your comment is so eerily similar to my own thoughts that I'm writing this reply.
I agree that most people misunderstand the concept of a 'moat' and become obsessed with that misunderstanding. People tend to think that only technical 'coding skills' which they can easily understand constitute a moat. But in reality, the moat is the entire workflow across the product's lifecycle, including coing skills. In that sense, infrastructure workflows are nothing more than 'the most easily replaceable consumables.' The essential purpose of infrastructure is to pursue 'standardization,' which paradoxically means a state of 'zero switching costs' where customers (app developers) can switch at any time to a better API or a big tech built in feature. Pure technology that doesn't latch onto the messy real world domains of customers will inevitably be absorbed without resistance by massive capital.
In some ways, customer lock in at the application layer, or even the fan culture around a product, creates emotional lock in. The end user app that provides a specific workflow integrated into users' daily routines can overcome even technical inferiority through 'experience' and 'emotion.' Technology can be copied, but the user identity attached to a tool is what I think a real moat is.(That is also the reason I love Windows.)
The example you gave, Cursor's Composer, is exactly the case I'm talking about. I think Cursor is inferior, and I don't think its Composer model feature is all that great either. But Cursor has a passionate fan base, and users who choose Composer as the best value for money no longer care about absolute technical performance or benchmark scores. They are captivated by the 'speed of experience' of code being completed quickly as they intended, and the 'frictionless workflow' the tool provides.it's not the company that builds the best AI model that wins, but the company that wraps 'good enough technology' in 'great UX' and dominates users' habits. That is how apps dominate infrastructure, and that's the moat you and I are thinking about.
That said, this conclusion is probably too hasty and has many flaws. Still, your thoughts are so similar to mine that I'm leaving this reply. Thanks for the great comment. Have a good day
oliculipolicula 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe 'habit-flow' or 'fart-flow'.
Moaty infra lets user take routine or even not-very-routine dumps (emo or brain) without issue..
[One muses that that also helps to manage "risk-exposure-flows"]
Then again VCs have their own habit-moats too, like some have the idea that anything "in the cloud" ---nowadays, "of the cloud"---must be easy to monetize (at the very least easier to sell to others like themselves). Or others, let's call them "edge-bros", that 'hard to understand' naturally translates into 'hard to copy (but hopefully easy to standardize)'.
Maybe what one needs to do is catch a VC as it is jumping from one moat to another
pqtyw 1 days ago [-]
Infra is perhaps somewhat safe but realistically it's a really low margin capital intense business long-term unless you can lock-in customers with hundreds of services like AWS. So not a lot of space for a huge ROI.
> are all the rage these days
Are they? Overall it seems kind of tame compared to 2020-21 since VCs are somewhat risk average outside of a few outliers. Funding looks much more concentrated these days.
jdw64 1 days ago [-]
You're right. Looking at recent indicators, there are more stable investments than I thought. But please understand that, as a human, I haven't achieved ROI in terms of marriage, relationships, a stable job, etc., so my perspective might be mixed with a bit of envy
GabrielBianconi 23 hours ago [-]
Our investors aren't looking for safe, they're looking for a small chance in funding the next Databricks or similar. Most times it doesn't work out unfortunately, but that's part of the game.
(Also, we raised the capital in 2024 and didn't burn most of it.)
jdw64 23 hours ago [-]
First of all, I respect your decision. I apologize for speaking too hastily about your choices. What I was trying to do was simply talk about how incredibly fast AI infrastructure changes. I also understand your respect for investors looking for the next Databricks. But the reason I wrote what I did is because the confidence expressed in the README ended so early. That said, such confidence isn't necessarily a bad thing. Isn't it said that victory belongs to challengers like you, not cynical people like me? I feel bad about that part. Still, I have no intention of withdrawing my skeptical view about whether AI infrastructure can succeed as an open source startup. I'm very sorry it came across as if I was mocking your failure. That was not my intent. I was simply trying to leave a comment saying that AI infrastructure has a different direction from traditional infrastructure.
GabrielBianconi 23 hours ago [-]
Thanks, appreciate the follow-up. It's certainly still to be determined if OSS AI infra will pan out, but I hope it does!
jdw64 23 hours ago [-]
I wish you success. I wasn't trying to mock your failure, and I'm truly sorry if I made you feel bad. I don't want to be a cynical person who mocks others' challenges. I apologize again for that. I was just expressing that something doesn't seem right from my current perspective. I hope your next challenge goes well.
I mean it. I'm sorry once again
Eridrus 24 hours ago [-]
Tell me you haven't talked to a VC.
A better model for VCs is: companies are finding tons of budget to allocate to new AI spend. Besides the labs, who is going to be able to capture some of that spend while they're actively looking to spend it?
Nobody at the seed stage is investing in things they think are "safe". They are investing in things they think have huge upside.
jdw64 23 hours ago [-]
Sometimes people don't realize that 'professional' ideals and 'reality' are different.
What you're talking about seems like 'ideal' investing, not real world investing at all. Of course, the VCs in your country and the VCs in my country are different.
It's like in software, where everyone says you should write maintainable code within the norms, but in reality, most people don't do that
that investing in 'potential' is the basic principle of VCs. They call it the power law. But when you look at actual investment portfolios, it seems quite rare for people to follow only that principle. I guess you don't think so. Of course, I agree that ideal venture investing follows the power law. But in real world investing, there are pragmatic investors who operate somewhere between the ideal and reality. We always project ourselves onto the 'ideal,' but I don't think there are only people who are immersed in that ideal. Of course, no VC would invest in someone like me. I've met with VCs three times in my career, but they all turned me down. Haha.
jdw64 23 hours ago [-]
Anyway, I wasn't trying to mock your profession. Here's what I think. Most VCs and investors have their own success formula. There will be VCs who succeeded by investing in infrastructure. But the question is whether that same success formula applies to AI startups right now. Of course, from your perspective, it might look like 'this clueless kid is just being cynical without knowing anything.' I partly agree. But that's not the core of my argument.
What I'm trying to say is that those success formulas themselves need to be reconsidered.An insider from up there came out and talked about the next 'Databricks,' believing that's the kind of potential they're looking for. All of them do. Everyone wants to be the first investor in a goldmine. I don't think this is just about greed
The question is whether the traditional infrastructure investment logic holds here. I think most current AI infrastructure tools are closer to 'temporary patches' that exist before the functionality gets internalized.
Let's say infrastructure is like a concrete building. Traditional IT infrastructure basically has a standards committee, and once that committee sets things, changes are extremely rare. It's a kind of 'lake.' But AI infrastructure right now is different from one to another; even the ecosystems differ—the Chinese ecosystem is different from the US ecosystem. It's a flowing 'river.' I just think the question is whether the old grammar can be applied in this situation.
You probably have more money, more investment experience, and more success than I do. I only have a lot of failure. But apart from that, the issue is simply that 'potential' in growth potential ends up being data measured against past examples, and the question is whether that data still holds up now. Anyway, I might have been slightly sarcastic earlier, so I apologize for that. Someone as successful as you, please bear with it a little.
Eridrus 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not a VC man, just someone who has raised funding recently. Nobody in the US is talking about the next Databricks atm, for better or worse, they are either trying to get as much allocation in OpenAI/Anthropic, funding random credentialed people to make neolabs, or funding people who are somehow selling into the massive AI coding/agent demand (or to the labs). Investors in the US currently do not care about safe bets, they want growth at all costs. Risk on.
Maybe in your country it's different, but this is what I see.
hn_throwaway_99 20 hours ago [-]
> VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra.
I think you're really overgeneralizing what "infrastructure" means in this case.
pavlov 1 days ago [-]
This is the claim in the repo readme that presumably unlocked the VC investment:
“TensorZero is used by companies ranging from frontier AI startups to the Fortune 10 and fuels ~1% of global LLM API spend today.”
One percent seems like a lot. Anyone on HN use this?
GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
We raised most of the capital before we had any traction. We raised on a rolling basis and had millions in the bank before we had even published the open-source repository. Ultimately we raised based on the team's background + vision.
The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago. TensorZero powered tens of trillions of inference tokens per month. TensorZero is not widely used but it was used by a couple of extreme-scale users.
pavlov 23 hours ago [-]
Thank you, appreciate the response. It’s a great part of the HN community that there’s almost always someone around with the first-hand experience and facts.
Best of luck with whatever you do next!
spmurrayzzz 1 days ago [-]
I used it, but only briefly to evaluate it. It had some overlap with a tool I built myself, was curious if any of the extra features would be useful.
Ultimately I found the data model and UI to be both cumbersome and unintuitive. Langfuse ended up being the observability tool I went with instead over the one I built (and still use today).
sebmellen 1 days ago [-]
Generally speaking, every YC company post ~2020 is forced to make pathologically false claims to compete in the (fundraising) market.
18 hours ago [-]
ojosilva 1 days ago [-]
Just tell AI to write your copy and that's what you get, overhype-as-a-service.
croes 1 days ago [-]
Rounded to the nearest percent >0
lostmsu 1 days ago [-]
ceil(market_share)
bz_bz_bz 1 days ago [-]
Seed was in Aug ‘25 and website simply says the project will no longer be maintained: https://www.tensorzero.com/
GabrielBianconi 1 days ago [-]
Seed was in '24 actually but we only announced in '25.
This was coincidental. Someone reported the issue last week, we fixed it, and published the advisory.
MonstraG 1 days ago [-]
For people like myself, who didn't understand the timing of events - raised in august 2025, archived yesterday without any notice.
1 days ago [-]
hek2sch 1 days ago [-]
Most VCs avoided application layer believing it is too risky with few player would emerge as winner over application layers calling them GPT wrapper (now called Harness) and pouring money into infra layer. Would love to see your opinion about how this thesis would turn out going forward.
onel 5 hours ago [-]
Your post title is misleading and false. They didn't archive overnight, they raised the money last year, the founder explains in comments.
_pdp_ 1 days ago [-]
Not my experience. I think most VCs thesis is around the application layer - not much around the infrastructure.
That being said, while I am biased, there is a lot of work around infrastructure so calling it "just a wrapper" massively underestimates the effort - this is purely from my own experience building this space.
Besides, if it is true how come OpenClaw is spending so much money on a open source project. Salaries alone will cost 7 digit sum for a harness and I have first hand experience dealing with companies doing exactly this.
Shameful plug - we are building cbk.ai, better known today as chatbotkit.com.
Open source powers the business of many large corporations and they give essentially nothing back - why would maintainers refuse an offer for money in this environment?
andruby 23 hours ago [-]
What are good OSS alternatives? Or do most users not bother with such infra tool?
feverzsj 1 days ago [-]
At least it's not a pig butchering scam.
xyst 23 hours ago [-]
Among the first domino to fall leading up the AI bust. Hope my 401K won’t get decimated by this one.
krembo 1 days ago [-]
I don’t understand the commenters here who are attacking the entrepreneur. If it's not your money, then he is accountable only to his investors.
arjie 19 hours ago [-]
Click through to their profiles and you'll find that they habitually do this. Preserve your own sanity and just eject them from your feed by removing comment subtrees starting with their comments. I see less than half of the comments in this thread and they're in the realm of reasonable.
Treat it as an engineering problem where you're trying to lower the noise floor.
RIMR 22 hours ago [-]
You don't have to have money on something to have an opinion about it.
villgax 1 days ago [-]
Just switch to Bifrost already
rvz 1 days ago [-]
But it is written in Rust™.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
Guys - skynet is winning the war. We oldschool humans are left behind here.
Wasn't GitHub once a place for humans? Now we could rename it SkyHub.
We started the company two and a half years ago, and raised $7.3m in 2024 (announced only almost a year later). We've spent less than half of this amount.
Earlier this week we came to the difficult decision to wind down the project. The open-source repository remains available on GitHub (Apache 2.0) but won't be actively maintained by the team moving forward.
Now one question that you probably get a lot and I must ask: why not pivot?
News like this is reinforcing the narrative that frontier models and AI outsourcing generally is on the way down.
The other half goes where?
We are returning the remaining capital to investors.
It takes maturity and decisiveness to recognize when a startup's core idea isn't going to work. In cases where any pivot wide enough to get into different lane is essentially a whole other business, it's often better to just shut down. Even if the last desperate pivot starts to work, you often have some team members and investors who aren't a good fit for the new focus and, worse, the 'new' business that's finally starting to work is almost out of money and the cap table is messed up. It's usually better to shut it down and reboot cleanly.
Founders who've successfully raised millions and executed well are usually quite fundable, even if their first startup didn't work out. Sometimes the timing is wrong or the market evolves differently. The key is how well you think, execute and communicate through both the windup and the wind down.
Major pivoting is almost always a really bad idea. (I admit I'm doing a bit of weaseling using the "major" qualifier, but when I searched for examples online, a lot of the ones that came back weren't major pivots, just slight refinements of focus to find better product market fit). Pivoting usually carries a lot of baggage - better to just give the money back and start afresh most of the time.
Familiar with creditors getting divvied in bankruptcies, but not refunds to investors… oh it’s because there’s never any money left when things wind down. (We hear of retail stores where employees discover closures posted on shop doors when reporting to work.)
Perhaps now, but during the Zero Interest Rate era, the received wisdom was founders ought to keep going until there bank account was empty, in the hope that they may salvage returns for investors. Vendors, partners, clients and employees would be screwed, naturally, but it didn't matter because VC preferred it because losing all the money in a desperate gamble was preferable to lending money to startups at 0%
Honestly, I was close to flagging this story because the title is deliberately manipulative - it makes it sound like the founder did a rug pull. But I was really glad to see the founder come in to these comments and just say we tried, but the market shifted under us. Happens all the time.
The title is misleading unfortunately but that's how social media goes...
Early stage startups tend not to have a lot debt to pay off, because there aren’t many places willing to offer them much credit.
When after a few months we accepted that it wasn’t going to work, our investor got basically all his money back.
It was pocket change amounts compared to the sums of money that they deal with in Silicon Valley. But the point is the same anyway, the investor got back basically everything.
Ended up having to wind it down because it was a stupid idea and I realised quite quickly after spending money on it. Was a small amount of money but a lot for me. Luckily the investor never asked for money back.
Wound down my second one too but lost no money.
Then came into some money through a software sale about 7 years later, and offered to pay the first investor their full investment back, which was about half the money from the software sale (my only sale ever).
They really appreciated it but declined and instead said no, they want to invest in me AGAIN in the next one.
Felt really nice to have someone believe in you so much they would open themselves up to money risk again rather than take their initial investment back
It would be depressing if your first painting was your best work.
I might publish a long-form reflection when the dust settles.
Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.
It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.
When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."
They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice
Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them
This isn’t true. It’s easily shown to be not true by looking at all of the CEOs who had success with one endeavor and then failed all of their following startups, or the other way around.
A lot goes into founding a successful company. Not all of it is in anyone’s control. Not everything can be overcome by a CEO with powerful motivation.
Some times the market moves in ways nobody could have expected. I even worked at one startup that was destabilized and ultimately failed due to a natural disaster.
Looking back at the startups in my past, some of the worst CEOs were the ones who paraded around their ideals about failure not being an option or who pretended that they could get the company through anything through sheer force of their will and the power of their dream. One CEO who was all about “never give up, never surrender!” thinking ran the company into the ground because he refused to let us pivot after the initial idea didn’t get traction in the market but some other features were getting a lot of interest.
Some times knowing when to call it, move on to the next thing, and stop stringing your employees, investors, and customers along is an important CEO skill.
In one instance he raised the price of something by 1000 times without adding anything extra. His explaination was that it would build the right community. In his opinion people were to negative/sceptical and talked to much about what things cost.
Cost him 90% of the customers innitially then grew by 100ish%. As if some high end comedy the 90% said it was to expensive and that it would never work. The other 10% really needed to see what would happen.
In smaller startups, everyone is directly involved and has to punch above their weight to pull through, not just the CEO.
Also devoting everything in your life to one thing is not a mark of intelligence or skill. It is a mark of dedication but by itself means little.
And yeah, not everyone can be a CEO because most business fail very quickly. There is always an element of luck in those that survive.
But the idea that you devote 24x7 of your life hence you must be a good leader is not accurate. In fact, if you press this culture downstream, you'll tire your workers and the rest of the team.
I.e. Not the majority of celebrity CEOs with golden parachutes and underpaid employees. Only in the position thanks to "my dad knows his dad and we went to the same school" nods and winks. It is the objective truth for most executives.
For example: I cannot imagine being a successful touring live performer. I am an introvert, I keep a rigid schedule so travel throws everything off, can't keep myself awake very late...
Could I perform the functions of a live performer? Yes, though no matter how much I "tried" the mismatch between the job and my natural tendencies is a recipe for failure.
Not everyone can be a CEO because not everyone is cut out for it. If you think you could step into those shoes, you're either built different or delusional.I think the problems with "successful" CEOs don't paint the complete picture. Many CEOs come in after the hard work has been done and "final phase" CEOs enshittify the product and treat their partners and customers vastly differently than they did during their build phase. I experienced this first hand at Palo Alto Networks. At the time their second CEO (Mark McLaughlin) had just come into the org. Mark was one of those few genuine CEOs I experienced, probably one of the least narcissistic I've seen at that point in a young company's trajectory. However Nikesh Arora (Mark's successor) is a complete narcissistic asshole. I still talk to many in leadership there on the regular and the consistent theme is he's surely the reason PAN support and product quality has taken a dive compared to the engineering focus on product and customers back in the early 2010s.
There are a lot of papers surrounding CEOs and many look at the narcissistic angle [0][1][2]. The reality is a lot of these companies could operate just fine without a CEO. I find it hard to believe CEOs are even remotely worth their compensation packages given most of them have zero clue about the product or customs they serve anymore. This all flows back to the "shareholder value" bullshit the US economy is built on. If corporations had more restrictions in financial engineering maybe, just maybe, they'd actually try to better compete within their product/service space.
[0] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/n... [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0149206319892678 [2] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/25/are-narcissistic-...
These are not examples of in-born traits. While I agree that not everyone has the motivation to become a CEO, I would disagree that a person cannot learn and adapt.
The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.
> The problem with your point of view is that "Love of cocaine" is one of them, it's near the top, and you'll never acknowledge the fact.
I don't get why one can't easily acknowledge the slightly weaker statement that traits that are inherent to successful CEOs might be positively correlated to being prone to a love for cocaine (which says nothing about any causality).
Being a bit delusional is a critical quality of some CEOs, so the distinction hardly matters.
Is there a way to reach out to you as I would like to hear what you have to say about what I am working on. You can update your HN profile to include contact information or you can reach out to me using my HN profile.
I'm basically working on a portable intelligence layer for AI that I will be open sourcing and the commerical product will be to make the intelligence layer even smarter. I can share the Show HN post that I am working on that better explains the value proposition and would love to learn any lessons you have gained while trying to sell AI tools commerically.
Edit: In case somebody calls me out it. I didn't want to use the `tensorzero` email domain incase the domain was going to become defunct soon.
and domains are cheap.
I’d shoot the note now if the feedback could be valuable.
The only way this could be a 'lesson learned' is if you homehow managed to not pay any attention to what has been going on in the last 25 years with open source software companies.
That's why it's called learning.
I would applaud that the fact that found took bold decision to think out of the box and take action towards it.
Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments.
[0]: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/tensorzero-raises-7-3m-seed-...
or you're incompetent
That is indeed how the VC funding game is played. If you don't raise another round, you are dead anyway, so you spend down your seed round to try and justify that following round...
I’d bet on extreme irresponsibility.
(Honestly I don’t think so here, but I predict that will happen eventually)
The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerks and/or grifting losers. It's not the VC's fault.
Also read the link. This is apache 2 licensed. Even in whatever imaginary world where there is such a social contract, there is thankfully a legal contract that includes disclaimer of warranty.
Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.
Forking only makes sense if the creators are also monetising it successfully.
Yes, that's exactly what it means!
https://github.com/agentify-sh/gateway
For now I will just open this up to see if there is any interest if so I would be spending whatever free time I get to fix issues and open it up to other contributors so we can keep going.
I think its important to have an LLM gateway tool like this to remain open source.
It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity. I didn't publish it as I counted several similar projects in the field.
Putting $7.3M into such a project would make sense only in the case of a precise growth plan with already declared customers and an promising sales funnel. There is no technical moat.
> It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity.
That’s the thing, though. The version I build for myself sheds all the features that get in my way. I don’t share them either because they’re only useful for me.
Perhaps in the future big tech projects will be delivered with a common “core” and the expectation that agents fill in the use-specific stuff.
I feel like this is really going to change the software industry moving forwards. Historically it was tedious and time consuming to actually develop tailored dev tools which is why so many organizations relied on third party solutions. When nowadays you can easily half bake something in a few hours and get it working, tailored _specifically_ to your needs.
The thing is this requires you are given liberty to actually do this yourself. Think of something like say LMS software. Every college in the country is using what either blackboard or canvas. Could they make some bespoke LMS that works great for physics 101 at State university? Absolutely. But they don't, because the course director for physics 101 does not care or have the time to muck around with LMS prototypes. They barely have time to learn how to use their paid for LMS for anything but hosting the slides and syllabus.
So on the one hand, yes, there is massive creative potential for people to roll their own tools. But this is not often met with the required time and liberty to then go on to roll their own tools. Buying off the shelf still serves the organizational need it ever did: defer the creating to "someone else" who has been anointed by marketshare as the thing to do already, so that if shit really hits the fan you can just say you did what anyone would have done in your position. Same function as management consultancy: insulating fallout from bad ideas from the people who could be fired for it and give them essentially an out where they won't get browbeaten over it.
I think our culture around work and responsibility and "free time" needs a revolution for the LLMs to take off as promised as this playdoh tool.
That's way too narrow, though. It could be done at the department level, the university level, or the state level, right?
I suspect so, the headless / "api/cli only" tools like CRM are pretty big right now and I don't think we've seen the end of that trend, probably more like just beginning.
[1] https://github.com/mcowger/plexus
"infra is safe" Hmm, but that wasn't a good idea. because if an open source infrastructure project like TensorZero gets shut down this quickly, won't they start to realize that those investment theories are also risky?
The difficult thing about AI infrastructure is that, unlike other industries, it will not become fragmented. It will likely remain tied to specific big tech models. What does this mean? It means that because AI models are not yet standardized, the infrastructure itself is actually riskier. In other words, the privatization of standards is happening.
The challenge with AI infrastructure is that an independent, stable standard layer has not formed, unlike in other software infrastructure markets such as databases, web servers, cloud, and containers. Over time, those ecosystems developed relatively standardized interfaces and operational layers. But the LLM ecosystem is still evolving rapidly. Models themselves change fast, APIs differ, pricing differs, context windows, tool calling, structured output, evaluation, fine tuning, caching, routing, everything keeps changing.
So even if an infrastructure startup tries to build a common abstraction layer across multiple models, before that common layer can stabilize, big model or cloud providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS, or Azure can just absorb the same functionality directly. In the end, AI infrastructure is at high risk of becoming an attached feature of model providers rather than solidifying as an independent layer.
But if a startup that raised 7.3 million dollars fails this quickly, who would trust and invest in such things? That aside, it seems AI startups are all the rage these days. I also want to learn AI and get funded like that. Does anyone here trust me enough to invest? About one hundredth of that would probably be enough
> VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra.
First off, this isn't even infra in the infra sense of the word. Infrastructure implied something physical, a pure software product can almost never be considered 'infra'. A tool maybe, but not 'infra'.
VCs can also be irrational and driven primarily by personal connections rather than reason. I didn't do a deep dive in this project/leadership, but often who you know is some important than what you produced. There's a reason why a lot of VCs go for the old motto of "I'd rather invest in an A team with a C product; than invest in a C team with an A product".
I agree that most people misunderstand the concept of a 'moat' and become obsessed with that misunderstanding. People tend to think that only technical 'coding skills' which they can easily understand constitute a moat. But in reality, the moat is the entire workflow across the product's lifecycle, including coing skills. In that sense, infrastructure workflows are nothing more than 'the most easily replaceable consumables.' The essential purpose of infrastructure is to pursue 'standardization,' which paradoxically means a state of 'zero switching costs' where customers (app developers) can switch at any time to a better API or a big tech built in feature. Pure technology that doesn't latch onto the messy real world domains of customers will inevitably be absorbed without resistance by massive capital.
In some ways, customer lock in at the application layer, or even the fan culture around a product, creates emotional lock in. The end user app that provides a specific workflow integrated into users' daily routines can overcome even technical inferiority through 'experience' and 'emotion.' Technology can be copied, but the user identity attached to a tool is what I think a real moat is.(That is also the reason I love Windows.)
The example you gave, Cursor's Composer, is exactly the case I'm talking about. I think Cursor is inferior, and I don't think its Composer model feature is all that great either. But Cursor has a passionate fan base, and users who choose Composer as the best value for money no longer care about absolute technical performance or benchmark scores. They are captivated by the 'speed of experience' of code being completed quickly as they intended, and the 'frictionless workflow' the tool provides.it's not the company that builds the best AI model that wins, but the company that wraps 'good enough technology' in 'great UX' and dominates users' habits. That is how apps dominate infrastructure, and that's the moat you and I are thinking about.
That said, this conclusion is probably too hasty and has many flaws. Still, your thoughts are so similar to mine that I'm leaving this reply. Thanks for the great comment. Have a good day
Moaty infra lets user take routine or even not-very-routine dumps (emo or brain) without issue..
[One muses that that also helps to manage "risk-exposure-flows"]
Then again VCs have their own habit-moats too, like some have the idea that anything "in the cloud" ---nowadays, "of the cloud"---must be easy to monetize (at the very least easier to sell to others like themselves). Or others, let's call them "edge-bros", that 'hard to understand' naturally translates into 'hard to copy (but hopefully easy to standardize)'.
Maybe what one needs to do is catch a VC as it is jumping from one moat to another
> are all the rage these days
Are they? Overall it seems kind of tame compared to 2020-21 since VCs are somewhat risk average outside of a few outliers. Funding looks much more concentrated these days.
(Also, we raised the capital in 2024 and didn't burn most of it.)
I mean it. I'm sorry once again
A better model for VCs is: companies are finding tons of budget to allocate to new AI spend. Besides the labs, who is going to be able to capture some of that spend while they're actively looking to spend it?
Nobody at the seed stage is investing in things they think are "safe". They are investing in things they think have huge upside.
What you're talking about seems like 'ideal' investing, not real world investing at all. Of course, the VCs in your country and the VCs in my country are different.
It's like in software, where everyone says you should write maintainable code within the norms, but in reality, most people don't do that
that investing in 'potential' is the basic principle of VCs. They call it the power law. But when you look at actual investment portfolios, it seems quite rare for people to follow only that principle. I guess you don't think so. Of course, I agree that ideal venture investing follows the power law. But in real world investing, there are pragmatic investors who operate somewhere between the ideal and reality. We always project ourselves onto the 'ideal,' but I don't think there are only people who are immersed in that ideal. Of course, no VC would invest in someone like me. I've met with VCs three times in my career, but they all turned me down. Haha.
What I'm trying to say is that those success formulas themselves need to be reconsidered.An insider from up there came out and talked about the next 'Databricks,' believing that's the kind of potential they're looking for. All of them do. Everyone wants to be the first investor in a goldmine. I don't think this is just about greed
The question is whether the traditional infrastructure investment logic holds here. I think most current AI infrastructure tools are closer to 'temporary patches' that exist before the functionality gets internalized.
Let's say infrastructure is like a concrete building. Traditional IT infrastructure basically has a standards committee, and once that committee sets things, changes are extremely rare. It's a kind of 'lake.' But AI infrastructure right now is different from one to another; even the ecosystems differ—the Chinese ecosystem is different from the US ecosystem. It's a flowing 'river.' I just think the question is whether the old grammar can be applied in this situation.
You probably have more money, more investment experience, and more success than I do. I only have a lot of failure. But apart from that, the issue is simply that 'potential' in growth potential ends up being data measured against past examples, and the question is whether that data still holds up now. Anyway, I might have been slightly sarcastic earlier, so I apologize for that. Someone as successful as you, please bear with it a little.
Maybe in your country it's different, but this is what I see.
I think you're really overgeneralizing what "infrastructure" means in this case.
“TensorZero is used by companies ranging from frontier AI startups to the Fortune 10 and fuels ~1% of global LLM API spend today.”
One percent seems like a lot. Anyone on HN use this?
The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago. TensorZero powered tens of trillions of inference tokens per month. TensorZero is not widely used but it was used by a couple of extreme-scale users.
Best of luck with whatever you do next!
Ultimately I found the data model and UI to be both cumbersome and unintuitive. Langfuse ended up being the observability tool I went with instead over the one I built (and still use today).
https://github.com/TensorOne
That being said, while I am biased, there is a lot of work around infrastructure so calling it "just a wrapper" massively underestimates the effort - this is purely from my own experience building this space.
Besides, if it is true how come OpenClaw is spending so much money on a open source project. Salaries alone will cost 7 digit sum for a harness and I have first hand experience dealing with companies doing exactly this.
Shameful plug - we are building cbk.ai, better known today as chatbotkit.com.
https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/
Treat it as an engineering problem where you're trying to lower the noise floor.
Wasn't GitHub once a place for humans? Now we could rename it SkyHub.
PS: Someone won't become a trillionaire with this attitude.