Data lakes promised schema-on-read flexibility but became swamps. The industry responded by turning them into databases again, defeating the original purpose. We built Matterbeam differently: immutable storage with inferred intermediate schemas that translate rapidly into any structure you need. When materializations aren't right, replay them. The original vision, actually operationalized.
We gave our first employees restricted stock agreements instead of ISO options, with the exact same legal terms and vesting schedule I got as founder. 2-6% equity grants, six-year vesting, hiring bonuses to cover exercise costs and taxes. Values have to cost something, or they're just words on a website.
This is a little triggering :) Reminds me of all the promise back in 2005 when I built my first startup Grazr.
It was:
- a widget that was a mini RSS reader that let visitors to your site read the RSS feeds you subscribed to on your site
- a way to share your collection of RSS feeds dynamically
- a way to copy / remix those collections
- a way to subscribe to those lists dynamically (if they had a dynamic blogroll or whatever)
- a processing and filtering engine to allow merging collections of feeds together into a single stream
- Javascript on the server (in 2005 :) ) run using embedded script tags in the OPML / XML blogrolls to create even more dynamic blogs
The net effect was you could make your own news feeds / timelines and use code to control how they were filtered / combined / etc... It was crazy powerful (for 2005) and I still miss it _today_ since it had the dynamism of the news feed, some of the social aspect, and total control since there was no algorithm other than your and the people's who's list you subscribed to curation and any code you ran against it.
So many memories. That was a big part of my first startup in 2005. Grazr was the “next level of rss”. Unfortunately the first level never quite took off.
Very nice! :) I also had a similar itch a while back and built https://gamescape.app (during the pandemic). Different focus -- all about shared maps and tokens rather than a "full" VTT. Plan is for it to be free forever. Can't work on it anymore since I started a startup that eats 100% of my time, but totally usable (my group uses it every week :) ).
This looks exactly what I started building awhile ago (and then bailed when I discovered Foundry). Do you think you'll ever release the code so it can be self-hosted?
I've toyed with OSS'ing it or releasing the code. It would be a non-trivial amount of time and energy to package it in a way that people could host it. Gamescape was a hobby thing so I used some different architectural patterns I'd been wanting to experiment and play with that aren't totally standard.
I posted to get ideas and maybe help other startups. We dipped a toe into posting on Reddit. Targeted community, sharing a white paper, asking if people wanted to share their pain with us (we're still trying to learn). Got modded to oblivion. I thought we ticked the right boxes, interesting info (IMHO), being transparent about who we are.
Basically I wanted something to approximate pen, grid paper and physical tokens during the pandemic when I was playing with some old high school friends remotely. Roll20 was just too clunky.
I’ve got a new startup now (unrelated) so I haven’t had much time to work on it. If anyone wants to work on TTRPG tools (I’ve considered OSS this, or maybe even paying for dev) let me know!
