As a follow-up to their demise, the AllPeers guys are debriefing on the Peer Pressure blog and offering their experienced views to other start-uppers. Obviously I am paying a lot of attention to their post-mortem, especially since our project Podmailing is, like AllPeers was, positioned in the P2P / personal file-sharing space.
You should read the original article entirely before paying any attention to me. So here are a few humble comments i'd like to make:
"If, on the other hand, you plan to dethrone Facebook by adding state-of-the-art social features to the fabric of the web, transforming the internet experience of billions of people, you’re going to have to execute to perfection and still get really really lucky if your company is to succeed. Of course, if you make it you’ll be assured a very comfortable early retirement."
OK, I agree. You know, I already heard that somewhere... oh yes, that's what they say about Poker. If you wanna make it to the final table in the World Series Main Event, you must execute perfectly AND be really lucky.
"It is comforting to see failure in this way because we certainly wouldn’t have sacrificed our lofty ambitions to increase our chance of moderate success."
Exactly. I know what you mean about that Matt. at zSlide we have also made that decision. For us it means to bet everything on our boldest scenario. For an entrepreneur I think that making that choice often requires a lot of self-confidence, and to be self-demanding and self-disciplined. It's not only to work hard in order to get it right. It's also to never stop, never give up!
"Raise as much as you can
I’m not the first one to say this, but let me express my wholehearted agreement: raise as much as you can, as soon as you can, and not a penny less."
Or don't raise funds at all. This is exactly the sort of question for which you hear both answers just as often.
"But only a company’s founder has a single-minded focus on the company’s success, and this includes acquiring a war chest to deal with unforeseen contingencies."
Sounds fair.
"In retrospect, it seems obvious and absolutely normal that it would take us the better part of two years to build a new peer-to-peer stack from the ground up and deploy it in a scalable way"
2 years? Yeah, that's about it here too.
"Nonetheless, with all the real-world experience of building a P2P network behind me, my opinion as a technologist is that the huge challenges of deploying a consumer P2P app outweigh the advantages."
True, a pure P2P service lacks quality of service.
"The biggest problem with consumer P2P is that other users must be online in order for files to be available. With AllPeers, we frequently heard the complaint that “someone shared something with me but when I went to download it, I got a message saying ‘no sources’.”
I'm sure you also had a lot of users blocked by their routers and firewalls, didn't you? Been there, done that.
"This isn’t to say that P2P doesn’t have compelling uses. A hybrid model that uses P2P where possible and a central server otherwise looks more promising since it solves the “no sources” problem mentioned above while retaining much of the efficiency advantage of a decentralized architecture. We had already started to experiment with this at AllPeers, and this would have become a big part of our technological strategy had we had time to finish implementing it."
Same here! Couldn't agree more. The good news is, scalable centralized architectures are becoming a commodity. We use Amazon Web Services for Podmailing and it is starting to work out really nicely for us. Especially since the BitTorrent protocol is supported natively by Amazon S3!
"For mass distribution of media, I believe that P2P is most effective when it is implemented at a very low-level in the network stack. Application level code shouldn’t have to worry about it,...
I agree that P2P machinery should be as transparent as possible for the end-user. But to my mind, P2P at the Application Level is not a question of network stack: it is the concept of exchanging stuff between users, which includes 100% Web file hosting services as well as YouTube and the like. It's about personal sharing or user-generated content. In that sense it's rather a good thing.
...but wherever possible data should be cached at the edges of the network and delivered from the most efficient location. This is essentially how the web handles distribution of web pages, with caching at the ISP and in the user’s browser."
I hadn't thought much about that, good point. And on a side note this is a motivation for people to have large hard drives, which is not obvious to those who only believe in "Web software" these days. I do believe that the Web browser environment and the Desktop environment are on the way to totally merging, but data caching is a structural requirement that will always need to be optimized in terms of bandwidth and storage space. So we will continue to have large storage in our offices, homes and pockets, and as always, the good news is that storage is growing very fast.
"I am sometimes critical of what I perceive as the excessively ideological bent of many open source advocates. One of the great things about the open source movement, in my view, is that is provides a strong counterweight to proprietary software."
Me too : I hate the integrists, but I love open source - might even release some in the near future.
Ok now I'll go play poker, might even get a little lucky!
;-)
