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by aazaa 1711 days ago
> I’ve joined the Wasmer company at its early beginning, in March 2019. The company was 3 months old.

I had no idea that Wasmer, Inc. was a company. The home page, wasmer.io, says nothing about a company and reads like an open source project landing page.

Way at the bottom is a banana button to "Contact Sales" that's just an email address.

What's the product Wasmer is selling?

Clicking through to "about," I see nothing about products, just bios of the team members:

https://wasmer.io/about

> The CEO, Syrus Akbary, had evidently a lot of pressure on its shoulders.

I suspect that pressure had to do with not having a product for sale in the traditional sense. Maybe the company was viewed as a product, with another company as the customer. If so, it's clear how this could become a pressure cooker.

No product + investor money + team to support = pressure and bad work environment.

3 comments

Forgive my ignorance, please, but what is a `banana button`? I tried to search duckgo/google and the results are... interesting but probably not what you meant. Thanks!
It comes from a book whose name I can't remember. Maybe "Don't make me think." It's about UI design.

"Banana" as in the fruit. Monkey as in, well, user. If you want a monkey to follow you, use a banana visible enough that the monkey can see it.

It's basically any giant, clearly visible button.

My previous knowledge of Wasmer is a "Wasmer vs. Wasmtime" comparison they published, which looks heavily biased and more like marketing or a hit piece than a good-faith comparison: https://wasmer.io/wasmer-vs-wasmtime
> What's the product Wasmer is selling?

Wasmer is an implementation of Wasm.

Yeah a free open source implementation. How are they planning on making money?
For example how does Oracle make money from MySQL, a free open source implementation of a database? They sell support.
"Selling support" is one way to make money from OpenSource, but a) it's not clear that Wasmer is even doing that, and b) there's loads of other ways too (hosting, open core, freemium, etc).