[tlackemann]

With all respect, I hope you don't have a lot of capital locked in this. Who is this company targeting? Google?

My company uses gRPC and it's an absolute nightmare but not so much to the point where we'd use a company like this to add on MORE costs to our infrastructure.

It baffles me people choose buzzword technology because "ex-googler" or whatever when 99% of companies that choose it will NEVER hit the scale it was meant for. Best of luck to the sales team. They'll be the driving force I'm sure.

REST is fine for 99% of companies. Long live REST.

[kentonv]

I don't see Buf's play as being about scale or performance, but rather developer experience. I think that that with the right tooling, the developer experience of strong schemas with code generators can far surpass JSON/REST. If that happens then the performance/scalability benefit is just a bonus.

Will people pay for it? That's not my area of expertise. But, I would note that Vagrant started out as a collection of Ruby scripts for wrangling existing VM products, which probably few people imagined would be something people would pay for. And just this morning, Hashicorp went public at a market cap of $18.5B. It is possible to build a business around developer tools. Not easy, certainly, but possible.

> I hope you don't have a lot of capital locked in this

Like any intelligent angel investor, I always assume I'll lose 100% of my investment and size them appropriately.

[tlackemann]

I wasn't really talking about Buf at scale but rather how gRPC is just a buzzword technology that companies get sucked into adopting for the sake of "scale". I've yet to see gRPC used in a way that makes sense - it's just added complexity for an org that should've been a monolith to begin with.

Maybe I'm an old curmudgeon but I don't see the point, at all.