[_vvhw]

The founders of Convex are some of the most talented developers I know.

The CTO worked with Turing-award winner Barbara Liskov on Viewstamped Replication Revisited [1], the revision of the pioneering consensus protocol, and later the founding team pulled off the migration of Dropbox from S3 to their own custom storage stack called Magic Pocket [2].

The deterministic simulation testing techniques [3] they used to develop Dropbox's revised sync algorithm are still state of the art today (few systems are designed to be tested like this), and the online verification techniques [4] they used to verify their production systems are vital to building large-scale systems safely.

I can't think of a stronger technical team to do something like Convex, and couldn't imagine a better devops team to be running the backend.

[1] https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/vr-revisited.pdf

[2] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

[3] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

[4] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/velocity-conference-new...

[jmkni]

Fun fact, Barbara Liskov is the L in SOLID

[_vvhw]

And coined the term “killer heuristic” for chess algorithms.

[james_cowling]

Thank you! We have a really talented team working with us but we're very actively growing. If anyone is looking for a job in San Francisco: https://www.convex.dev/jobs

[rmbyrro]

Dropbox is one of the subscriptions I'm most glad of paying.

[swyx]

i'm also equally impressed by their background, and puzzled that they choose to target frontend developers rather than backend developers (who presumably they would be much better able to solve problems for?)

[jamwt]

(Founder / CEO of Convex here)

Hi Shawn. I don't remember you bringing this up when we spoke in person recently, but it's a great question.

In our opinion, the very best way to evaluate yourself as a backend developer is how directly you solve problems for frontend developers. We believe in the merit of customer obsession, and the customers are not buying queues. They're buying the product as they see it: its surfaces, workflows and experience. And that's what the frontend developers, PMs, and designers are creating.

Historically, all these backend technologies that only interoperate with each other are only useful so long as they make product creation and improvement easier, more reliable, etc. We strongly believe as soon as you don't need them anymore, you should toss them out. They're complex and not proprietary to your product.

Convex (and serverless in general) is just the next step in providing more powerful abstractions that allow companies to double down on frontend engineering (work that adds product value) instead of reimplementing the same backend/devops plumbing the users never see (work that, at best, merely sustain product value).

So, given that we recognize this need, I respectfully disagree that we're not well equipped to solve these problems for frontend developers! Most of our team's recent our work has been designing synchronization and storage platforms to enable product development, including work on web, desktop, and mobile libraries/SDKs. We feel like we have both a lot of empathy and experience for this space, and we're very proud of our early product and the enthusiasm from the web dev community.

[swyx]

hey jamwt! no i wasn't thinking about this at the time, someone mentioned it when discussing Convex and I thought "huh, thats an interesting way to look at market-founder fit" so I just tossed it out there.

great answer :) if you can solve DX for frontend you're solving it for everyone.

[ikhare]

(I work at Convex)

I was the one of the original TLs of Google Photos, specifically on Android and eventually managed all of the frontend teams for Google Photos. So I hope it's not a stretch to say that I have deep empathy for frontend problems. We also have great frontend oriented folks on the team.

I also worked with jamwt at a previous company (Bump) doing frontend work. When we worked together, I remember the acceleration of our ability to execute when the backend people were closely involved in our data syncing problems. Heck jamwt and team even wrote most of the initial client syncing code. When backend and frontend folks work closely together to solve data problems you can make magical things happen. In the end we're just product oriented engineers trying to ship delightful experiences.

[swyx]

i... feel like i shouldve figured that out, because i definitely saw that in your profile but just didnt make the connection. thank you!!

[ikhare]

Hey no problem! We’re all trying to make this space better. Thanks for all the work you put into it too!

[james_cowling]

This is very nice feedback. The short answer is that we want to solve problems that matter for the people who need them solved.