> When we first met the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn't seem especially committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It was the usual story: he'd drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word "Billionaire" printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.
Edit: Funnily enough, one of the Octopart founders quit grad school on the first day HN existed. Time flies:
Following that archive.org link is really incredible. To be able to go back to the first day this site was launched and click around like I'm viewing today's site; just amazing.
Yesterday I had PG's Startup School 08 video[1] on the background and he spoke about them just after being a cockroach and how companies succeed not just by not being evil but by being good.
Has Octopart given interviews regarding their technical infrastructure? Everything on their site is very fast and performant. The autocomplete on the homepage is excellent. And the filtering done via the sidebar post-search handles a high-level of complexity quite well.
Congratulations and good luck on a new stage of Octopart!
I met one of the Octopart guys at a YC at NYC event one time and we briefly chatted about Griffiths' QM book, what customized site would be like in the future, and other random things. Brief conversation, but walked away thinking they were nice people working on a cool idea. very cool to see this.
Yay, I hope you can influence Altium in a positive way. CAD is changing so much and some of the old school guys want to get back to the old days of $25,000 "seat" licenses and what not but that horse has left the stable. Octopart has been my go to source for finding parts (and datasheets given the crap that is the datasheet web spam) for many years.
That's great! I've been an Octopart-Arena user for nearly 2 years. I've had good experiences with their support and APIs.
I hope this will allow for a better implementation of compliance linking -- I've been waiting for a good RoHS and REACH tool, and I think Octopart has a great start.
Are we really all that are left? Interestingly, Octopart and Weebly were among the companies in the program I would have enthusiastically invested in, had I had that option.
Congratulations for the Octopart team. However, as a user of both Altium and Octopart, this is worrisome.
Altium has a bad history of licensing schemes, bad support and, most of all, old technologies. As a user, I understand a professional tool must be stable and not jump in the latest fad, however, the Delphi and Turbo Pascal cracks in Altium show all to often. Most designers I know get the illustrative habit of closing Altium from time to time to avoid losing data in the next crash.
Their version control bindings also show their age, and a few years ago I cracked in a post[1] about Altium and git:
> The answer I eventually got from Altium was "what is git?" I took that as a "don't try it."
I really like the tool, but the company seem too invested in selling services like Vault and flexboard, which sound great for big companies and consumer products, but, as a freelance and custom projects engineer, they are a much lower rank to me than simply good and practical ECAD.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 68.9 ms ] threadRelevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
> When we first met the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn't seem especially committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It was the usual story: he'd drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word "Billionaire" printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.
Edit: Funnily enough, one of the Octopart founders quit grad school on the first day HN existed. Time flies:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...
http://docs.octopart.com/newsweek_octopart_small.jpg
Also, good seeing people make money off the new electronics revolution.
Also, good seeing people make money off the new electronics revolution.
Really happy for them. Great team.
[1]https://youtu.be/q7K0vRUKXKc?t=891
I met one of the Octopart guys at a YC at NYC event one time and we briefly chatted about Griffiths' QM book, what customized site would be like in the future, and other random things. Brief conversation, but walked away thinking they were nice people working on a cool idea. very cool to see this.
I hope this will allow for a better implementation of compliance linking -- I've been waiting for a good RoHS and REACH tool, and I think Octopart has a great start.
Yeah, it's probably buy and bury.
congrats to the founders.
Altium has a bad history of licensing schemes, bad support and, most of all, old technologies. As a user, I understand a professional tool must be stable and not jump in the latest fad, however, the Delphi and Turbo Pascal cracks in Altium show all to often. Most designers I know get the illustrative habit of closing Altium from time to time to avoid losing data in the next crash.
Their version control bindings also show their age, and a few years ago I cracked in a post[1] about Altium and git:
> The answer I eventually got from Altium was "what is git?" I took that as a "don't try it."
I really like the tool, but the company seem too invested in selling services like Vault and flexboard, which sound great for big companies and consumer products, but, as a freelance and custom projects engineer, they are a much lower rank to me than simply good and practical ECAD.
[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5121233/how-to-use-altium...