404 Deno CEO not found

I visited deno.com yesterday. I wanted to know if the hundreds of hours I’ve spent mastering Deno was a sunk cost. Do I continue building for the runtime, or go back to Node?

Well I guess that pretty much sums up why a good chunk of Deno employees left the company over the last week.

Layoffs are what American corpo culture calls firing half the staff. Totally normal practice for a sustainable business. Mass layoffs are deemed better for the moral of those who remain than a weekly culling before Friday beers.

Deno’s decline

A year ago I wrote about Deno’s decline. The facts, undeterred by my subjective scorn, painted a harsh picture; Deno Land Inc. was failing.

Deno incorporated with $4.9M of seed capital five years ago. They raised a further $21M series A a year later. Napkin math suggests a five year runway for an unprofitable company.

Coincidentally, after my blog post topped Hacker News, Ryan Dahl (Deno CEO) clapped back on the official Deno blog, admitting they had been too quiet about their future direction. Dahl mentioned that adoption had doubled following Deno 2.0. User base doubling sounds like a flex unless you give numbers. The harsh truth is that Deno’s offerings have failed to capture developers’ attention.

Ghost towns and failed products

Deno Deploy, the main source of revenue, was plagued by highly inconsistent isolate start times. It took an issue from high-profile devs for anyone at Deno to wake up. Deno rushed the Deploy relaunch for the end of 2024 and it became “generally available” last month. Is anyone using it?

Speaking of ghost towns, the JSR project also struggled. JSR floundered partly because Deno couldn’t afford to invest in better infrastructure. Developers don’t want to replace Node and NPM; they just want what they already have but better—a drop-in improvement without friction. To Deno’s credit, they recognized this with the U-turn on HTTP imports, but the resulting packaging mess made things worse.

Where is Ryan Dahl?

Tradition dictates an official PR statement following layoffs. Seems weird not to have one prepared in advance. Given Dahl’s recent activity, a pivot to AI might be Deno’s gamble. Idle speculation has led to baseless rumors of an OpenAI acquisition.

I’ve been heavily critical of Deno in the past but I really wanted it to succeed. There were genuinely good people working at Deno who lost their jobs. I hope the Deno runtime survives. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to the friction still found in Node.js. So where does Deno go from here? Over to you, Ryan.