I've Sold Out

I've sold out

2026-04-08

Table of contents

So, this is awkward. I've joined Cristina, Jakob, Ramiz, Vegard, Armin, and Colin at Earendil. And I'm taking pi, the little coding agent that could, with me.

Now, before you get out the pitchforks, hear me out.

Why would you do that?

Many reasons! Let me give you a "quick" history lesson.

"It's like poetry, it rhymes" - the great George Lucas

I've been doing OSS since 2009ish. My first "success story" was libGDX, a cross-platform game development framework. Back in 2011, it was all the rage and the most used game development framework on Android. Some prominent libGDX users included Niantic (Ingress was built with libGDX, Pokemon Go was not) and the peeps behind Slay the Spire. It also powers Spine, a commercial game development tool I've been involved in for almost 10 years now.

I mostly handed over the reins to a beautiful team of core contributors in 2016, who to this day keep the project well maintained. I never commercialized libGDX, unless you consider it commercialization to build a proprietary piece of software like Spine on top of it.

Zero regrets, worked out beautifully, opened many doors, and got me in touch with a lot of very interesting (and kind) people. Some I proudly call friends.

libGDX also got me involved with the now defunct RoboVM by Niklas Therning and Henric Müller. RoboVM was an ahead-of-time compiler and runtime for JVM code on iOS, similar to the (also defunct) Xamarin which did the same for C#. Niklas created a RoboVM-based iOS backend for libGDX, allowing libGDX users to easily port their games over to Apple's devices. He and Henric eventually realized that RoboVM might have commercial potential, and built a company around it. They got me on board early on and put me in charge of creating the first commercial, proprietary add-on: a debugger.

Within a year, we grew the team by another 5 people and eventually reached almost full feature parity with Xamarin, including an IntelliJ IDEA based IDE that made cross-platform mobile development pretty enjoyable. The core RoboVM tech stayed open-source, while the debugger, Xcode storyboard integration, and other bells and whistles were our commercial offering.

Then Miguel and Nat approached us. Long story short: we sold RoboVM to Xamarin. A short while later Xamarin closed-sourced our open-source RoboVM core, quickly followed by Xamarin selling to Microsoft. Then Microsoft shut down RoboVM immediately.

While there was some monetary gain, everything about this fucking sucked. As the "OSS guy", who held pull request contests for the RoboVM repo and did most of the community management on the side, I was also the guy who had to write the "Sorry, no more OSS, suckers" blog post. You cannot imagine what people called me on social media and via email, despite me having zero control over the situation (I was not a majority shareholder). RoboVM going closed-source was devastating, and it made me sour on both VC-funded startups and OSS. But ultimately, none of this bullshit mattered.

What did matter was the community we built around both libGDX and RoboVM. A few days after RoboVM's open-source core was closed-source, a handful of libGDX contributors forked the old RoboVM repo and got to work. Within days, libGDX games could be compiled via the fork. Within a handful of months, they got back full feature parity, including a debugger, Xcode integration and more. To this day, libGDX is powered by this RoboVM fork, called MobiVM, on iOS.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to know that I've seen some shit when it comes to OSS and commercial efforts. Good and bad. I've learned some things along the way. And I don't take any of this lightly.

"I tell you what I want, what I really, really want" - Spice Girls

Maybe you've heard about the little app called OpenClaw. OpenClaw is powered by pi. That made me collateral of Peter's success. Especially after Armin thought it's a good idea to tell the whole world about the relationship between OpenClaw and pi on his blog.

Anyone who couldn't reach Peter would reach out to me. Any VC or big corp you can think of in this space has knocked on my door one way or another. I've also had many calls with people I look up to who turned out to be pi users. I've spent the last 2 months in 3-5 calls per day.

I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers.

Seeing all this interest, and watching more and more people build real things with pi, part of me wants to take this further. That includes building a team. It also includes commercialization to feed the team, done in a way that doesn't repeat the shit I lived through with RoboVM.

But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have a four-year-old kid. I want to watch and help him grow up as best as I can. This is, first and foremost, what I want. Everything else is secondary to that. In the past 2 months, he cried a lot because "daddy isn't here". I never ever want to experience that again.

Now here's what my professional life as Mr. CEO of a freshly VC-funded startup would look like: get a team together, possibly a co-founder, find product market fit, establish a company culture, resolve interpersonal relationship issues within the team, step into every landmine you can step into along the way, feel alone and stressed out, spend every waking hour worrying how you'll make the company work, be uniquely responsible for increasing shareholder value, stop engineering, become a dull boy managing (again).

On top of that, such a VC-funded startup entirely focused on commercializing pi, and only pi, would have to make some decisions that'd lead to the same bullshit I've experienced at RoboVM. It is extremely hard to find co-founders and investors who understand this space. And while I have some experience with VCs, I don't feel confident in my ability to select a VC that is OSS compatible.

The immense stress associated with all this is not something I strive for. And it would be at odds with my biggest want: help our little one grow up. And yet, I'd probably also have big regrets if I didn't give it a try in some way.

So, here's what I want:

• Be with our kid, keep our lifestyle, never have our boy cry again because of "work"
• Make pi OSS sustainable by putting a small team together and adding a commercial topping, that doesn't go against the OSS spirit and the community
• Don't repeat the errors of the past

What to do, what to do?

Of Demented Elves

I think Armin and I first met 14 years ago, on the r/austria subreddit. We did not align politically on many things, him being a "hyper neoliberal" and me being a "social democrat" (at least according to what I feel was our mutual impression of each other). Any time I saw that @mitsuhiko handle in a thread, I felt the urge to tell someone they are wrong on the internet.

The one thing that differentiated Armin from other internet trolls was the way he conducted himself in these heated discussions. He was never emotional or aggressive. Our discussions would either end in cordial disagreement, or a newfound common understanding. That's extremely rare on the internet.

We eventually met up in Vienna in real-life, sometime in 2016. The Sentry office was still in its infancy, and a young Daniel, whom I'd shared an office with in Graz before he joined Sentry, was all excited showing me his new workplace.

Over coffee, Armin and I found we had more in common than we thought. Not only politically, but also in the way we think about software, and OSS specifically. In my recollection, we became actual friends that d