flâneur

In defense of thin wrapper startups

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In 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a college student, described the initial version of Linux in a forum post: The early version of Linux was dead simple: a combination of an existing command line tool (bash), an existing compiler (gcc), and a way to run multiple tasks on the same CPU. Some would have called Linux a thin wrapper around bash and gcc. It's hard to foresee the future impact of simple tools — especially ones built on nascent technology. The history of software products is littered with many such examples. Here is a fun way to observe this phenomenon: pick your favorite software platform and use the Wayback Machine to view its landing page from when it started. Here is Twilio’s — famously a thin wrapper around Verizon and friendly web development syntax. While all platforms start as features, not all features become platforms. How can we distinguish between an idea that could become a big platform and one that will forever remain a feature? There are the usual platitudes: work on

All platforms start as simple features. The story of Linux – the most popular open-source operating system (OS) – is a telling example. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a college student, described the initial version of Linux in a forum post: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones … I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't p

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