It might come off as trite, but I genuinely am sorry that things didn't pan out for you

Very early in my career I used to believe that I or anyone else could be a CEO.

It wasn't until working with tiny teams where the CEO/founders devoted everything in their life to the business -- often at the expense of hobbies, romantic relationships, and any shred of free time -- that I realized true CEOs are a rare breed.

When are you ask things like "what happens if the product fails?" the answer would always be "It won't."

They both relentlessly believe in, and put every ounce of energy toward, their vision because anything less would not suffice

Again as trite as it sounds, I empathize with these people in that to them losing their vision felt like losing something dearest to them

> first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product.

Is there a way to reach out to you as I would like to hear what you have to say about what I am working on. You can update your HN profile to include contact information or you can reach out to me using my HN profile.

I'm basically working on a portable intelligence layer for AI that I will be open sourcing and the commerical product will be to make the intelligence layer even smarter. I can share the Show HN post that I am working on that better explains the value proposition and would love to learn any lessons you have gained while trying to sell AI tools commerically.

Edit: In case somebody calls me out it. I didn't want to use the `tensorzero` email domain incase the domain was going to become defunct soon.

Are there other OSS LLMOps projects that have overtaken you? I couldn't think of one.

> an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product.

The only way this could be a 'lesson learned' is if you homehow managed to not pay any attention to what has been going on in the last 25 years with open source software companies.