The way I think about it is it's about showing growth by any means. When you're starting from nothing you talk about anything you can. Only in the last few months have I been able to switch from focusing on Github stars in talking to VCs to talking about actual usage by humans.
For the sake of the article though it's a hook I figured might encourage folks to keep reading. :)
I reacted to this as well. I hope he/she gets real value for the work they put in. Having worked as a developer and consumer of open source work (for huge finance institutions), it pains me to see how devs pour their souls into open source projects, and consumers (our bosses) don’t even know or care who wrote the code everyone is using.
Keep in mind the realistic alternative in practice is number of users paying for a yearly subscription. Which would you rather see more often as an engagement metric - subscription plans, or open source users? It would be a sign of vitality for the open source community if github stars were a metric that VCs sought more often.
All metrics for pre-seed startups are based on popularity, that’s what VCs ask for: indicators that people want to use your product, whether it’s monthly active users, monthly recurring revenue, or github stars.
When someone is trying to build it via open source rather than a subscription model, github stars might be the best, or even only available way to track engagement reliably. Also, part of the story was about how long it took to reach a certain number of stars, and they compared it to other projects that got as much engagement more quickly.
