cli-website

Who needs a website when you have a terminal.

Basic Commands

• help: list all commands
• whois root: learn about us
• whois [partner]: learn about a partner
• tldr: list all portfolio companies
• tldr: [company_name]": learn about a portfolio company
• email: reach out to us
• twitter: twitter accounts
• instagram: instagram account
• git: this repo
• github: all repos
• locate: physical address
• www: plain-text version of this site
• test: do not use
• other: try your favorite linux commands

Advanced Commands

• alias
• cat
• cd
• chmod
• chown
• clear
• cowsay
• cp
• curl
• date
• df
• echo
• emacs
• exit
• fdisk
• find
• finger
• free
• ftp
• grep
• groups
• gzip
• head
• history
• kill
• less
• ls
• man (alias: woman)
• mkdir
• more
• mv
• nano
• open
• passwd
• pico
• pine
• ps
• pwd
• quit
• rm
• say
• sftp
• ssh
• stop
• su
• sudo
• tail
• top
• touch
• uname
• vi
• vim
• wget
• zsh

Missing a favorite one? Make a PR!

Portfolio CLIs

Future project: get the Hello Worlds working for every portfolio company with a CLI or npm/pypi/cargo package

• esper
• great_expectations (alias: ge)
• meroxa
• okteto
• particle
• privacy_dynamics (alias: privacy)
• zed

Build Notes

npm run build produces dist/, which is what Netlify publishes. It is wiped and rebuilt from scratch each time, and it is gitignored — no build output is ever committed.

That build:

• copies the static assets (images/, videos/, css/, welcome.htm, and the config/*.js files welcome.htm loads directly)
• copies and minifies the xterm vendor assets
• bundles the app boot/runtime code into dist/js/app.bundle.js
• emits a minified lazy-load asset for the RickRoll animation
• generates the crawlable surface and dist/index.html (see below)

Anything not on the copy list in scripts/build-assets.js stays out of dist/, so scripts/, tests/, package.json, and the unbundled js/ sources are not served.

npm start builds and then runs netlify dev against dist/.

Crawlability

The terminal renders its content only when someone types a command, so search engines and LLM crawlers see an empty page. scripts/build-pages.js closes that gap from a single URL:

index.html     an offscreen block naming every company and person
_redirects     the old mirror URLs, 301'd into the terminal
llms.txt  llms-full.txt  robots.txt  sitemap.xml

Content is addressed by URL fragment: /#tldr-chargelab tells the terminal to run tldr chargelab on load, and js/terminal-ext.js splits the command from its argument on the first hyphen so a hyphenated slug still resolves.

There used to be a static mirror here — real HTML pages at /about/, /team/, /portfolio/<slug>/ and the rest. It worked well enough to cause the problem it had: Google indexed all 70-odd pages and started showing sitelinks to About / Team / Jobs under the root.vc result, advertising a conventional website sitting behind the terminal. It was removed in #128 and those URLs now 301 to their commands. Since Google strips fragments before indexing, this deliberately trades per-company search results for having exactly one indexed URL.

The homepage block is a .visually-hidden div rather than <noscript>: extraction pipelines routinely strip <noscript> as non-content, and Googlebot indexes the rendered DOM, which drops it once JS runs.

config/*.js is the only source of truth. Changing a portfolio description regenerates the homepage block, the llms files, and the redirects.

There is nothing to keep in sync. None of it is ever committed — it exists only in dist/, and every deploy runs npm run build and regenerates it from the current config/*.js. No cron, no CI drift check, no "rebuild and commit" step: a config edit reaches the generated files the moment it is deployed, because that is the only way they come into existence.

index.html in the repo root is a template. The regions between its <!-- BEGIN generated-* --> sentinels are empty; the build injects the JSON-LD and crawlable-index blocks when it writes dist/index.html. Do not paste generated content back into the template.

Use npm run build:pages to regenerate just those files while iterating — netlify dev does not watch config/*.js.

Firm-level facts (blurb, thesis, fund size, office address, email) live in config/firm.js so the terminal and the static pages cannot disagree. It has no dependencies and must load before config/commands.js in both scripts/build-assets.js and welcome.htm.

config/firm.js, portfolio.js, team.js, and jobs.js end with a guarded module.exports so they work unchanged as classic browser scripts and as CommonJS modules for scripts/build-pages.js. Keep the typeof module guard — an unguarded module reference is a ReferenceError in the browser — and do not convert them to ESM, which would break the bundle and welcome.htm.

Performance Notes

The terminal now initializes on DOMContentLoaded instead of waiting for window.onload, and optional work such as ASCII art preloading happens after the terminal is already usable.

In local repeated Chromium benchmarks against the previous HEAD, median startup timings improved roughly:

• homepage prompt visible: 1941.7ms -> 70.1ms
• homepage first command rendered: 2076.5ms -> 223.5ms
• #whois-lee deep link rendered: 1159.9ms -> 151.9ms

Hosting

root.vc is served by Netlify, which publishes dist/ — server: Netlify on the live response, the apex A record points at Netlify's load balancer, and www 301s to the apex.

The repo is also connected to a Vercel project. That project belongs to the ai-incarnations branch (the parked AI-reinvention experiment, #110), which carries its own vercel.json and builds there successfully. main has no Vercel deployment, so Vercel had nothing to build on this line: every attempt failed and posted a red check on PRs that had nothing to do with Vercel.

vercel.json here sets git.deploymentEnabled: false, which turns off automatic Vercel deployments for branches carrying this file.

Do not "fix" this by making it match the ai-incarnations copy — that branch deliberately omits the key so it keeps deploying. If it is ever merged down, expect a conflict on vercel.json and resolve it toward whichever host is actually serving the domain at that point.

Live at: https://root.vc.

Special thanks to Jerry Neumann at Neu Venture Capital for the inspiration for this website concept.

Thanks to the team at divshot for the awesome and hilarious Geocities Bootstrap Theme.

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