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
• cp
• curl
• 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
• 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 static mirror 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/.

The static mirror

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 renders the same config/*.js data as plain HTML at real URLs:

/about/  /jobs/  /portfolio/  /portfolio/<slug>/  /team/  /team/<slug>/
robots.txt  sitemap.xml  llms.txt  llms-full.txt

config/*.js is the only source of truth. Changing a portfolio description regenerates that company's page, both indexes, the sitemap, the llms files, and the <noscript> block in index.html.

There is nothing to keep in sync. The mirror is never 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 static pages the moment it is deployed, because that is the only way the pages 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 <noscript> blocks when it writes dist/index.html. Do not paste generated content back into the template.

Use npm run build:pages to regenerate just the mirror 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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