> using up millions of VC-dollars building a new version of this fundamentally important core utility
It's nice to think of this as 'taking advantage of' VC dollars, but VC dollars come with strings attached, namely the need for an 'exit'. The exit only happens if the company in question makes multiples of what it invested, meaning that VC-funded companies need significant revenue from their users. These days, the growth required for an exit leads to: 1) advertising being laced into a product, 2) user data being sold or otherwise monetized, or 3) charging you a monthly subscription fee.
Maybe this time it's different—there are theoretically other VC-friendly business models that work for software—but I struggle to see how.
Open-sourcing the application from the beginning would certainly give more confidence here.
I'm already wary of creating accounts on VC funded apps. Surely there are others like this too. I'm just tired of being burned by the cycle you just described, eventually value must be extracted and usually that means a tradeoff of user values versus budget values and I'm not here for that anymore.
It's nice to think of this as 'taking advantage of' VC dollars, but VC dollars come with strings attached, namely the need for an 'exit'. The exit only happens if the company in question makes multiples of what it invested, meaning that VC-funded companies need significant revenue from their users. These days, the growth required for an exit leads to: 1) advertising being laced into a product, 2) user data being sold or otherwise monetized, or 3) charging you a monthly subscription fee.
Maybe this time it's different—there are theoretically other VC-friendly business models that work for software—but I struggle to see how.
Open-sourcing the application from the beginning would certainly give more confidence here.