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moises_silva | 4 years ago
I do not understand. It's a business. Why would anyone expect important services to be free? during ramp up there's a benefit of providing free or discounted services while you grow, learn what users want, estimate your own costs, etc; It was a free ride and you can enjoy it while it lasts. Why would anyone expect a free ride to also last forever?
In my opinion great products need a strong balance of capital and ideals. Capital incentives unchecked by a counter balance of leadership actually believing in the mission of the company can lead to bad outcomes. Pure idealism without adequate funding has another set of problems though.
gen220|4 years ago
I think the "common person" does not see these as growth hacks. The internet is full of things that "appear" free, and have "appeared" free forever.
You have x-ray vision for how these businesses work internally, and you describe the playbook very accurately, but most people do not have this kind of context.
Which makes it hard for those people to distinguish "good people doing good work for the good of all" from the playbook you describe. It's especially hard when the company describes itself as the former externally.
> Capital incentives unchecked by a counter balance of leadership actually believing in the mission of the company can lead to bad outcomes.
This is true. As a customer, depending on the good-will of leadership to counterbalance the influence of capital is depending on humans, and even really good ones are fallible and temporal.
A for-profit company blessed with good leadership today does not guarantee a for-profit company with good leadership tomorrow, a year from now, and so-on. Eventually, within the constructs of a for-profit company, capital always wins.
> In my opinion great products need a strong balance of capital and ideals.
Yep yep, value creation and openness are not mutually exclusive, and one does not have a monopoly on the other.
However, I'd argue that value capture and openness are mutually destructive: only one wins in the end, and the total victory of either marks the death of a business (i.e. something that generates profits for shareholders).
From a consumer's point of view, once an organization gets in the mindset of optimizing for value capture over value creation and openness, it's time to consider moving on.
The paradigm-shift of software is that the victory of openness no longer means the destruction of customer value, because OSI-licensed software can outlive the business.
moises_silva|4 years ago
Well, I dunno, you always are depending on the "good will" of leadership. They could decide to squeeze every cent and provide as little value as possible at any time, whether they have venture funding or not. If your alternative is a "non profit", look at Mozilla, plenty of people unhappy with a lot of their decisions and users feeling "betrayed". I don't think we can expect most services to run as non-profits regardless. It's an imperfect system, but is the best we've got so far.
> From a consumer's point of view, once an organization gets in the mindset of optimizing for value capture over value creation and openness, it's time to consider moving on.
I'd argue this comes after the IPO. When you have millions in venture capital, is easy to keep running the business at a loss and keep growing. When it's time to make a profit is when things start getting hard.
I suppose this is what some people don't like. They'd like founders/businesses that stay small and focused on a niche, make money but not too much and keep a good value product running. Without looking at 1Password finances though, even when it was a paid service, we don't know how profitable it was, if at all, and may be going after enterprise customers with this new funding is the only way to not only 'break even' and start making some good profits.
neon_electro|4 years ago
moises_silva|4 years ago