Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.
Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.
Sounds like perverse incentives? If your best coarse is to ruin your company and product to make a buck, you may as well be a telemarketing scammer or some other vulture of society that make bank off the mystery/rent seeking of others.
I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.
Theoretically it aligns the incentives of the founders with those of the VCs putting new money into the round (eg the founders are OK with the company taking more risk, because they have diversified their personal net worth somewhat). Now, the incentives of the VCs putting new money into the round, there's certainly an argument that they don't always benefit society or deliver the best possible product...
Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at least to the point of getting back what they put in. Founders and employees are typically last in the line.
Yes, during the rounds where VCs are stepping over themselves to invest, founders can negotiate terms that permit them (and their employees and early investors) to sell some of their stock as part of the deal, in a secondary sale (https://rizstanford.medium.com/secondary-sales-in-vc-backed-...).
Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than adhere to an established file format (or creating a new open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their customers' data.
That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.
I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.
Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.
The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.
A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.
I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".
I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.
Apple is not a company I would trust with long term product support, at least at the pro end. It has dropped several products. I used to use Aperture, for instance, which was a great pro photography product, but it was dropped with no real exit route.
Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.
For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?