Being bootstrapped doesn’t somehow absolve founders of that. It’s a false sense of security.
VC-backed companies eventually exit, yes, but bootstrapped companies often just… die.
And, plenty of VC-backed companies do not commit the cardinal sins described in this article; lock-in, anti-user practices, and so on. I ran a VC-backed cybersecurity company for nearly 10 years, and we never engaged in any bad-for-the-user chicanery, and our VCs never pushed us to.
This is an article to promote Obsidian (which is fine, and I have on my list to try) but on very shaky ground. Being bootstrapped, in and of itself, does not somehow imply Obsidian will be around longer or less crappy to their users.
It’s entirely about the founders and what they prioritize; not how they got their funding.
but I think the point is that by being "100% user supported”, the way to get rich is by getting more paying users by “making things people want” vs optimising a metric like “growth” in order to temporarily fool the next investor into overpaying at IPO or acquisition.
The way to get rich if you’re VC-funded is also to make things people want by getting more paying users. You don’t become Dropbox or Stripe by having a terrible product.
The fools optimizing for “growth” without anything sustainable aren’t going to get rich (on average), and are focused on the wrong customer - the VC.
VCs don’t force you to do bad things. Bad founders do bad things, and they sometimes raise money. That’s all.
VC-backed companies eventually exit, yes, but bootstrapped companies often just… die.
And, plenty of VC-backed companies do not commit the cardinal sins described in this article; lock-in, anti-user practices, and so on. I ran a VC-backed cybersecurity company for nearly 10 years, and we never engaged in any bad-for-the-user chicanery, and our VCs never pushed us to.
This is an article to promote Obsidian (which is fine, and I have on my list to try) but on very shaky ground. Being bootstrapped, in and of itself, does not somehow imply Obsidian will be around longer or less crappy to their users.
It’s entirely about the founders and what they prioritize; not how they got their funding.