> 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.
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.
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.