It seems that the constraint "Can't be bought", or "Can't be bought to be shut down", is an important one and fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a VC-

It seems that the constraint "Can't be bought", or "Can't be bought to be shut down", is an important one and fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a VC-funded startup. That's also why Twitter failed in that respect. Potentially workable governance models to prevent this kind of takeover: - Community-driven open source - Bootstrapped company with limited profit ambition (think GitHub or Basecamp) - Non-profit/charity organization If you're a startup millionaire and care about the real-world viability of P2P, decentralization, etc., consider donating to / investing in one of these vehicles instead of looking for the next big business model. Any startup ever will sell out to centralization and control eventually, unless they specifically put themselves in a position where they don't control their own ecosystem anymore (having open-sourced the software and gained a large enough audience that can decide to fork if necessary).