Some of that? There are a lot of companies that raised 20m+ without any hope of ever paying that back and actually heavily depending on new rounds of funding to

Some of that? There are a lot of companies that raised 20m+ without any hope of ever paying that back and actually heavily depending on new rounds of funding to survive at all. This was all wrapped up as ‘pump everything in growth’ which works as long as it works and that was no different in 1999 when companies were also just buying users (one of my clients at the time gave away free groceries the first month of your membership; guess what the retention was after that month) with investor money. When that dried up, all users left in a a few months and the companies were gone. This will happen again. Everyone I know (business and personal) uses a lot of freemium services from startups they will never pay for; they will simply leave the second they have to pay or when ads appear. And that has to happen for these companies to have a chance at all.