No, it’s not bad, it’s good. Keep in mind the realistic alternative in practice is number of users paying for a yearly subscription. Which would you rather see

No, it’s not bad, it’s good. Keep in mind the realistic alternative in practice is number of users paying for a yearly subscription. Which would you rather see more often as an engagement metric - subscription plans, or open source users? It would be a sign of vitality for the open source community if github stars were a metric that VCs sought more often. All metrics for pre-seed startups are based on popularity, that’s what VCs ask for: indicators that people want to use your product, whether it’s monthly active users, monthly recurring revenue, or github stars. When someone is trying to build it via open source rather than a subscription model, github stars might be the best, or even only available way to track engagement reliably. Also, part of the story was about how long it took to reach a certain number of stars, and they compared it to other projects that got as much engagement more quickly.