10 ms·

I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I

I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers. With Google I can't help thinking about every keypress being logged to optimize sales pitches at me. I just don't feel that with Kagi, because I'm paying them. Sure, they might be logging every keypress (I don't actually think they are, but you never can tell) but even if they were, I could be reasonably certain they were doing it to retain my subscription, which probably means making my search better, not selling me other stuff. It's a priveleged position to be in, and the economic argument isn't watertight, but in the "search as a brain extension" space it still _feels_ premium, because it creates trust. And that frees up brain space for other things - like where the hell was that article I was looking for?

lobocinza 4y ago
I'm worried that I need to be logged-in and expose my CC to use such service. Nonetheless most of us use Google Search in a similar way.
sergimas15 4y ago
awesome
Invictus0 4y ago
Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they run out of other ideas to grow the business.
- leoh 4y ago
  I very much disagree with your premise * one does not need $200-300B ARR to run a search engine; and merely making a ton of money does not mean that the way that one has been making that money will continue forever * using Kagi, one realizes how much the web has been perverted, in my opinion, by the obsession with the ad model; there are many nice, novel things that Kagi could introduce which would reduce ad revenue for a company like Google, but would be useful and novel for Kagi without loss in revenue (on the contrary — could help); ie google is incentivized to keep people on the site through various irritating means; a search engine that isn’t distracting and gives me what I want — I would be more than glad to pay for (and already do pay Kagi $10/month) Other thoughts: * Supposing $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users; that is $1B MRR which is not bad at all and is more than plenty for a meaningfully sized team with meaningful salaries. * Just like how lowered energy prices during and after the Industrial Revolution made manufacturing at scale feasible, the incredible amount of high quality OSS and infrastructure these days is making it increasingly feasible to do things Google did 20 years ago — something unthinkable for even the best engineers of that era. Not to mention the relative ease of collecting capital with payment services (let alone VCs, etc.) today — even with a looming recession factored in.
  - gbear605 4y ago
    > $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users That would actually be $12B ARR, since that price is per month while ARR is usually per year.
    - leoh 4y ago
      Oops, yup, just came back to fix this; ha!
- bratwurst3000 4y ago
  what I find strange is that selling ads makes more money than selling service. Because at the end the people watching the ads are buying the stuff advertised so those who adverstise have more money for advertising…. So for it to be rentable people have to buy way more than the ad revenue google makes. If spending for google ads is 1% of bussines budget and budget has to be at least Revenue……..with 280 billion revenue for google it would be 280.000.000.000.000 that we as humans have to spend for stuff that was advertised on google so someone pays google for ads so they can run google search etc …. 35 dollar is maybe ok… …. Maybe better than spending 3500$ on … I dont know … stuff is good also ..
ukd1 4y ago
I'm with you; I'm a paid Kagi user for a while now, and unlike various attempts at switching to duck duck go (et al), Kagi is actually fully working for me. I do not switch back to Google more than once a month, and each time I've gotten "worse" results so far. I'm sold, literally.
- prox 4y ago
  Do you stay under 30 searches a day? On their pricing plan it seems users searched a lot more in their beta program than anticipated. 240 searches cost them around 3 dollars.
cardanome 4y ago
While I am very willing to pay money for a user-centric search engine the requirement to do so directly conflicts with the greatest must-have feature that I need from one: Anonymity. Now the issues is not just privacy but making sure it does NOT optimize search results based on prior searches or other facts it knows about me. Now the big problem is that one would think delivering the exact search results that I am looking for is a good thing. No. It is super dangerous. It can causes me to live in a bubble, blinding me of possible opposing opinions. It is feeding my ignorance. So there is a goal conflict here. I don't know how to solve it. I wish there would be something like Wikipedia for search engines but even the wiki models has its problems and biases.
- memen 4y ago
  I like the idea. Maybe a 'Search for me' button instead of the current 'I'm feeling lucky'. Or two columns or tabs for personalised and general results. Sounds easy, but I am not aware of any search engines that offer this, unfortunately. On the other hand, a lot of the search results bias stems from the search query itself. "Does X cause Y" for example will show results that echo the search, and not show opposite results. Simply because you did not ask the opposite or a more open/unbiased query like "X Y".
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  I thought: couldn't the details about the user live on the client? And the user could delete, modify, decide not to use them. This way you get anonimity and custom results
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    That doesn't work unless the server sends all 1 million results (say) to the client up-front. Otherwise, if you prefer results from example.com but the server only sends example.com results on page 3, your client has no way of showing you those results on page 1.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
fardo 4y ago
>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead them.
- api 4y ago
  Having the actual user pay is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a user centered product or service. It doesn’t guarantee the company won’t double dip but without a direct economic model nothing is even possible but ads and surveillance.
  - toomanyusers 4y ago
    It strikes me that a company like Kagi should be able to craft a legally enforcable agreement with its customers which expressly forbids the company from selling ads and conducting surveillance. The agreement could be carefully written by a skilled lawyer to define the things Kagi cannot do, the proof customers must present in order to proceed with a valid lawsuit, and even the maximum damages that the customer may sue for. In that case, if Kagi was found at some point to be using customer data for these purposes, it could be sued very easily and by many parties. People are calling for regulation for data privacy. In the meantime, Kagi can create its own regulation it will hold itself to for the benefit of its users, can it not?
- danuker 4y ago
  Also smartphones and smart TVs.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Even Amazon
- andyfleming 4y ago
  I'm a little tired of the rhetoric about Netflix adding ads. It's only on an entry-level account that is subsidized from the normal pricing (IIUC, correct me if I'm wrong). You could argue that they've artificially inflated the price of the normal plan or that it's a slippery slope, but it's not like they've forced ads on the existing plans. I think what's more interesting/concerning/insidious is hidden ad content like product placement. It's getting to the point where personalized product placement could be embedded in shows dynamically.
jongjong 4y ago
I just tried Kagi and was surprised that my open source project shows up in the results for relevant keywords. All the other search engines I tried bury it completely out of view no matter how specific the keywords are. It makes me wonder how many other indie projects like mine are excluded from mainstream search engine results.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  See if the founder’s side project Teclis [0] (non-commercial search) finds it. Kagi uses the project’s index in addition to Google and Bing. [0]: https://teclis.com/ https://teclis.com/
  - jongjong 4y ago
    Yes, it finds it. It ranks quite well for most keywords I tried. It even got #1 spot for one of the keywords I tried. I also noticed some other related open source projects show up (by other people) which I hadn't heard about for several years. Google search only shows paid SaaS platforms in the first page of results.
gnramires 4y ago
I believe it's a responsibility of organizations themselves to orient this way, and for customers to be vigilant about this orientation. Does your search engine have weird incentives to exploit you? Change search engine :) ---- I have an idea (more here[1]) that the next addition to our civilization should be a distributed system to evaluate, reward and compensate externalities. Open source software is a great example. It's free, it has massive benefits to users and for people reusing it for all sorts of projects, it's public. Yet we still can't find a great way to fund it. There are donations, and maybe that's all we need in some sufficiently enlightened society, but I think we should be addressing those more directly. And clearly there are technologies which generate friction and other social costs, that could be (differentially) quantified and prices. The same goes for pollution and a miriad of issues. Laws can help here, but laws tend to lack softness and specificity in my opinion, and laws are strictly punitive. If you're generating a negative externality, and the legal system is well designed, maybe you'll have to compensante for it. But that relies on quick lawmaking and judges evaluating something they're not specialists at. And there's no dual for punishment (actually compensation and reeducation), there's no intrinsic reward system. There are prizes and grants, and I'm sure they generate immense value for what they are, but they're still very unsystematic and unreliable, I think. I dream of a system where if you generate value for society, you will be recognized and make a comfortable living off it; if you need investment, you will also be supported. (I call this idea Elementalism; I'm not sure it's original) I think we need to be a little more open to careful, thoughtful changes to our social-economic system that can improve things. While Elementalism isn't a formal part of our system, each of us can do our part and give directly to what we understand needs the most. This is the core idea of Effective Altruism which I also extend to donating to Open Source (which I believe can be effective[2]) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/why_philanthropy_isnt_just_for_billionaires/ibws24i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/w...
ipaddr 4y ago
"At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use" 240 searches cost them over $10.00. They will need to find additional revenue or reduce costs to even reach a break even point. They will have to raise prices or make you pay per search or sell your data or better yet all three.
- function_seven 4y ago
  I wonder how much the per-search cost is marginal cost vs. amortized fixed costs. If their paying user base grows by 10x, do the searches drop from 4¢ each to 2¢ each?
  - Tumblewood 4y ago
    Most of their cost comes from API accesses to other services (e.g., Bing), so unless they can replace those API calls the price cannot go down very much.
    - Gareth321 4y ago
      API access is negotiated by volume, so as they grow, they can negotiate preferential pricing.
- prox 4y ago
  Or give notice to power users that they are exceeding quotas by a lot. Have a power user subscription perhaps. Many people don’t download a lot and ISPs are good, but you have outliers, datahoarders perhaps who take a lot of bandwith.
- loonster 4y ago
  > Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. .0125 per search. The teams rate is twice that.
csomar 4y ago
I just tried it for a few terms that Google found no relevant results for (related to Wasm/Rust); and holys*t there were many results from people (developers) who wrote in their blogs. I'm a user now, and potentially a customer if I hit their free limit.
anoy8888 4y ago
Very naive . It just means that in addition to whatever google do with your data , they also charge you money on top of that . When people have power to do things to maximize their gains (selling u ads/ data in addition to charging u ) , expect that it will be done. It is the same in politics. Power corrupts.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
The reason that I'm not using Kagi (and some of my paid subscriptions) is that payments require login, and login makes it possible to track my search history. I'm happy with paying them with money, but not with my keywords. Is there some zero-knowledge protocol that could help here? In particular, to establish that a user is currently subscribed, without revealing which subscription they have?
- bawolff 4y ago
  Anonoymous credentials covers that use case pretty well.
knicholes 4y ago
Oh, but you CAN tell if they're sending those keypresses back to the mothership by monitoring the networking tab in your browser.
- tyingq 4y ago
  Maybe. They can hold batches and smuggle them in various ways.
  - knicholes 4y ago
    If they have an auto-complete feature, the keypresses WILL be seen in not even in a smuggled way. They'll be directly in the URL to the search function!
    - corobo 4y ago
      You could probably hide that from anything but a deep dive by chucking the data through a websocket. Unless you see and recognise the initial socket connection you may miss it entirely.
lesuorac 4y ago
The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't make enough money otherwise. Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able to make all the decisions for the company. [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months
- BasilPH 4y ago
  They mention that users can invest in them through SAFEs. This only makes sense if they plan an exit, either by selling or through an IPO, or am I missing something?
  - simonbw 4y ago
    I think it implies that they intend to take VC money at some point in the future, like a series A, and they’re trying to avoid VC money now while they can get better terms. I don’t know if that necessarily means they plan an exit, or if they’d be happy just being profitable, but I do think it implies they plan to grow significantly. EDIT: Their website says that they don’t plan to take VC money, so I have no idea what a SAFE means in this case. The point of a SAFE is that the investor is guaranteed the best terms when a priced round of investment happens.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Other options include going public or paying out dividends.
    - lmeyerov 4y ago
      Going public is a qualified event for a SAFE to convert -- it is a financing -- but curious about the dividends SAFEs are often capped, so taking awhile doesn't matter so much, except maybe interest calcs

lobocinza 4y ago

I'm worried that I need to be logged-in and expose my CC to use such service. Nonetheless most of us use Google Search in a similar way.

sergimas15 4y ago

awesome

Invictus0 4y ago

Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they run out of other ideas to grow the business.

leoh 4y ago
I very much disagree with your premise * one does not need $200-300B ARR to run a search engine; and merely making a ton of money does not mean that the way that one has been making that money will continue forever * using Kagi, one realizes how much the web has been perverted, in my opinion, by the obsession with the ad model; there are many nice, novel things that Kagi could introduce which would reduce ad revenue for a company like Google, but would be useful and novel for Kagi without loss in revenue (on the contrary — could help); ie google is incentivized to keep people on the site through various irritating means; a search engine that isn’t distracting and gives me what I want — I would be more than glad to pay for (and already do pay Kagi $10/month) Other thoughts: * Supposing $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users; that is $1B MRR which is not bad at all and is more than plenty for a meaningfully sized team with meaningful salaries. * Just like how lowered energy prices during and after the Industrial Revolution made manufacturing at scale feasible, the incredible amount of high quality OSS and infrastructure these days is making it increasingly feasible to do things Google did 20 years ago — something unthinkable for even the best engineers of that era. Not to mention the relative ease of collecting capital with payment services (let alone VCs, etc.) today — even with a looming recession factored in.
- gbear605 4y ago
  > $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users That would actually be $12B ARR, since that price is per month while ARR is usually per year.
  - leoh 4y ago
    Oops, yup, just came back to fix this; ha!
bratwurst3000 4y ago
what I find strange is that selling ads makes more money than selling service. Because at the end the people watching the ads are buying the stuff advertised so those who adverstise have more money for advertising…. So for it to be rentable people have to buy way more than the ad revenue google makes. If spending for google ads is 1% of bussines budget and budget has to be at least Revenue……..with 280 billion revenue for google it would be 280.000.000.000.000 that we as humans have to spend for stuff that was advertised on google so someone pays google for ads so they can run google search etc …. 35 dollar is maybe ok… …. Maybe better than spending 3500$ on … I dont know … stuff is good also ..

ukd1 4y ago

I'm with you; I'm a paid Kagi user for a while now, and unlike various attempts at switching to duck duck go (et al), Kagi is actually fully working for me. I do not switch back to Google more than once a month, and each time I've gotten "worse" results so far. I'm sold, literally.

prox 4y ago
Do you stay under 30 searches a day? On their pricing plan it seems users searched a lot more in their beta program than anticipated. 240 searches cost them around 3 dollars.

cardanome 4y ago

While I am very willing to pay money for a user-centric search engine the requirement to do so directly conflicts with the greatest must-have feature that I need from one: Anonymity. Now the issues is not just privacy but making sure it does NOT optimize search results based on prior searches or other facts it knows about me. Now the big problem is that one would think delivering the exact search results that I am looking for is a good thing. No. It is super dangerous. It can causes me to live in a bubble, blinding me of possible opposing opinions. It is feeding my ignorance. So there is a goal conflict here. I don't know how to solve it. I wish there would be something like Wikipedia for search engines but even the wiki models has its problems and biases.

memen 4y ago
I like the idea. Maybe a 'Search for me' button instead of the current 'I'm feeling lucky'. Or two columns or tabs for personalised and general results. Sounds easy, but I am not aware of any search engines that offer this, unfortunately. On the other hand, a lot of the search results bias stems from the search query itself. "Does X cause Y" for example will show results that echo the search, and not show opposite results. Simply because you did not ask the opposite or a more open/unbiased query like "X Y".
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
I thought: couldn't the details about the user live on the client? And the user could delete, modify, decide not to use them. This way you get anonimity and custom results
- Arnavion 4y ago
  That doesn't work unless the server sends all 1 million results (say) to the client up-front. Otherwise, if you prefer results from example.com but the server only sends example.com results on page 3, your client has no way of showing you those results on page 1.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

fardo 4y ago

>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead them.

api 4y ago
Having the actual user pay is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a user centered product or service. It doesn’t guarantee the company won’t double dip but without a direct economic model nothing is even possible but ads and surveillance.
- toomanyusers 4y ago
  It strikes me that a company like Kagi should be able to craft a legally enforcable agreement with its customers which expressly forbids the company from selling ads and conducting surveillance. The agreement could be carefully written by a skilled lawyer to define the things Kagi cannot do, the proof customers must present in order to proceed with a valid lawsuit, and even the maximum damages that the customer may sue for. In that case, if Kagi was found at some point to be using customer data for these purposes, it could be sued very easily and by many parties. People are calling for regulation for data privacy. In the meantime, Kagi can create its own regulation it will hold itself to for the benefit of its users, can it not?
danuker 4y ago
Also smartphones and smart TVs.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Even Amazon
andyfleming 4y ago
I'm a little tired of the rhetoric about Netflix adding ads. It's only on an entry-level account that is subsidized from the normal pricing (IIUC, correct me if I'm wrong). You could argue that they've artificially inflated the price of the normal plan or that it's a slippery slope, but it's not like they've forced ads on the existing plans. I think what's more interesting/concerning/insidious is hidden ad content like product placement. It's getting to the point where personalized product placement could be embedded in shows dynamically.

jongjong 4y ago

I just tried Kagi and was surprised that my open source project shows up in the results for relevant keywords. All the other search engines I tried bury it completely out of view no matter how specific the keywords are. It makes me wonder how many other indie projects like mine are excluded from mainstream search engine results.

Semaphor 4y ago
See if the founder’s side project Teclis [0] (non-commercial search) finds it. Kagi uses the project’s index in addition to Google and Bing. [0]: https://teclis.com/ https://teclis.com/
- jongjong 4y ago
  Yes, it finds it. It ranks quite well for most keywords I tried. It even got #1 spot for one of the keywords I tried. I also noticed some other related open source projects show up (by other people) which I hadn't heard about for several years. Google search only shows paid SaaS platforms in the first page of results.

gnramires 4y ago

I believe it's a responsibility of organizations themselves to orient this way, and for customers to be vigilant about this orientation. Does your search engine have weird incentives to exploit you? Change search engine :) ---- I have an idea (more here[1]) that the next addition to our civilization should be a distributed system to evaluate, reward and compensate externalities. Open source software is a great example. It's free, it has massive benefits to users and for people reusing it for all sorts of projects, it's public. Yet we still can't find a great way to fund it. There are donations, and maybe that's all we need in some sufficiently enlightened society, but I think we should be addressing those more directly. And clearly there are technologies which generate friction and other social costs, that could be (differentially) quantified and prices. The same goes for pollution and a miriad of issues. Laws can help here, but laws tend to lack softness and specificity in my opinion, and laws are strictly punitive. If you're generating a negative externality, and the legal system is well designed, maybe you'll have to compensante for it. But that relies on quick lawmaking and judges evaluating something they're not specialists at. And there's no dual for punishment (actually compensation and reeducation), there's no intrinsic reward system. There are prizes and grants, and I'm sure they generate immense value for what they are, but they're still very unsystematic and unreliable, I think. I dream of a system where if you generate value for society, you will be recognized and make a comfortable living off it; if you need investment, you will also be supported. (I call this idea Elementalism; I'm not sure it's original) I think we need to be a little more open to careful, thoughtful changes to our social-economic system that can improve things. While Elementalism isn't a formal part of our system, each of us can do our part and give directly to what we understand needs the most. This is the core idea of Effective Altruism which I also extend to donating to Open Source (which I believe can be effective[2]) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/why_philanthropy_isnt_just_for_billionaires/ibws24i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/w...

ipaddr 4y ago

"At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use" 240 searches cost them over $10.00. They will need to find additional revenue or reduce costs to even reach a break even point. They will have to raise prices or make you pay per search or sell your data or better yet all three.

function_seven 4y ago
I wonder how much the per-search cost is marginal cost vs. amortized fixed costs. If their paying user base grows by 10x, do the searches drop from 4¢ each to 2¢ each?
- Tumblewood 4y ago
  Most of their cost comes from API accesses to other services (e.g., Bing), so unless they can replace those API calls the price cannot go down very much.
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    API access is negotiated by volume, so as they grow, they can negotiate preferential pricing.
prox 4y ago
Or give notice to power users that they are exceeding quotas by a lot. Have a power user subscription perhaps. Many people don’t download a lot and ISPs are good, but you have outliers, datahoarders perhaps who take a lot of bandwith.
loonster 4y ago
> Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. .0125 per search. The teams rate is twice that.

csomar 4y ago

I just tried it for a few terms that Google found no relevant results for (related to Wasm/Rust); and holys*t there were many results from people (developers) who wrote in their blogs. I'm a user now, and potentially a customer if I hit their free limit.

anoy8888 4y ago

Very naive . It just means that in addition to whatever google do with your data , they also charge you money on top of that . When people have power to do things to maximize their gains (selling u ads/ data in addition to charging u ) , expect that it will be done. It is the same in politics. Power corrupts.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

The reason that I'm not using Kagi (and some of my paid subscriptions) is that payments require login, and login makes it possible to track my search history. I'm happy with paying them with money, but not with my keywords. Is there some zero-knowledge protocol that could help here? In particular, to establish that a user is currently subscribed, without revealing which subscription they have?

bawolff 4y ago
Anonoymous credentials covers that use case pretty well.

knicholes 4y ago

Oh, but you CAN tell if they're sending those keypresses back to the mothership by monitoring the networking tab in your browser.

tyingq 4y ago
Maybe. They can hold batches and smuggle them in various ways.
- knicholes 4y ago
  If they have an auto-complete feature, the keypresses WILL be seen in not even in a smuggled way. They'll be directly in the URL to the search function!
  - corobo 4y ago
    You could probably hide that from anything but a deep dive by chucking the data through a websocket. Unless you see and recognise the initial socket connection you may miss it entirely.

lesuorac 4y ago

The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't make enough money otherwise. Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able to make all the decisions for the company. [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months

BasilPH 4y ago
They mention that users can invest in them through SAFEs. This only makes sense if they plan an exit, either by selling or through an IPO, or am I missing something?
- simonbw 4y ago
  I think it implies that they intend to take VC money at some point in the future, like a series A, and they’re trying to avoid VC money now while they can get better terms. I don’t know if that necessarily means they plan an exit, or if they’d be happy just being profitable, but I do think it implies they plan to grow significantly. EDIT: Their website says that they don’t plan to take VC money, so I have no idea what a SAFE means in this case. The point of a SAFE is that the investor is guaranteed the best terms when a priced round of investment happens.
- freediver 4y ago
  Other options include going public or paying out dividends.
  - lmeyerov 4y ago
    Going public is a qualified event for a SAFE to convert -- it is a financing -- but curious about the dividends SAFEs are often capped, so taking awhile doesn't matter so much, except maybe interest calcs