This is a perfect case study showing how it literally doesn't matter what your business is or what kind of community you've built, or operating practices you've

This is a perfect case study showing how it literally doesn't matter what your business is or what kind of community you've built, or operating practices you've developed; if the company has sold itself to investors, and investors decide "we want our exit" the company will turn into whatever it has to in order to "give investors their exit" and "return capital." Lets look at an article that talks about how they got into this situation (https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html) Relevant quotes: "We can never go back to the golden years of Stack Exchange and we probably don't want that anyway." "This might seem odd until you understand the intended audience: investors. It's been over a decade since the first round of financing. At this point, private equity has invested more than $150 million. It's about time to find an exit strategy." "Instead, Stack Overflow will position advertising as a way for companies to promote both their products and their perks for potential employees." "Stack Overflow's investors want to get back their investments plus a healthy return. Let's say each investor wants at least 20% return on their investment per year." "The VCs want a bit more than Microsoft is willing pay. So the company needs to start making it's case for a public offering. The only story that will sell is growth—ideally "hyper growth". "I’m writing today to share that I’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%, or 58 employees." Lets sum up shall we: We created this great product that people love. We then decided that we needed to grow really quickly and so we sold the future of the company to people who only care about money. We then sold the whole company outright to new investors (Prosus which is a "tech investment" firm) because the original investors are demanding a payout because "it's been long enough" apparently that they have not gotten their payout. The new company then demanded growth, which led to over-hiring on the false bet that they would increase revenue via propaganda. That didn't work so we're breaking our agreement with 58 people that we were betting on (most likely without telling them specifically that their employment was conditional based on a hypothesis) in order to make sure investors do not get upset. Sounds great, lets keep doing this.