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> Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it o
by spacechild1 1y ago
> Not every business needs to become a unicorn.
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
- aembleton 1y agoWhy would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns. If you can bootstrap it yourself then there's no need to do this, but those that bring in investors will need an exit.
- reaperducer 1y agoWhy would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns. You can do two, or even all three of those things. Human beings are not boolean greed machines. The HN bubble likes to reduce everything to a numbers game. Real life isn't like that, as demonstrated by the many tens of thousands of companies that aren't run like a dystopian Silicon Valley comic book.
- g0db1t 1y ago[dead]
- layer8 1y agoThe conclusion still stands: “It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.”
- andrew_lettuce 1y agoI don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but the last line feels off. Investment profile needs to be matched with returns, but they don't all need to be 5 year mega exits, and they don't need the same companies to be racheted up in round after round of fund-led growth. This is why we don't build companies that will last 100+ years anymore
- bombcar 1y agoInvestors in “lifestyle businesses” and bootstrapped ones exist. You just never hear about them because they’re small and like the businesses they invest in, they’re satisfied with moderate returns.
- beezle 1y agoBecause if they do not care about the product or users their returns will be sub-optimal?
- spacechild1 1y agoSome (non-VC) investors are personally invested in the product and want it to succeed/improve.
- jonplackett 1y agoJust been reading about them - they haven’t taken venture funding - so I expect they don’t have the same pressure to 10X every 6 months. From their site: Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93. Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats. In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
- spacechild1 1y agoThis sounds great! I'm sceptical of every company that takes VC money, so it's great to see that they didn't.
- carlosjobim 1y agoWell they did, they took venture funding from their users.
- jonplackett 1y agoThat’s not venture funding. Key difference: They didn’t take any funding from anyone whose values are misaligned with their own
- carlosjobim 1y agoVenture funding is a financial and legal term with a defined meaning. Unfortunately the real world does not care whatever idea the hacker "community" has regarding what the words mean.
- CL_ergo 1y agoActually the real world does care. Words have meanings in the context that they're spoken, and often times whether you want to or not, dictionaries have to update their meanings because they changed over time.