11–20 of 264 posts
One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation.
You _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.
"But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March." People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing. I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning millions of dollars mak…
True, but a little misleading. The majority of the co-founders of Ello, plus nearly all of its staff, were based in Colorado.
Source: I worked for Ello.
The network never really caught on, but there was some good work being done there.
Social networks and marketplaces are the hardest things to get going
I think everyone should understand (and, honestly, repeat daily) that in our modern capitalist system where never-ending growth is an expected requirement of any company that has ever taken outside funding, it is simply an impossibility for a company to have any kind of durable values that conflict with that growth-at-all-costs requirement. It's as much of an impossibility as the sun rising in the west, and we should stop any pretense that it's not. Enshittification is inevitable.
Nearly every tech company starts out similarly: an absolute laser focus on users and their needs, because that is how you first grow. At some point, though, all of that fruit is picked, and you then start going into features that are "user neutral" but that make money, until finally you chip away at features that look like they can be user neutral in the short term ("We A/B tested and nobody minded one more ad!"), but the long term effect is that you've completely destroyed your founding ethos.
For example, it's easy to pick on Google these days because it's, well, so easy. Their total about face from a company that was nearly universally loved by engineers to one that, if not loathed, is at best seen as the "next IBM" is so obvious. E.g. Google got huge originally with a world-first search engine by not "selling out", by not masquerading ads as organic search results. Now when I search for any remotely commercial term the entire first page is ads that are nearly indistinguishable from organic results.
It's not just Google, though. Apple loves to crow about user privacy, but it's hard to square this "value" with their insistence that anyone on iOS who uses iMessage to talk to anyone on Android gets 0 encryption (oh, and if even a single Android user is in a group chat, nobody gets encryption).
I don't think that makes any company "evil", but it does make it somewhat sociopathic in the sense that there can ever only be a single goal: growth at all costs. The sooner we all recognize it means we can treat all companies with an appropriate level of caution. One final note related to this, is that this is one reason I'm not really a fan of PBCs as mentioned in the article. PBCs are a smoke-screen. As the saying goes, "Follow the money". When push-comes-to-shove you'll also see PBCs compromise their "values" the second growth starts to be at risk.
If I invested a bunch of time, effort, and vision into something and had nothing to show for it while nearing failure... I'd be very tempted to sell just so I don't have to go straight from failure to job hunt. This situation seems outrageously stressful to me... I literally don't even know what I'd do if I broke my arm or came down with some serious illness while in the inbetween state.
> After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former…
Even the supposedly indie anti-social social media outright violated their own manifesto. Is it any surprise that we're skeptical of the big promises of a bright future that corporations make all the time? I'm curious to know if anyone has evidence of a post similar to this but for a company with a (so far) happy ending.
Itch.io continues to be great, for now
A pretty good portion of my social network moved, myself included. But it fizzled out really quickly and we all ended up back on Twitter.
Every once in a while I'd still get a notification from Ello that someone had followed me. It was always a porn bot, but the email notification was still nostalgic. A part of me is sad the site died.