It's kinda ironic that Keybase disappears into Zoom the day after Matrix/Riot enabled end-to-end encryption by default, with cross-signed device verification similar to Keybase's concept of connected keys - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... . In other words, a fully open source (and open standardised) alternative continues to exist in the form of Matrix. [disclaimer: project lead for…
Zoom Acquires Keybase
171–180 of 751 posts
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
While honourable advice, the bottom line is Keybase sold without having a business model. So perhaps better advice is, start a business even if you don’t have a plan and someone may buy it anyway.
The plan was to get acquired. As much as I've liked Keybase the product, their steadfast refusal to ever come up with a way to make money has always made me suspect they were doing the typical Silicon Valley thing: just burn funding until a bigger company notices and buys you.
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#173Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#174Oh wow, I had a guest lecture from Max Krohn yesterday in which I asked about how Keybase was being funded; no mention of this at all!
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#175I'm seeing a certain pattern here, aren't we all just fooling ourselves? Isn't this just all inevitable? Aren't all these startups just lining up all in the hopes just to get acquired? I guess when we see VC Funded™ on any startup what it _really means_ is that: "We are prioritising a return for our investors even if it means violating our mission statement".
This outcome is almost certainly seen as a failure by the VCs. It looks like an acquihire. If so, it's quite possible that the VCs didn't even get their money back. Acquihires generally do not return money to VCs -- obviously, given that the employees are free to work anywhere, the acquirer's interest is in paying as much as possible to the employees and as little as possible to the now-worthless acquired company.
It's likely the employees are the ones benefiting most from this outcome, in that their pay has probably gone up considerably and they are no longer nervous about their job security, after many years of high stress and low pay.
It's possible the VCs were even offering some more cash to keep going, but at unfavorable terms, and the team said: "No, we'd rather take the big paychecks from Zoom."
Given Keybase has only had one funding round (according to crunchbase), the founders certainly still had a controlling stake in the company and the VCs couldn't force them to sell or not sell.
You can blame VCs for a lot of things but this kind of outcome is just not one of them (except insofar as that it allowed a company with little viable business strategy to exist in the first place).
(I am the founder of a failed startup. We had multiple "acquihire" offers, none of which offered any money back to investors.)
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#176Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for. I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good. It's like a 1%-er meta profit model where the actual business is in buying and selling the business and the core business is really just a temporary front that is designed to never make a profit, just create fancy looking charts and…
> I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good Uh when was this? For-profit businesses have always been created for the primary purpose of making money. Any side effect like employee well being happened to coincide with what maximized profits at the time or due to regulation.
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#178Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#179I've found kbfs a very convenient way to share files with collaborators. Anyone know of a self-hosted encrypted remote filesystem that might replace it?
There's Tahoe-lafs, which ahs been around for years but, although secure was originally pretty notorious for being hard to use. Maybe it's improves since...
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#180Keybase's side of the announcement: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom > What the Keybase team will be doing > Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty o…
is this an acquihire then?