41–50 of 367 posts
But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission.
Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
Is $670K adequate sum to he raised through such financing round? I get used to multi-million numbers in startup announcements.
The irony is, I think I could get more delivered with a $670k cheque than I could with a $6.7 million one. With the latter, you would grow too big, management would creep in, you would overengineer, you might spend too much time working behind closed doors etc. Later on you would need cash to scale this business, but for early stage product development I think $500k to $1 million is the sweet spot.
They may have access to talent pool willing to work for their vision at significantly reduced rates, but unless they effectively sell themself to big cloud provider, they can’t significantly reduce the infrastructure cost.
I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670 million, and I was very sad. That’s “VCs gonna enshittify it in 3 years” money. But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission. Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
Is $670K adequate sum to he raised through such financing round? I get used to multi-million numbers in startup announcements.
The irony is, I think I could get more delivered with a $670k cheque than I could with a $6.7 million one. With the latter, you would grow too big, management would creep in, you would overengineer, you might spend too much time working behind closed doors etc. Later on you would need cash to scale this business, but for early stage product development I think $500k to $1 million is the sweet spot.
I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670 million, and I was very sad. That’s “VCs gonna enshittify it in 3 years” money. But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission. Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670 million, and I was very sad. That’s “VCs gonna enshittify it in 3 years” money. But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission. Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…
I've been using Kagi since I could first get onto the product. As soon as it came out of Beta, I subscribed. I had no idea how intrusive Google was. I love Google services. Google Cloud is far better than the others. That said, the search is just poison. I now spend time looking at results, not searching for results. I have to admit though, ChatGPT did make me consider dropping the subscription. Mr Chat has weakened…
Per their own documentation, Kagi servers are hosted on Google Cloud.
"Kagi is building a novel ad-free, paid search engine and a powerful web browser as a part of our mission to humanize the web." With 670K? Cuil went through about $30 million to develop a standalone search engine. And that was fifteen years ago, when search was simpler. There may be a market for a search engine company that profitably runs a low-cost operation with very few ads and makes real efforts to keep out spam…
I had to read the headline twice. At first I read it as $670 million, and I was very sad. That’s “VCs gonna enshittify it in 3 years” money. But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission. Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
You're going to have to explain the relevance of the K man.
Ever since they upped the search limit (before it's pay per search), I've been a happy camper. On the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches, and I use a lot more !bangs now, like !mdn or !archwiki (although the search powering both of these are probably funded by donations)
> On the other hand, it did teach me the true cost of searches It really does change the dynamic of how you search, if you know that the next search will cost you 1.25¢. Right now I use Ecosia, so I'm actually more motivated to do extra searches, to increase the number of trees they plant. Kagi is the other way around, search has a cost, so be mindful about what you search for. It's a great way for them to have a sen…
Ecosia and Kagi aren't targeting the same market. Ecosia, for example, isn't as serious about privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713050