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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

I'm considering that as well. Peldi from Balsamic has written about it

https://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2011/09/12/profitsharing/

Edit: I don't know about an update, but there was discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986673

That was posted in 2011, is there an update? In my opinion such structures make it difficult to raise funding, and in highly fluid markets such as the one Balsamiq operates in, a well funded competition can easily crush you. I have seen several employee owned companies in Healthcare Policy/Research (E.g. Mathematica Policy or SSS), where they are funded by a constant stream of government contracts/grants which are intimately tied to the company and with very low probability of a competitor winning them.

a well funded competition can easily crush you

Who crushed Balsamiq?

<spoiler>Nobody.</spoiler>

Considering it is cash-positive small company, someone might be crushing them and we would have no way to know. It seems the flurry of positive press that they were getting seemingly ended in 2012 ~ 2013. Not that it reflects as an evidence towards their impending demise, but there is little evidence to contrary. Even with a company that has ideal/fair distribution of profit, the inherent smaller size translates into a higher risk.

Also note their product is/was based on Adobe Flash (now Air?), which is increasingly unpopular, if not being phased out in many places due to it's terrible security record.

Not for long... ;)

That's excellent news. :)

I think if someone would be crushing us, we'd find out pretty quickly, as our sales would decline.

So far, they've done just the opposite. Here's my latest yearly status update: https://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2016/02/05/looking-back-at-2... - with revenue charts! :)

Reading through that, the "native HTML/JS editor" is welcome information.

The "We started the year by building a proof-of-concept application on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, and HTML/JS." is good for Linux support.

Any chance of BSD support as well? :)

Hi there! Peldi from Balsamiq here. The profit sharing program is one of our most successful policies. The only update it required since 2011 is that we raised the percentage of profits to be shared from 10 to 15%, and we might raise it again in the future as we have more and more employees.

This is excellent. Thank you.

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