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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah holy crap. I've been a big fan of Keybase since they launched, but this is a deathknell. I guess I'm not too surprised, Keybase didn't seem to have a business model, but still, disappointing that they're going to go into death this way.

Attention people starting businesses: VC funding is fun and all, but please, have a business model. Your users and employees depend on it.

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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.

> So perhaps better advice is, start a business even if you don’t have a plan and someone may buy it anyway.

A better world for your personal pocketbook maybe, but certainly a worse world for the rest of us. I wouldn't characterize that as "better" in any general sense.

Sometimes, acquihire is the business model. It makes money for the VCs and money for the founders. It's just the fools^wconsumers who bought in early (and the non-essential employees) who get the shaft.

What's our business model, how are we making money? Umm... don't ask me - I'm just the founder!

The sad thing is that you need to remind people of it. I would never start a business without an idea of a viable business model for it. What do they expect? Growing until they are too large to fail and then ... Godot arrives and everything is fine?

They expect to get bought. And they were right.

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