The cycle begins again.
2) We've taken Venture Capital funding in order to get ramped up much faster, so we can do all those great things
3) Because we didn't ramp up as fast as the Venture Capital funding wanted, we're changing our direction.
4) We're selling to a big company for billions of dollars who will either ash can our work entirely or totally ignore our initial mission.
Founders like to pretend they didn't break their promises when their VC funders or a takeover totally changes their product in step 3 or 4. But they broke their promises in step 2, the second they took Venture Capital funding. VC is investing a small amount in many companies expecting massive payout from one of them. The end goal is to go public or sell to a large company. Either means giving up control, which means you've agreed to give up control as soon as you take VC funding. A company can no longer be trusted to do what's in the best interest of their customers as soon as they a) take VC funding, b) go public, or c) get sold. No matter what promises they've made.
Point is, don't jump from Figma to PenPot thinking everything will be better, they will go the same route within 3 years if they're successful. It's nice that it is open source, but at some point it will not be open source, or will have significant changes for a professional paid version. Open Source is only part of the equation, it also needs either a community or consistent company support, and that's not guaranteed once VC gets involved.
Doesn't matter - it's an open source app, I can clone it and run it on-prem or locally (and I already have - and opened a PR!). FLOSS simply eliminates a great deal of SaaS risk.
They can delete their repo tomorrow, go full-proprietary, sell out to the highest bidder, get taken over by Adobe. None of it matters, I can still work on my designs.
The only really evil things can come from the likes of google anti-fragmentation agreement where essentially you are marked with a Scarlett letter if you didn't go all-in into google proprietary ecosystem. But we have FCC to protect us from that, right?
Correct. They broke their promise as soon as they took VC money. Same with Keybase and same with Bitwarden. They cannot be trusted on their 'promises'.
> It's nice that it is open source, but at some point it will not be open source, or will have significant changes for a professional paid version. Open Source is only part of the equation, it also needs either a community or consistent company support, and that's not guaranteed once VC gets involved.
This. 'Open Source' is a marketing term and illusion which is 1/4 of the equation with it being hijacked for a different purpose. There is a possibility that there could be a private fork that has different features to the open source version.
As soon as VCs get involved it is basically a race to the exit at all costs, even if they have to close or omit some features from the open-source version if they have to.
I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source license and a strong community lead us to a very successful business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince you that you have to trust us, that would insult your intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open source community with both designers AND developers (I touch upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. Thanks for your thoughtful post!
It doesn't matter what your end goal is, their end goal is to 10x or more their investment, full stop.
Whatever you do that gets in the way of that will result in you being removed.
So congrats on the funding I guess?
Is a desktop app in the cards to enable offline use, with https://tauri.app maybe (instead of Electron, for improved performance)?
- Product become popular
- Company X takes VC money/get aquired
- Company Y makes an alternative product that is cheaper and maybe Open Source
- Company X makes product worse due
- People switch to product from company Y
- Now repeat everything, but Company Y is now Company X.
Not long ago, Figma was Company Y in this cycle.