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Comment by lprd | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly surprised that keybase is still around. It's really cool what they've built, but how exactly are they keeping the lights on?

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Simple, they were bought by Zoom in 2020.

It seems like it was actually the acquisition by Zoom that seems to have sent Keybase down this slow death march. It was obvious that the acquisition was in order to acquire the team to improve Zoom's own security posture, and they had no interest in the Keybase product itself.

Since then, activity on the open source keybase repos has been minimal and they have not made any major product changes.^1,2 Basically just keeping the lights on. I give big props to the few folks at Zoom that are still pushing commits. Keybase is/was awesome.

[^1]: https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors [^2]: https://github.com/orgs/keybase/repositories

well they had raised $10 million and burned through almost all of it so I'm not sure you can describe the acquisition that effectively saved their company as "sending them down a death march"

however, it's clear you're right - Zoom doesn't prioritize the product.

Oh yeah no arguments from me there, they were definitely burning through cash without a clear vision about where they were going to start making money. But had they not been acquired I am 100% positive they could have raised boatloads of more money in that crazy market from late 2020-early 2022.

Keybase's life cycle basically turned me completely cynical for how tech startups work. It was a really cool idea, but they had zero plans from the start for sustainability. They were clearly just shooting for an acquisition to pay off the VC and founders, leaving the tech to die in the curb. Makes me sad. I recognize it's a common pattern since forever, but this was the first one I felt personally let down by.

Holding out hope that Zoom will open-source the server side of things and perhaps let a foundation take over maintenance/ownership of Keybase.

There's clearly value there, but yeah they need to find a way to make it sustainable.

Portfolio startup/Startfolio: business (chiefly technical) created with the primary, if not sole, aim of acquisition by a larger startup

100% on this. What made this sad was the mission of Keybase and its founder appears to have been b.s. in the face of enough zeroes on a check.

Remember when they got roped into some lame cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme? Hahaha. The joys of having VC debt and no business model.

> in the face of enough zeroes on a check ... roped into some lame cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme

It turns out the number of zeros required was zero.

They air-dropped XLM Stellar Lumens

A fork of Ripple XRP after Ripple was sold

Same dude that did both ^ also created and sold MtGox (likely insolvent) to Mark Karpeles

Need articbull to do all the citations on Jed/ripple/stellar and how keybase ended up having a stellar wallet

Keybase open sourced some great stuff. I hope they will share the rest as well.

If I had to choose between them not existing, or existing to be acquired then I'm glad they choose what they did.

I feel HN as a double speak for startups. Lots of cheer for open source and free stuff, lots of hate for anything subscription-based, lots of noise for high salaries and then picachu surprise when stuff like this happens. If anything I am completely cynical on HN users and not much on startups getting bought...

And a lot of us are the most able to pay for these things we use for free, but don't.

Actually lots of people asked to pay for the service and wanted them to accept money. Nobody is against subscription if it comes to things like remote resources.

There is a segment of the hacker community that believes that the correct and noble purpose of a startup isn't to build a stable company or find product-market fit, but rather to confuse VCs into temporarily paying some people to create the niche project they wanted to create anyway, but didn't have any way to keep the lights on while building; where the correct and noble end-goal of such a project is to avoid acquisition, use up all its runway paying the employee salaries, and, upon shutdown, open-source the IP (and hook the employees up with their next startup doing the same thing.) That "shutdown and release FOSS" step is seen by this segment as not only the intended outcome of the startup, but the entire purpose/mission of creating the startup in the first place. With any messaging to the contrary existing solely to make VCs complacent, rather than because the founders actually believe it.

That sounds _way_ better than making a handful of very wealthy people a little more wealthy, while leaving employees and customers in the cold after the acquisition. I wish that segment of the hacker community were larger...

I mean, they basically said as much when they bought it. They didn't buy it for the product, they bought it for all the folks who bring a wealth of cryptography knowledge. This was also around the time that Zoom had a LOT of bad PR around privacy and spying on users, IIRC.

That said, Zoom is the reason the lights are still on, even if not a lot of work is being done on the product. Keybase never really had a solid marketable product to begin with, so I honestly don't see it going down another way. They seemed to be entirely set up to get acquired at some point, regardless who or what their plans were.

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