Which part of the transaction is against the principles of a free and open market?
A cushy exit when your ambitious plans fail: gated on your connections.
So the market is technically open but plebs do not have credentials to play at all. Or to quote someone, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
Not a rap on Neeva team, btw. They did nothing wrong and kudos for tackling a big problem even if they failed at it.
Kind of disappoints the romantic story but it is what it is
It’s not some injustice that private firms raise money and then direct it to who they want. That’s just a mechanism for reducing risk in a game where everything is extraordinarily risky.
How about let's start there.
I see no statically compelling reason that should be the assumed position for most people
I feel this frustration is strongest with enterprise software which is usually the most capital intensive to build and requires a lot of trust to sell.
The number of people who get to make decisions about, for example, data warehousing services is already pretty small and the subset of those willing to be somebody's first customer is even smaller.
However, there are plenty of other startup opportunities outside of that space. Consumers, media people and developers are generally easier to chat with than CIOs and still need software to do what they want to do.
Besides, the "free market" is not a goal on its own. It's a method that is frequently the most beneficial one, but not always.