This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business. There’s just nothing else to say here other than this is 100% expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large exit to the point where you IPO.
Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100% guaranteed to do this.
I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that has maintained the core of what they do, and the value proposition, but didn’t push most of their money into paying for sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally, stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at the cost of employees.
Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he’s a good person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else, and so it’s honorable that he is attempting to find ways to mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end of the day the arrow of history is clear.