But then I saw the “K” and grinned. This is proper bootstrap money, and makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission.
Congrats. I am really pulling for you, Vlad.
By the way, to "bootstrap" a business is short for "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" (yes, it's an old phrase) and means not raising any money.
Just a to bootstrap a computer is to start it when it has no code loaded or running. Nowadays it's in ROM so the term is rather obscure but we used to toggle a little bootstrap program in from the front panel or, if you were lucky, load it in from paper tape. That program was very short, just enough to get some more code loaded and start it.
Today I learned! Technically Kagi was bootstrapped up to this point (I've invested $2MM+ of my own money to get us this far). This is the first external fundraise (as noted in the annoucement) and what makes it very special to me is that people participating in the round are Kagi users who were already a part of our journey.
Same impression here
If you have the money to participate and lie about having/earning more money then you qualify.
There is no constitutional way to prevent you from investing based on net worth, so the law places consequences on the companies offering investments.
And the only time this affects the company is if they were relying on a regulatory exemption that also allows unaccredited investors, in which case you should have just participated as an unaccredited investor and they were supposed to verify.
Otherwise, the law says “self-certify”, which is the state sanctioned term for lying.
What? Of course there is. Low net worth isn’t a protected class. We don’t do it that way because the purpose of the law is to protect small investors.
If a fine or sanction from the government was applied to the investor themselves based on net worth, I would argue 5th amendment and 14th amendment equal application of laws, and 1st amendment's freedom of speech citing the Citizen's United case where money movement is speech
I think that would be resilient in most circuits and certainly scotus
Investment = you are not personally liable and no need to return the money if u fail. It's not ur money.
Bootstrap = you are responsible to pay it back.iys ur money once u get it.
> We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. … We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
Same here!
I think this is because our eyes-brain system is optimizing the read operation by scanning the words and maps them against a list of words we already familiar with, thus, sometimes it got the wrong meaning. This trick was used by some brands to mislead people to buy some products with a familiar brand name.. like “Adibas” and “Reedok”.
> makes me hopeful that Kagi will stay close to its original mission
I really hope so but no one can guarantee this would be the case if the company get bigger with more money being thrown there.
In its first years, Google’s tagline was “don’t be evil“ but they couldn’t deliver the promise.
OpenAI’s original mission evaporated as soon as ChatGPT became a thing.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981
Huh?
I'm going to go have a coffee.
Now let's go and blow that money in Vegas.
/s