...yet.
In typical VC fashion it will totally respect the user forever (wink, wink) until they want to actually cash out.
PS: would've been a nice touch if you disclosed acreom is yours.
VC-backed companies eventually exit, yes, but bootstrapped companies often just… die.
And, plenty of VC-backed companies do not commit the cardinal sins described in this article; lock-in, anti-user practices, and so on. I ran a VC-backed cybersecurity company for nearly 10 years, and we never engaged in any bad-for-the-user chicanery, and our VCs never pushed us to.
This is an article to promote Obsidian (which is fine, and I have on my list to try) but on very shaky ground. Being bootstrapped, in and of itself, does not somehow imply Obsidian will be around longer or less crappy to their users.
It’s entirely about the founders and what they prioritize; not how they got their funding.
The fools optimizing for “growth” without anything sustainable aren’t going to get rich (on average), and are focused on the wrong customer - the VC.
VCs don’t force you to do bad things. Bad founders do bad things, and they sometimes raise money. That’s all.
not unless these values are provided by technical decisions over policies or promises.
in acreom’s case, you own the software as well as your data and there’s not much we can do about it since we built it that way (local-first, offline with optional sync, e2ee, markdown without any acreom specific formatting)
Conversely, with a less misaligned board & company structure, a friendly hire (e.g., internal) can take over and the board stays aligned. Ex: Mozilla. Protecting this is super hard... OpenAI has been quite a lesson in how fast things can change even with supposed governance structures: 100% reversal to closed code/weights/algorithms/data, $-first, & pro-military