Ask HN: How to determine company's long term dependability? (Ello, Astral)
In July 2023, Ello shut down its services, with no warning. The service initially pitched impressive features such as "never selling user data to advertisers or third parties, never showing advertisements". After the dust settled many realized that Ello took significant funds from venture capitals and that's how it was able to support itself while having little to no income from users. The line of thinking goes that the venture capital investment could have harmed the social network if not outright forced its demise from the start. [1] Anecdotally, to me it seems to be a common sentiment on HN that venture capital = bad news for users.
I really like uv [2], an "extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust." It seems to be something Python's ecosystem really needs. I really love the mission of Astral and what they do, as I concretely believe that Python's tools should not be written in Python, to avoid depending on themselves during runtime.
But then I checked out "Company" section of Astral and they are venture capital backed [3]. That's a red flag, as far as I am concerned. They have collected 4M$ in funding from various venture capitals [4]. They allegedly want to provide (are providing?) B2B solutions, which is expected for a company in this business. But the venture capital will want to cash out at some point and I am unsure that Astral can survive that, without e.g. adding "premium" features or outright selling the business to a competitor, which would most certainly mean at least disruptions for uv. Considering that, in production, uv would be a central tool nearly impossible to replace, I am concerned about that.
What do you think?
EDIT: Note that the Astral - Ello link is purely chronological, these two don't have remotely similar business model, I just wanted to start with something recent.
[1] https://waxy.org/2014/09/the-problem-with-ello/
[2] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv
[3] https://astral.sh/about
[4] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/astral/__W6l-bp3GV_9maZhwlt8FKy458zB3M7bWVjKMEPSKuYU