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Comment by bruxis | Hacker News Reader

The era of having startup founders both immediately accessible on social platforms (X/Twitter, Discord, etc.) and overly willing to share their opinions is a messy one.

It's hard enough in a small startup to prevent CEO "commentary-driven-development" , let alone have their random thoughts driving investment insight and user acquisition/attrition.

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Even without seeing Vlads comments it was already disheartening to see them investing in AI features of questionable utility rather than focusing on the core search product. Trying to make a new search engine is already a difficult enough task without spreading themselves even thinner, and diluting the value of the subscription for those who just want search because they only offer unlimited searches in conjunction with unlimited access to the AI tools.

To me the Orion endeavor was much more concerning. I don't understand how you can sustain a company of a handful of people and work on search, ai, ai+search, orion and making tshirts.

Orion came before Kagi Search. If anything, I'm sure Orion users found this Kagi endeavor much more concerning.

What do you mean? The unlimited tier didn't come with AI last time I checked. That's the ultimate tier which costs 2.5x as much to pay for the ai?

The $10 unlimited tier gives you unlimited access to FastGPT and the summarizer. The 2.5x more expensive plan above that gives you more AI features, but it sounds like you're paying for early beta access, and they will filter down to the cheaper plan eventually.

Messy, but valuable imo.

It’s good interacting with the real people that make software.

IMO, The fact that it’s so detached from the customer is part of why MBAs fit in to leadership so nicely.

None of the customers see it coming, because they don’t interact with employees.

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