Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth.
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement around it.
The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots.
Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no real duty to outsiders throwing away money.
Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first class, while laying off employees left right and center.
But we are still allowed to criticize moves that we think are counter-productive or a waste.
As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest more of his own money to keep the company growing in the future, if needed.
I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a little worried.
> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade, I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private, unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public, unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had invested in us.
Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000 wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company, what benefit was spending it actually providing the company? Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the website for the tournament, which was maybe a little visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious "yes".
Yes.
Do you think they charge too much?
Do they charge more than you think it's worth?
Or, at the bottom end, if their previous salaries were barely ramen-style living wages, I would be glad that they have become able to pay themselves enough to be comfortable.