I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way.

I mean, Unity's just the latest example. Before it came Hashicorp and Docker. I'm sure we could think of many more examples if we tried.

And what's really frustrating is that if these businesses had focused on simply "building a product the community wanted, supporting that community, and making enough money to comfortably keep going" - all of them could have been successful.

I'd really love to see the tech community try more models that simply aim for comfortable sustainability - not astronomical growth. You know, enough to pay a modest engineering team market salaries indefinitely while they continue to support and develop the product.

My company is actively using this model now. It's really hard watching competitors raise multi-million dollar rounds though.

Unless your plan is to vest and cash out, you shouldn't envy them.

That's why it happens so often though -- the very people who are directly enriched by doing it (holders of the majority of the company's equity) are the only ones asked to decide to do it (board votes).

Canonical example: MailChimp

The founders retained essentially all the equity (Atlanta), so when push came to shove they decided "Fuck it, we'd rather be rich than work" and sold the company.

It feels like the only way to avoid this would be aligning the equity structure with employees and customers in a better way.

Exactly. I think what we are seeing is the result of decision makers at these businesses now having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the community. Their only stake or interest in the operation comes from having dumped a bunch of money into it. But now they get to call the shots or if not, exert a ton of pressure.

I think the takeaway is that businesses built around a community really should not go public.

VCs don't like this. How are they going to get their ROI immediately? Having normal investors vs funders changes the mentality of long term to cash grab.

They have a business model and they would've been fine if they hadn't started increasing their headcount by 50% every year and focused on their core products.