I always wonder why original founders just sell the company and do something else. Why don't they try to control it more and make sure it stays aligned with needs of society more?
Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR
I certainly wonder about the "do something else" in the sense of serial entrepreneurs. If I could cash in once I'd be done. If I had enough money to retire on, I would. Run a cat shelter or something.
But the actual answer here is probably a combo of a few things: One, running a company is probably not as much fun as building a company. Much of my career has been "pioneer" roles where nobody else has done the job before. At a certain point, the foundation is laid and the problems to solve are different and often less interesting -- at least to me. It's the build vs. maintain thing.
Two, they started with good and noble intentions. Money got involved. A lot of money got involved. The noble intentions were replaced with reality.
Three, have you met users? As a site grows you have to deal with more and more people and people can be very demanding and not very appreciative. Coupled with the previous factors, I think original founders get burnt out and decide to take the cash and move on. The allure of building anew is too much, the grind of maintenance is too much, and the cash is too good to pass up.
Also four... there's a peak for any site. You often don't know when or how, but you do now that someday your site's maximum value, interest, participation, and all that is going to peak and then decline. Sticking around to fight the good fight may just mean passing up a payday and being left with a declining property nobody wants anymore.
Probably 10-15 years ago now someone I new built a dev focussed B2B SaaS company that was quite successful. I’m not sure if they ever raised investment, but they were hyper efficient and definitely not following the VC model. Profitable, very small team, and that’s how they liked it. I compared notes with the founder regularly and found it very inspirational. He didn’t want to follow the typical VC model. He wanted to build a long term company that could sustain itself. I just loved everything about what they were doing and how well they were doing it.
And then one day, completely unexpectedly (to me) I read that they’ve been acquired by a private equity firm. I reached out to find out what happened and what changed. His answer was along the lines of “turns out everyone has an exit point after all. Priorities and motivations change and I’ve given this company everything I have to give it. It’s time to explore what’s next”
I think about it a lot. And I’ve witnessed it in various ways numerous time since. People that were hacking on a side project with the idea of “I just want this to be a fun passive income stream” seeing the adoption and love their work gets suddenly thinking “oh my, there’s potential here I didn’t see before! I could build a whole team and company around this… let’s go raise investment!”.
I think we’re just really bad predictors at how achieving the things we want will impact us emotionally. When we reach those milestones we react either more positive or more negatively than we could understand previously.
And yet you get people like Zuckerberg who'll stick around until the end. It's not like he cares about users or connecting people beyond them being a means to grow the company. Yet he saw through the company from its founding to the gigantic megacorp it is now, and it doesn't seem like hell ever want to quit. Why didn't he quit? It's not like his users are any more appreciative and he's far from beloved by anybody.
…or they might have determined that they‘d rather spend their time on something else.
Keeping control is a (mostly time) commitment and liability. You have to stay on top of things and actively decide on issues that inadvertently come up.
> Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR
That is assuming the worst in people. Have you ever wanted to move onto something new? If you make something cool, it is not your lifelong obligation to oversee it.
They probably had some nice checks written with their name in the "pay to the order of"... but they weren't the ones doing the selling, negotiating the price, or having any say in it more than any other shareholder (weighted by the shares and voting status) would.
What? How do you justify declaring a person as a whole "super toxic" with only a link to an interview citing a link to a blog post including "Things like… hyper-competition… an over focus on aggressive competition… things like zero sum thinking" when:
* the post is about interviewing which mostly is, for better or worse, a competitive zero-sum process.
* the post is more than a decade old (then, more like two now.)
* the post is written by someone else.
I have no opinion on the guy one way or the other, and he may in fact be toxic, but that's hardly compelling evidence.
Because despite claims to the contrary most of these sites/projects aren't created for altruistic reasons, they were created to make money (at some point). Cashing out is typically part of the long term plan.
In the case of Stack Overflow, I think the reason for the data dumps was two-fold: one of the original founders (who left long ago) came across as at least idealistic and wanting to do the right thing. The other was pragmatic and most likely always thinking about the money angle. However, the other founder likely also saw the value of the data dumps from a PR standpoint which was quite valuable as they were initially trying to replace expertsexchange.com that paywalled most of the content. IIRC, they discussed the data dumps in the early days of their podcast.
Now that there's big money to be made from machine learning (both the models and the data they are trained on), they've likely decided 'screw it' on the PR value of the data dumps and would rather get some of that sweet, sweet machine learning money.
The thing is, I sympathize with them not wanting machine learning companies to make money off the site’s content without any benefit to the contributors, moderators, or the site itself. I worry that gating access won’t really change that and just mean that the site owners also benefit at the expense of the community.
It is a well known situation. The best thing is that I don't think it was intentional, contrary to other well-known "offenders".
Experts Exchange was well known for showing up in search results but not providing the answers without paying. Many people hated it and wanted search engines to implement some sort of deny list to filter it out automatically.
