My thesis is that the 2016 elections have graduated this question into a pertinent political problem. The Facebooks and Twitters of 2020 will have to be built on something, and the current model of "VCs/existing tech companies/etc" controlling larger and larger portions of the stack is simply inoperable, long-term, for a free society.

Every VC-funded startup is premised implicitly on "full monopoly" as the endgame for exits that demand extremely high returns from investors. This worked really well from 2002 to 2016, and is still a really good model for a lot of software innovation, but we need to start seriously thinking about other funding models -- grants, not-for-profits, institutions like Harvard/MIT/Stanford, etc., to be involved in funding the next generation of web software technology.

I know this isn't a super popular opinion here :). I'm pretty confident in the reasoning, though. The solution to the sociopolitical problems Facebook unearths isn't "another Facebook", it's rigorous rethinking of the relationship between users, companies, data, and new software applications. Sandstorm was exactly the right next step, but unfortunately kentonv & co had to spend most of their time on enterprise sales, because this is the tail end of what the VC-funding-only ideology expects you to do if you want to enact widespread software innovations.

Another approach I think will work well: https://solid.mit.edu/

I still think we had a reasonable business model. The problem is, it was enterprise-targeted, and none of us actually knew how to sell to (or even talk to) enterprise customers. It turns out this is a skill that is not easy to learn. We really should have hired for it, rather than trying to figure it out from first principles. But by the time we realized that, it was too late -- enterprise sales cycles are long so we needed a lot of lead time.

With more investment I think we could have made it work, but it turns out that once you run into any kind of "trouble" as a startup, getting further investment becomes incredibly hard -- and we were pretty bad at the fundraising game to start with (it is, essentially, sales, after all).

I don't think we have any particular evidence that Sandstorm wasn't viable as a technology or a business -- we just personally did not have the right skillset for the business model we chose. :/

"The problem is, it was enterprise-targeted, and none of us actually knew how to sell to (or even talk to) enterprise customers. It turns out this is a skill that is not easy to learn. We really should have hired for it, rather than trying to figure it out from first principles."

That's how I predicted it would fail, too. You were at least able to figure out the problem. Many people will blame everything or everyone else. Enterprise sales is it's own beast that's much different from how things operate in the Valley or smaller shops. That's only half the problem. The other half is you usually have to integrate with systems designed not to integrate with 3rd parties easily. Lock-in loving systems. The healthcare startups are particularly being hit hard by this.

I keep thinking there's potential to get a business going that specializes in the sales and/or enterprise features at reasonable price. A public benefit or nonprofit company that forces the charges to be limited to something reasonable. They can help all these new companies bootstrap the enterprise-specific aspects of their goods for a price. What you think?

The investment market for infrastructure software is difficult now. Some might put it another way, but I think it's challenging given the way that current market model choice moves back and forth between a preference for private or public offerings. Consider the evolution steps from MSPs to SaaS.

Of late, offerings that provide a hybrid approach to software seem to be emerging. Gravitational and Relicated are examples of toolsets for these types of modelss. Take logging as a service and the more traditional self hosted log solution. What would work best users would be one piece of software, which could run both on-premise and in the cloud on someone else's servers, or even someone else's service. On-prem, it might be managed by those who wrote it. Hosted, it might represent a segment of a larger market play for intelligent time series analytics and sold as a monthly revenue rollup.

Deploying these types of models will be interesting, but it's totally doable using some type of lightweight federation across services. Sandstorm represented a portion of the infrastructure needed to do simple deployments that felt like a hosted service. A service proving cryptocurrency payments for their APIs might be another piece of the puzzle.

I continue thinking about these new markets as new technology enables them.

When you say hybrid, do you mean hybrid for the same customer (i.e. parts or instances of the service running at the same time on-premise and in the cloud) or for different customers (i.e. a particular customer will either run on-premise or in the cloud, but not both)?

Both. I'm not a big fan of the term hybrid given the past use of it to describe cloud services. I think of it more like managed SaaS services, where a customer might buy software licensing by the month and run it just on-prem, on-prem and hosted, or just hosted. I can also see a third option where there's an MSP like entity running code on your hosted infrastructure, but licensing software both on-prem (running on your stuff) and then bits running in the cloud as a solution to burst-based problems. AI services will definitely manifest this way.