Ah ok, so the team has joined cloudflare but the corporate entity continues with the original owners.

So in some ways better than an acquihire and in some ways worse.

It seems almost universally better? I can't think of any acquirer that would be more successful with Sandstorm than the founders themselves. Nobody I can think of is aligned with "users own their data" and big enough / cares enough to help Sandstorm gain adoption.

Even Sandstorm not gaining traction with their B2B strategy is likely a blessing in disguise: with enterprise money coming in they would have felt a hard pull to do more things that enterprises like. No matter how much conviction you have, making payroll often trumps that.

Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work. My hope is that the project can continue to improve and gain traction to the point where it sets up or joins a foundation, then potentially try to restart a complementary commercial venture on top of that.

> Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work.

Well, no... I don't think we proved it didn't work, only that we lacked the expertise to make it work. With more time and some good hiring I think we could have fixed the problem, but the investor money ran out, so...

Ok, that might have been an oversimplification on my part, maybe "isn't a natural fit" would have been better. I'm sure there's enough value there that you could have eventually made a business out of it.

I think some others of the team work for stripe now.

That's correct.