While honourable advice, the bottom line is Keybase sold without having a business model.
So perhaps better advice is, start a business even if you don’t have a plan and someone may buy it anyway.
The plan was to get acquired. As much as I've liked Keybase the product, their steadfast refusal to ever come up with a way to make money has always made me suspect they were doing the typical Silicon Valley thing: just burn funding until a bigger company notices and buys you.
> So perhaps better advice is, start a business even if you don’t have a plan and someone may buy it anyway.
A better world for your personal pocketbook maybe, but certainly a worse world for the rest of us. I wouldn't characterize that as "better" in any general sense.
Sometimes, acquihire is the business model. It makes money for the VCs and money for the founders. It's just the fools^wconsumers who bought in early (and the non-essential employees) who get the shaft.
What's our business model, how are we making money? Umm... don't ask me - I'm just the founder!
The sad thing is that you need to remind people of it. I would never start a business without an idea of a viable business model for it. What do they expect? Growing until they are too large to fail and then ... Godot arrives and everything is fine?
Re:Zoom Acquires Keybase
by icebraining on Friday May 08, 2020 @03:58AM
(#23112454)
They expect to get bought. And they were right.
Attention people starting businesses: VC funding is fun and all, but please, have a business model. Your users and employees depend on it.