Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
Just been reading about them - they haven’t taken venture funding - so I expect they don’t have the same pressure to 10X every 6 months.
From their site:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
What "most people" (Arch Linux enthusiasts I presume) think about it has no influence on the contracts between Kagi and their investors, and the laws the parties have to abide to.
And how do you suppose that Kagi receives the money invested by their users? If you guessed by function of a VC firm, then you guessed right.
These are legal and contractual proceedings, with strict definitions of terms by law, not by popular opinion in the hacker community.
"Underlying motivations" of the investors is never a legal factor in any kind of investment deal. That's not something that can be accounted for by any kind of contract.
Because Kagi is not a publicly traded company, where anybody can invest.
They raised money in the form of SAFE notes, in which case a venture capital firm is created (you can also call it a legal entity or a juridical person) and each investor owns a part of that firm in proportion to the money they invest. That firm in turn will have a contract with the startup company which details and regulates how the invested funds in the future can be transformed to actual shares.
Thanks for the insight. But that's not how most people understand the term "VC money". So while you might be technically right, you are still (intentionally?) missing the point.
Venture funding is a financial and legal term with a defined meaning. Unfortunately the real world does not care whatever idea the hacker "community" has regarding what the words mean.
Actually the real world does care. Words have meanings in the context that they're spoken, and often times whether you want to or not, dictionaries have to update their meanings because they changed over time.
A dictionary has no bearing on the law and what is defined in a business contract. That would be like me claiming that I own a share of Apple Inc because I purchased an Apple in the supermarket. Sure, maybe I can get the entire HN comment section to agree with me, but that doesn't change reality.
I don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but the last line feels off. Investment profile needs to be matched with returns, but they don't all need to be 5 year mega exits, and they don't need the same companies to be racheted up in round after round of fund-led growth. This is why we don't build companies that will last 100+ years anymore
Why would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns.
You can do two, or even all three of those things. Human beings are not boolean greed machines.
The HN bubble likes to reduce everything to a numbers game. Real life isn't like that, as demonstrated by the many tens of thousands of companies that aren't run like a dystopian Silicon Valley comic book.
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.