Typical survivor bias in this comment.

“You only raised $100,000 in funding, spent zero on marketing and PR, bootstrapped by working hard to service real clients, and only made $1,000,000 after all that time.

You’re surprised that VCs didn’t give you $1 million? They would have waited 10 years to see you make this same $1 million.

YC-Funded OpenSea has gone on to raise lots of rounds from more VCs due to connections and hype, and now finally generated more money in shorter time than you. No wonder no one wanted to fund you.”

Ummmm…

You do realize that you’re ignoring the totally unequal starting conditions and playing field between someone who is picked to be given a large sum of money, access to a large network of investors and hiring opportunitirs, automatic built-in PR, and much more, vs someone who doesn’t have those things? And despite all that, many startups with all that going for them fail — eg to recoup the investment and generate revenue, founders leave etc. We have stuck with it for 10 years regardless of support from others, and now built our own network and are doing things that are much larger than most “app feature” startups. After all, we had to build entire platforms.

I am not saying this to brag. I am saying that the mentality around what gets funded and how, is so entrenched, that you could unironically make the above argument.

There are many open source projects that have similarly not received VC funding for years, yet have helped liberate the world. While the VC funded projects have often led to closed-source Big Tech monopolies that extract rents forever to satisfy wall street earnings.

And we would have been part of that entire VC funded economic model, if it wanted us, but it rejected our open source platforms like a poison pill. We aren’t changing the story to sound like we were “too good” for VC, like KeyBase sold itself to Zoom and WhatsApp sold to Facebook. We would have taken VC but we would have never sold or been acqui-hired. As it is, though, we were forced to stay independent this whole time.

> Wrong. Plenty of open source has funding today.

Let’s pick two of the biggest ones powering the entire Web today. The ones who didn’t have connections to Silicon Valley, shall we.

NGiNX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

Was so good, it gradually replaced Apache and Microsoft IIS. (Lighthttpd never did get much love.) From 2002 to 2011 the author (Igor Sysoev in Russia) developed it without having any VC funding, in 2011 he finally started a company w the same name.

MySQL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB

Started in 1995 and only got its first VC in 2001, from Scandinavian VCs. They proudly considered themselves a “second gen open source model” of giving their software away and charging for support, rather than dual licensing. Anyway, MySQL had to persevere and build their product with no VC support for 6 years, it was finally sold to Sun Microsystems, now it is under Oracle, and the open source community has forked it into MariaDB.

And even today, take a look at projects like MaidSAFE that have worked since 2006 to build an amazing next-generation Web4 system for the entire world. VCs wouldn’t touch something like that until it was mature.

“Why fund open source Web 2.0 or 3.0 platforms that liberate the world when you can let people trade JPEGs on the Internet using a closed centralized service. That’s what the people want today.”

That’s why cryptocurrency has democratized investment and Web3 will eventually do to gatekeeper institutions what Web1 did to established newspapers, magazines, cable channels, radio stations and so forth.