> you always are depending on the "good will" of leadership

This isn't true if the product is FOSS. The Mozilla Company can be a disaster, but that's OK because Firefox is OSI-licensed. It will outlive Mozilla, and one or more community forks will appear to replace it, if needs be.

For example, observe how https://rockylinux.org/ rose from the ashes of RHEL/CentOS, after Red Hat were acquired by IBM.

The lesson is that as long as there's interest in an OSS product, there is money to be made servicing (hosting, bug-fixing, whatever) it. Where there is money to be made servicing it, a business will appear to soak up the demand.

> I'd argue this comes after the IPO.

I think it's purely a function of who your shareholders are, what your unit economics are, and how much money you have in the bank. It can happen to any stage of company. In general, contrary to popular HN belief (not saying it's yours), VCs prefer not to put good money after bad.

There are many public companies that are not relentlessly pursuing value optimization, because they have good unit economics, and have invested in attracting shareholders that are aligned with this idea. They are not starved for cash, and can raise money with low-interest loans when a growth opportunity presents itself.

> Without looking at 1Password finances though, even when it was a paid service, we don't know how profitable it was, if at all, and may be going after enterprise customers with this new funding is the only way to not only 'break even' and start making some good profits.

Like you say, we can't comment on 1P directly without knowing access to their Stripe account.

One might charitably say, their business hitherto was an experiment to see if one could build a VC-scale business around the problem of personal password management. The answer is no, but they can leverage their experience gaining that knowledge into solving a similar problem at an enterprise scale. That's probably how the execs & employees think, and it's a very reasonable take.

Unfortunately, while it's optimal for long-term viability of their business, it's not optimal for the consumer world writ large. While 1P has bootstrapped at the consumer's expense and benefit, building a consumer-facing brand for themselves along the way, it is now all downhill for the consumer from here, because they are no longer the focus of the company.

One can imagine a counterfactual, where they had developed their core applications as FOSS. 1P the business could continue to make money as 1P-enterprise, and "the people" could take over maintenance of 1P-consumer, if there was sufficient interest. The valuable experience they've accrued in building their product would continue to spin off value, instead of slowly grinding to a halt.

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Don't get me wrong, if you put me in the shoes of some exec at 1P with a fiduciary responsibility, I would do the same thing they're doing. It's the only rational direction. Their decision space is/has been heavily constrained by their initial conditions (accepting VC money, not starting with a FOSS product, etc.). If they hit `git push` to some public remote today, they risk losing the entire network they've been investing the last N years in building. It's not reasonable to expect people to make that trade.

I guess I'm hopeful that people will observe these outcomes, that it may influence their own decisions in choosing the initial conditions of their own projects. Sometimes fiduciary responsibilities contravene social responsibilities, and the superior cure for that circumstance, like with so many others, is prevention.