[taurath]

Platform quality is long term money, platform monetization is short term money.

With VCs who only care that the growth curve is exponential, they go for short term money every time, because yeah you might crash the company, but you've got a 5% chance of becoming a big evil corp.

[dullgiulio]

Yes, exactly this. You have to choose the hand that feeds.

If you start a platform around paying customers you make it one way, if you start it around getting as many users as you can and then monetize the popularity, then you are selling your users, and that's another way entirely.

[da_chicken]

Yup.

And stock investors often aren't much better.

[s17n]

Focusing on the 5% chance of massive success is the opposite of short term thinking.

[manigandham]

It's about having a massive exit, the sooner the better. It's absolutely short-term thinking, with an upper bound around 10 years. Less for smaller investors. Nobody cares what happens after the exit.