| An attempt at an AI enhanced, suped up Wikipedia. Definitely in the model of Freebase. It'll end in a sell-and-bury exactly as Freebase did, for exactly the same reason: venture capital + knowledge service = only one possible eventual outcome. It's always just a matter of time before the money corrupts the service. The demand for an exit / return (outsized at that, typically) by the owners who have put up a large amount of money forces the matter. Now that big venture capital controls them, they have to pursue revenue and profit as their long-term primary goal for existing, rather than knowledge being at the center of the mission (initially they'll pretend knowledge is at the center of their mission, that will pivot as the return pressure builds on them over time). When's the IPO? But but but we're a knowledge service, we're here to help humanity. Where's my return? When do I get a 1,000% return on my $10m? But but but we're a knowledge service, we just want to spread knowledge for the betterment of all. Breaking news, July 2024: Golden purchased by Verizon Media [insert big corporate swamp monster here] for $586 million in a fire sale. July 2026, Verizon Media quietly buries Golden. Andreessen in particular seems bent on driving as many interesting knowledge concepts into the ground as he can. His magic knowledge service touch was all over Rap Genius as well (with dreams of annotate-everything going back to the Netscape days [1]). There hasn't been a single prominent knowledge service in the history of the Web that has escaped destruction once they've taken big venture capital, except for Stack Exchange and they're starting to teeter on the edge where the owners start to push it in a way that begins the rolling corruption phase (with Stack that inevitable process was delayed for a long time by the influence of its founders and the decisions they made, but eventually papa VC wants his fat return). The only for-profit knowledge services that survive with their soul intact, are slim independent operations like wikiHow that are not commanded by venture capital and the never-ending need to force an exit. [1] https://genius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-horowitz-i... "But that's just the start. It turns out that Rap Genius has a much bigger idea and a much broader mission than that. Which is: Generalize out to many other categories of text... annotate the world... be the knowledge about the knowledge... create the Internet Talmud." "Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web" Bullshit. |
But all that being said, there's always at least a chance that the organization somehow bucks the trend. Or, even if the organization eventually becomes dominated by the profit motive in the long run, that's not to say that it won't build really beneficial things before that happens. Freebase eventually sold and stopped maintaining it, but it built a free database that anyone in the world could use (and still could use). It pioneered a concept. I don't know what Rap Genius is up to these days, but I thought their annotations ux was really innovative and I'm sure pioneered a whole lot of other sites. So even if an organization's mission eventually takes a back seat to profit, it can create ton of value along the way.
Personally I find this startup very interesting and am excited to see where they go.