[diacritica]

One thing I didn't share on my community post here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 was how tough was to find the right VC for us. The conversations started back in Nov 2021 and we received a ton of calls from excited (yet misaligned) VCs. Being used to enjoy total freedom as an employee-owned consultancy company we would quickly turned down most of them because we did see this path that you're describing crisp clear in front of us.

I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source license and a strong community lead us to a very successful business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince you that you have to trust us, that would insult your intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open source community with both designers AND developers (I touch upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. Thanks for your thoughtful post!

[joecot]

If you want to convince people to get invested in using PenPot, while you've also taken VC funding, then yes that is the way to go about it. The main way that open source projects continue if a company suddenly pulls out is if there is a robust volunteer community to be able to fork and continue. If you build that community, that would be able to continue maintenance and development if, say, your VC funders decided today it would be better to take the ball and sell it to Adobe for 8 billion dollars, then you will have built the contingency for when you inevitably lose control.

[__d]

Is there a path for the community to develop an ownership position in the managing entity, in addition to having access to the source code?

[TuringTest]

There are projects which have managed to do so, like KDE's QT, which was closed source but negotiated an escrow license with the community to release the code as BSD if the owner company ever stopped development.

https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqt_announcement/

[joshmanders]

The problem is that once you accept VC funding you are no longer doing it for the customers but for the shareholders.

It doesn't matter what your end goal is, their end goal is to 10x or more their investment, full stop.

Whatever you do that gets in the way of that will result in you being removed.

So congrats on the funding I guess?

[diacritica]

I've made my professional career out of rejecting false dichotomies and I've made sure to be surrounded by like-minded people, they'd had to remove everyone I guess, including the community. I understand where you're coming from and all I can say at this point is that I also write comments like yours elsewhere.

[joshmanders]

I applaud your dedication and I hope it's true. I've grown to really dislike when my favorite bootstrapped products announce VC funding because 99.99999998% of the time, it ends up badly for customers.

[diacritica]

And that's exactly what we saw with 99.999999998% of VCs and investors that approached us. This news is about securing the funding to build something that is remarkably challenging and make it happen fast. Our bet on SVG, like the Figma employee above says, is at the core of our ethos, but requires extra work, this is the type of commitment you should expect from Penpot.

[pen2l]

Your commitment to open standards is inspiring and I wish you all the success for the role you play in it.

Is a desktop app in the cards to enable offline use, with https://tauri.app maybe (instead of Electron, for improved performance)?

[diacritica]

Thank you! Open standards and not just "open formats" belong to the critical path to accessible innovation. There's already a community "port" of Penpot for a Desktop experience. You can learn a bit more here https://community.penpot.app/t/introducing-penpot-desktop/14...