[xyzelement]

The world is a competitive place and we are seeing some folks lose their innocence.

If what you are doing is a real business, then given the choice to protect your business or aspiring to be "open" (but with no benefit, just risk") - you focus on the business.

It's really no different than releasing too much of your secret sauce as open source - can only hurt you and is a sign you aren't that mature about what running a business through various problems is like.

[andygcook]

I wouldn't say there was no real benefit and only risk to being an "open startup". Sharing what you're doing and how it works is a marketing strategy, pure and simple. Up until recently, it was a low effort, high reward marketing channel to sell to other founders. Now with ruthless competition and the ease of cloning a service, it is becoming low value and even risky.

[Existenceblinks]

"open" triggers people to think the other way, but it's actually the same as what we know really well, it's a popular strategy among scammers. 'Look at my expensive sport car' this is a success, thus, building pseudo trust.

[timr]

Low-effort, maybe. But it was always high risk, and the reward was unclear except for a few players who did it successfully ("successfully"...it's not like any of these startups became titans) and marketed it well. Probably the marketing was the secret there, not the "open startup" part.

In the startup world, a lot of trendy ideas get repeated with little/no thought put into their actual risks and benefits for a particular situation. Remember when everyone was certain that feeding their team lunch in the office was the secret to winning? Today the hype is that you don't even want to have an office.

YMMV.

[wolverine876]

People like to say something that's more harsh or cruel or greedy - almost any negative human trait - is more 'real', a sort of reactionary assertion, which assumes liberalism (used broadly) as 'unreal', fantastical, a silly dream. People like to say that about 'realist' international relations, but the truth is that countries that do good attract more allies and friends.

But the truth is that people balance interests all the time, including businesses. Every decision balances many interests, some involving profit, some involving doing good. That is just as real, just as common a trait in humans.

[xyzelement]

Yup sure and I don't disagree.

And I think the connection to "liberalism" is a good point.

The difference is "doing something virtuous rather than maximizing revenue" vs "doing things that will clearly make your business/country unsustainable"

[elefanten]

Appreciate the upthread perspectives from you both.

One thought that came to mind is that these are, in some sense, concentric frameworks that rely on each other: a society’s values, a political economy’s priorities and affordances, and how business is conducted.

Gut level, I feel that the social and political pieces circumscribe how business can viably be run. So, I can see a (perhaps very presently-rooted) perspective that we should strive to uphold and/or fight for certain goals and outcomes on the higher levels, but that pragmatically running a business within the existing (functioning, even if dysfunctional) framework may not allow the same opportunities as trying to evolve the sociopolitical.

Going further out on a limb, the higher levels evolve more slowly — often intergenerationally - and that makes it hard to see (or remember) which rules interact with which kinds of trade-offs.