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by lelanthran
822 days ago
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> They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m, What does that mean? $100m revenue in a financial year? $100m since inception? TBH, at those numbers you are self-sufficient and there are no upsides to taking VC money, only downsides. |
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Ie Lockitron raised $2.2m in presales with it. Tile raised $2.6m in presales with it. And so on.
Unlike Kickstarter it did not take a 8-10% fee of funds raised. It was not a primary business for us. Just something we casually maintained because we coincidentally had a bunch of payment processors in our YC batch that year so spinning it up was less than a weekend’s worth of work given our connections.
I am pretty indifferent now but at the time I was infuriated that Kickstarter drew an arbitrary line between a creative and a founder. It simultaneously marketed itself as the democratic fundraising platform for artists and was perfectly opaque (and self-contradictory) on which projects they would gatekeep from their platform once they started getting heat from places like NPR.
At the time I took a hardline approach that the way to do good was to give people access to tools not restrict them from a platform. Enough time has passed that I see that’s a bit reductive.