Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
Asking friends what would kill their firms, I heard; Performance. Succession planning. Politics. There was plenty of overlap in their answers. What stuck out to me the most was how a lot of these fears closely aligned with the revolutions already going on in venture that I've been writing about. The productization and improvement in a venture funds... See more
Kyle Harrison • The Death of a Venture Fund
Open Source Software and Collective ownership, Coops, and User Owned Platforms
I would argue that this is roughly the state of "open source" today. It is the modern software developer’s marmelade, with the OSI as our Konfitürenverordnung, continuing to aggressively enforce a phrase that has since evolved in the popular vernacular.
"open source" is not the logical negation of "closed source"
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Now that Open Source is heavily depended on by nearly every commercial company, we’re running into sustainability and maintainability problems. These are problems that really didn’t exist at scale before. A very famous recent example of this is the XZ Utils backdoor exploit, where an open source maintainer accepted a subtle but significant compromise from a bad actor, partially due to burnout and harassment of the maintainer.
However, I see this in nearly every maintainer that I talk to. It’s almost impossible to make money by writing and maintaining Open Source software, due to several factors. Everyone wants and expects free shit, and nobody feels that they need to support the people making this all possible.
The strange new truth is that most open source developers and maintainers are now patronized by large corporations.
What would be more ideal is to have not one company paying each developer, which is subject to the whims of corporate KPIs and management changes, but instead to have thousands of companies pay a very small amount to professional maintainers.
The main problem is that there is no good way to do this currently. There is little to no incentive for companies to do this and there are few ways to aggregate and disperse such funding.
The second growing problem in the Open Source ecosystem is the problem of the new generation of Commercial Open Source.
Developers have now been growing up for decades loving Open Source and open communities, and when they start companies and projects, by default they want them to be open. However, there are corporate sustainability issues with Open Source, just as there are with individual maintainer. Somewhat ironically, The Man is now using Open Source licenses to stick it to the developer!
When judgment, or narrative come up in the context of digital networks, the conversation often goes one of two directions. The first is to identify the lack of common context on social media, nothing the confusion and contention that emerges from this kind of discourse. The second is to note that knowledge communities tend to cloister themselves on... See more
Calvin Hutcheon • Enchanted — Working With Lore P2 Discursive Landscapes
Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.
A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public. This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think
... See moretedgioia.substack.com • My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character
Most startups don’t die because someone is actively trying to kill them, but simply because the founders stop trying to keep them alive.
Gena Gorlin • Death is the default
The Indie Era of Startups
bryce.medium.com
perspectives on funding and venture capital (VC) and venture capital
As the amount of capital raised by venture capital firms nearly 8x’d between 2013 and 2022, the number of new startups funded didn’t even double.
When you take total VC dollars raised, divided by the number of new companies, you’ll see the average startup today has 5x more VC capital available than its counterpart did in 2013.
Rather than fund more ideas or more types of founders, most VCs simply ended up giving more dollars to more of the same founders and ideas they’d always back.
Great businesses aren’t good enough to drive the kinds of returns needed to generate the kinds of returns mega funds demand. As more capital was consumed, more risk was layered on to push from a great outcome to a mega-fund returning outcome.
Today, the fuel for startups and the oxygen for funds are being cut significantly. There is less available capital and appetite for burn