Thank you for calling this out! It's great to see more products adopt this stance and this is one of the reasons we chose to not raise funds for Typesense [1].
From an article I wrote recently on this topic [2]:
> Selling Stock vs Selling Search
One key realization we had is that when we bring on investors, we are essentially bringing on a new group of customers - customers for whom the product is our company stock.
The value this group of customers (investors) gets from the product they are buying (stocks) is appreciating stock prices. And the way we can keep this group of customers happy is by regularly raising the next round of funding which is when stock prices appreciate, or having a liquidity event to make a return on investment.
We are concerned that “launching” a new “product line” (selling stocks) and bringing on a whole new group of customers (investors), would cause us to lose our precious bandwidth that could have otherwise been spent on our core search product that our primary group of users and customers expect from us. After all, the “company stock” product line would not exist without the core search product.
From an article I wrote recently on this topic [2]:
> Selling Stock vs Selling Search
One key realization we had is that when we bring on investors, we are essentially bringing on a new group of customers - customers for whom the product is our company stock.
The value this group of customers (investors) gets from the product they are buying (stocks) is appreciating stock prices. And the way we can keep this group of customers happy is by regularly raising the next round of funding which is when stock prices appreciate, or having a liquidity event to make a return on investment.
We are concerned that “launching” a new “product line” (selling stocks) and bringing on a whole new group of customers (investors), would cause us to lose our precious bandwidth that could have otherwise been spent on our core search product that our primary group of users and customers expect from us. After all, the “company stock” product line would not exist without the core search product.
[1] https://typesense.org
[2] https://typesense.org/blog/why-we-are-not-raising-funds/