This is not just a founders problem - investors are equally compliant since they keep on throwing their money as long as they see that sweet exponential curve.

Once they get tired of seeing their money being lit on fire; they give the founders one option; monetize what you have or shut down.

Since users are now used to your service being free, the only thing you can do is to look at what you have; User data.

At first, you just sell this info to your “trusted” partners because you want to be able to sleep at night, but as the revenue keeps on growing, your investors realize you have a money printing machine at your hands.

At this point you you’ve lost your compass and forgot why you even founded the thing, being stuck at a big table discussing with investors and lawyers how to find loopholes in the new iteration of the GDPR laws, ending the meeting with deciding to funnel a big chunk of cash to lobby the law out of existence.

At this point, everybody looses except from the stock owners. Or maybe you find it hard to sleep at night, because even thought you now have infinite amounts of cash, you lost a part of yourself that day when you threw your entire user base under the bus.