I wasn’t aware of this, but I’m glad I am now. If that’s the case it’s time to look elsewhere or self host, VC funds and acquisitions are rarely good for users so I’ll assume the worst.
Where does this sentiment come from? I know very few applications I use that are VC funded or haven't gone through acquisitions...
If the user base does not increase at some rate determined by the investor, then growth comes in the form of advertising, partnerships, or similar that negatively affect the _product_ existing customers signed up for.
When investors get involved in software, you end up with winners and users.
1. Totally agree with the comments that VC funding absolutely killed LastPass.
2. Twitter is probably another good example. Twitter was a really large business, but they were constantly wringing their hands about what they could do to get as big as Facebook or Instagram. What if the answer was always just "No, you'll never be that big, just don't even try". So instead of improving their core bread-and-butter (and fine, easy to argue they didn't even do that super well), they wasted a ton trying to get users who were never going to use Twitter in the first place.
3. Very closely related to this idea about "When large sums of money become toxic", the private equity consolidation in US health care is another ongoing disaster. PE comes in with the promise of "streamlining operations", but instead they are just vampires, cutting stuff to the bone so that the health care system isn't able to respond to spikes in demand (e.g. Covid): https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/14/moodys-private-equity-he...
$100M to develop a new processor or phone or vaccine or search engine or social network that delivers video to everyone worldwide is different than $100M to a password manager or other “simpler” project.
With BW I have never expected the same and I am still hopeful on giving them the benefit of doubt.
The licenses are also confusing — people had to purchase apps separately for every platform: macOS, Windows, iOS, Android. And then they had to purchase upgrades separately as well.
