One of my most valuable life lessons has been that there is no such thing as 'multiple priorities'. It's in the nature of 'priorities' that they are ordered, and understanding that order lets you predict outcomes.
Sure, people or organizations can consider multiple things genuinely important, but what *really* drives the decisionmaking, is the answer to "if two of these important things ever directly conflict with each other, which one wins out?"
And in a commercial or business context, the answer is ultimately almost always "profit", regardless of the social or environmental virtues that a company sings about itself.
@joepie91 this is why i have repeatedly resisted doing a startup, because I am very aware of what that means.
it also seems to be about the only way to raise significant funds these days :/
fair enough.
some popular definition is also: startup is when there is no eorking business model yet and ppl pivot and pivot and pivot until they found the business model, which is when its stops being a startup.
i guess under this definition, startups is also what is covered by bootstrapped companies.
I'd love to have a new term for anything that is bootstrapped and is open source too.
imho bitcoin is that. web3 isnt.
...but thats just a random unrelated thought 😅
@serapath @bananas That particular definition doesn't seem very workable to me, because then you end up in endless debate about whether something "has a business model" or not, and the distinction as defined there only really matters to VCs anyway.
Because a startup finding a business model doesn't actually make it any less toxic or unsustainable, it's always trying to achieve impossible ROIs either way.
@joepie91 @bananas
hm...i mean.yeah.
Steve Blank, an entrepreneur who started the "lean startup movement" defines it like that.
once you manage to sell stuff repeatedly and consistently to a target audience and can now pour in money into marketing to scale, then it stops being a startup ...until you are still pivoting... developing and finding "product market fit" ... he considers it a startup.
anyway, i wish there was a specific term for bootstrapping sustainable open source software 🙂
@joepie91 right. 'fiduciary duty' is some shit, it means in practice "do the most evil thing so we can make the most money and to hell with everything else".