Comment by Dayshine
7 months ago
Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth.
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
7 months ago
Re the t-shirts: last time I checked the were private equity not VC and priced their product for profitability not growth.
Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
So if I understand your comment, you are suggesting that they went and raised money to make t-shirts?
Not upset in the slightest, I love Kagi search and want to see it continue. Merch is a solved problem and there was no reason to bring it in-house and make such a big announcement around it.
I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations.
The difference they don't tell you about their internal accounting so you don't join the dots.
Start ups burn money on silly things like offices way too nice for what they need all the time. That's much closer to unethical than a company with no real duty to outsiders throwing away money.
I don’t see any claims that they are unethical. “Losing faith” seems to be being used more like losing hope or something. People are worried that they are doing things that seem a bit wasteful because they don’t want them to fail.
> I'm suggesting that self owned companies are allowed to and often do spend absurd amounts of their spare money on pointless things like marketing or internal transformations.
Bradford Shellhammer (fab.com) wanting to speed run getting his United Global Services (invite only, elite tier, qualification criteria believed to be $50K annual base fare spend or 150K miles/year) so would fly back and forth between New York and Frankfurt every week, first class, while laying off employees left right and center.
I think the difference being that the niche customer based with Kagi is what will keep the lights on going forward. People share these feelings because they love the product and want to see it continue. Instead of taking it as hostile, it really comes from a place of love and wanting to see success. Very little to do with how you see it.
No one is saying self-owned companies aren't allowed to do things like that.
But we are still allowed to criticize moves that we think are counter-productive or a waste.
Maybe they wanted to make T shirts. Who knows. I don't get why people are up in arms about it.
False dichotomy. They should be plowing that money into more R&D, or, absent the current ability to do that, saving it for a rainy day.
As a paying customer, I want Kagi to succeed. I want Kagi's search offering to keep improving. Spending a couple hundred thousand of the company's money on t-shirts (one that I would receive, as I was a fairly early customer) sounds foolish to me, regardless of how much the founder is personally invested in the company, and regardless of whether or not he'll invest more of his own money to keep the company growing in the future, if needed.
I'm still bullish on Kagi's future, but things like this (and things mentioned in the linked article as a whole) make me a little worried.
> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Probably! When I was at Twilio, we participated in GitHub's charity dodgeball tournament a few times (early last decade, I think). The cost of admission was $3000 per team, and would go to charity. After a couple years doing it, finance started getting uncomfortable with it. We were a private, unprofitable company (now Twilio is, of course, a public, unprofitable company), giving away money that our VCs had invested in us.
Initially I rolled my eyes, "just the bean-counters doing what they do best: whining about every bit of spend". But later, looking back, I realized they had a point. While $3000 wasn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of the company, what benefit was spending it actually providing the company? Ok, so 12 or so employees got to go and have a fun day at a rec center, boosting morale for them. We got our logo on the website for the tournament, which was maybe a little visibility/marketing. But was that really worth $3000 of our VC money? Maybe it was, but I don't think it's an obvious "yes".
> Would you be upset if they had just donated that excess to charity?
Yes.
Would you be upset if they just paid themselves a higher salary?
Do you think they charge too much?
Do they charge more than you think it's worth?
Depends on if those higher salaries actually motivated higher productivity, commensurate with the increase.
Or, at the bottom end, if their previous salaries were barely ramen-style living wages, I would be glad that they have become able to pay themselves enough to be comfortable.