Comment by chr15m
9 days ago
> The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank.
I don't think "rich" is the correct way to describe this. It sounds like a lot of money but there are a lot of expenses and people to pay. Seventeen months sounds fragile - one long-ish recession and they're toast. I hope they survive.
They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank.
In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.
> The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget.
This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of running the website.
It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.
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17 months of runway for the something with the scale and ambition of Wikipedia is living hand-to-mouth.
18-24 months is a typical runway for a healthy American startup. As a mature nonprofit with a very predictable revenue source, 17 months is well within reason. Runways get shorter as you scale and stabilize, not longer.