While I think shareholders can be a driving factor, I see it way more often with VC-funded companies. The “2.5x year over year” growth mantra that places like YCombinator stipulate have disastrous effects on small tech companies. Often, these startups have an incentive to keep taking additional funding rounds, which appears to tighten the grip the VC has over them.

Try growing the next Microsoft or Google or Amazon out of that model. I’m not convinced that it’s possible. At least if you bootstrap your own company, you don’t have the same binding obligations…even if it takes way longer to get to a place that’s self-sustaining.

Hey, Chocobozz!

Yes, I’m aware of the runners, but I do not have the expertise or the infrastructure to set them up effectively. Part of my feedback is: there isn’t much guidance on how to do runners correctly, and setting up runners with something like cloud GPUs or even lots of little render nodes is prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming.

It may be my logical next step, but I kind of wish we had some community infrastructure for runners, to make this less painful.