> Komoot, to them, was more than a job; it was a mission and purpose. Many had accepted below-average salaries and uprooted their lives to commit to the outdoor lifestyle and the dream job. Suddenly, they were left scrambling for new work and visa sponsors with just a few months’ pay as severance. The six bosses, meanwhile, pocketed an estimated 20 to 30 million euros each.
That’s why, and call me unethical, I never do more than necessary at work. Never help outside of business hours, never engage with rich bosses. Switch every 2-3 years to new places. Maximise my income (in real money, not imaginary stocks) while trying to work the minimum.
I'm gonna copy paste a comment I wrote yesterday that I think fits perfectly here:
As an engineer if you are gonna be a rank and file employee you need to do it for your own reasons. I think the main good reasons to do it are:
1. It's relatively chill and you value the stability. You deliver competence from 9-5 then go home to your family or some other thing that's more important to you than work.
2. You really enjoy the pure engineering side and find meaning in the technical artifact you're creating. Probably it's open source and has some value/community outside of your employer.
3. You're gaining valuable experience that you can later leverage into something else. Probably you're in the first 5 years of your career.
If the main thing driving you is growing a business, and you don't directly own (not options or RSUs or whatever, actual real equity) a significant slice of it, you are very likely misdirecting your energy.
---
It sounds like the staff here thought they were in case 2, but they were not. I think that the article explains the reason why nicely: the thing they were building was not part of the commons.
You can be in case 1 and find meaning in what you do. That's where the blacksmith is.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a good job for 40 hours a week in return for a salary. Being a competent professional who does quality work is rewarding!
I just think if you're doing work of that nature (which _most of us are_, BTW) you need to recognise it for what it is. Don't burn yourself out trying to squeeze every drop of initiative/creativity/productivity out of yourself. Definitely don't answer emails at the weekend. Don't tolerate under-payment. Don't accept non-legally-binding promises from the boss.
Just deliver the best work you can in the time you get paid for, then stop.
At the same time we can maaaaaaaybe start pushing back on all of the "capitalism is not the problem" and "capitalism is the least worst of all available options" memes?
What's your reasoning equating "a medieval blacksmith" serving a village directly with their own work and "a rank and file employee" which is how the post you're commenting on was intentionally framed?
The medieval blacksmith / freelancer may be in a better position to feel meaning in their work, compared with an employee, because of the system of incentives around them.
I'm reminded of the Vshojo collapse just recently, where a whole load of people were convinced that not getting paid on time was a temporary necessity for growing the business.
Which promptly imploded, taking stolen charity donations with it.
There is nothing unethical about: you are doing the only sane thing in this system and economics. Morons, who work themselves to death believing bosses shit-talk about “our mission” and “we are in this together” will learn it the hard way.
In principle, we can imagine jobs that contribute positively to the world.
When a builder builds a house, or a doctor mends a broken arm, the community has one more home and one less broken arm - and the community is left richer even after the builder and doctor have been paid.
That house will be keeping a family warm and dry 20, 40, 100 years into the future, and the patient will be using that arm for the rest of their life.
I can see how a person with a job like that could take pride in the fact they've contributed to their community, in addition to the fact they've gotten paid.
Of course, a lot of jobs aren't that way, but have tricksy bosses who will try to convince you they are. Which is what it sounds like happened in Komoot's case.
I saw a post recently on linkedin. A founder was saying "If you had one year to live, would you still choose to work at this company? That is the bar to join <crappy nonsensical startup>". It was so incredibly sad.
Why would you say anything on Linkedin in the first place? There is absolutely no reason to engage there unless you are PR for a company or self proclaimed career ̶c̶o̶a̶c̶h̶ liar.
As a warning: every time I’ve pushed hard, then had to rein it in and do less, I’ve gotten fired.
There’s nothing you can do that makes you irreplaceable, even if you’re the only one in the world that can do it.
It’s fine if you want to stay in your happy place as the only one that can do X and then keep selling them on the value you provide and how you’re doing big things. But, nothing lasts.
Don’t burn out, but sitting on your ass is a bad strategy.
Don’t do that then. Work on 90% with bursts of 130%. Don’t work on 120% all the time because it’ll be assumed you’ve gotten lazy when you just need to slow down.
This approach doesn't work ethically if you are working for (say) public service organisations.
There's also the argument an abundance of cynicism - as well as being occasionally aimed at a misjudged target (eg you work for bosses who do try to do the right thing) - is corrupting to the self and wider society.
Of course the argument works for everybody who works in public service. You do the duties you are paid for. If you think that's not enough you are welcome to volunteer for free.
I like to remind those I mentor that The Company’s sole goal for their employment is to extract more value from them than they are paid - not because The Company is evil, but because that’s just what’s required in a capitalist endeavor. But, what it does mean, is that you shouldn’t feel like you owe any company anything - the goal of any for-profit corporation is to extract more value from you than they give back to you, period.
> That’s why, and call me unethical, I never do more than necessary at work. Never help outside of business hours, never engage with rich bosses. Switch every 2-3 years to new places. Maximise my income (in real money, not imaginary stocks) while trying to work the minimum.
That's not unethical at all, in fact I think that's a highly intelligent strategy to look out for the little guy (namely you) in the bear pit of tech capitalism. Anyone buying into the "we're more than a company, we're family" schtick is just another sucker to be worked remorselessly to line the pockets of the VPs and C-suite.
My previous employers included me in their Director/VP meetings, and the family schtick evaporates pretty quickly when they start talking cuts. One VP in a meeting, quite literally, proposed laying off an entire team of veteran engineers (most with young kids) and the very next thing that came out of this doucebag's mouth was "are we ordering in some lunch?". They do not care a whit about you and once you realise that then you should just look to yourself first and foremost and forget accepting below-average salaries just for some "mission".
They will happily kick you to the curb for any of the following reasons, which I have personally witnessed in the past few years,
- Their pal is looking for a job that's currently occupied by someone else. So they fire and hire.
- They want to deflect blame for their own failures, so they fire a bunch of folks who had nothing to do with the failures.
- They want to appear 'ruthless' to the CEO, so fire people to enhance their own image.
- They do a clear out of their previous incumbents staff once they replace someone and bring in their own crew.
That depends on what you consider noticeable. A lot of things are noticeable (and noticed) on the local level. The folks that organise reading sessions with the kids a my sons school. The people managing the local hockey club. People doing local education in IT. Organizing the neighborhood meetup. The people that do hack and tell. Blog about what they’re doing by as fun projects.
They may not be known beyond their local communities, but they have impact on society. Most of them are contend with that. If you’re looking to change the world, then that’s likely not good enough, but then again, if you’re looking to do that it’s unlikely that you will achieve that as a rank and file employee in a corporation.
I agree, but I also see how even a regular employee in, say, space travel corp (or in pharma and so on) can consider their work to be more impactful than running a local community (even in reallity their impact is minimal).
Yup, when headhunters reach out with all these idiotic startups that I know full well are just playing the game of "see if you can bullshit long enough for someone to buy your useless company" I don't even laugh anymore, just shake my head. If you have real life obligations and can't afford to hop jobs every year, never work for a startup.
Much of the article is waxing poetic about the commons and the corrupting influence of monetization and capital, yet the main thrust against genAI is training on data from walled gardens and expanding access. As far as I can read it, it's a fairly pro-capital angle as well, in that a nonprofit AI outfit who was training on copyrighted data would also be vilified. Seems incompatible with the rest of their article. But I suppose one has to have a strong stance against AI these days.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Copyright walled gardens/publishers are some of the most flagrant examples of walling off the cultural commons. It's also necessary in order to support livelihoods of individuals, but it can incentivize "bad" behavior like changing the mission in order to pursue mass appeal and profit. Likewise, completely disregarding the fact that 150 employees is something that is funded by growth isn't a fair representation of the whole story here. A group of hikers doesn't magically create a service like that from thin air.
Maybe what the author is trying to advocate for something like a corporate structure with capped profit? Regardless, their arguments need work.
I felt betrayed as well. Just paid €30,- the month or so before because I liked the app and the service, but I also needed more maps. It offered great value to me. If I knew 80% of the employees would be fired, inevitably leading to a degrading service, I would have never done that.
It is weird, but I do not trust the app any more in planning routes either. Sometimes i have the feeling bugs in the planning part already appear. The stability of the service for sure decreased.
Also there are more nag screens about the premium offer (dude I paid for the other great offer already!).
Very unhappy with this. I hope the komooters build an alternative. I’m happy to support them. I know that eventually I might get betrayed again.
For today I planned another route with komoot. If somebody knows an alternative? I like the komoot user photos because it gives an impression of the (gravel) roads. Plus the suggested routes and the planning ux are great. Im stuck with komoot for now.
The article mentions one example: https://wanderer.to/. Haven't used it personally but seems promising (albeit less "social" than something like Strava).
Less "social" would be a feature for me. I just want one that can plan routes, track journeys, and give me directions. I don't want to be worried that I'm accidentally sharing what I'm doing/where I am with the world.
I'll do you one better: I just want the GPS data. I use https://alpinequest.net on android which is a 15 euro one-time purchase and they focus on the app, and that's all. I don't want every activity I do turn into some version of facebook.
One only need a web server to share gpx files really.
Planning routes can be easily done offline with desktop apps. Don't even start with mobile use, I have never seen a web based tool where you could plan a route by tapping on a smartphone screen without pulling your hair out of desperation.
Friend of mine wrote this app[0]. It’s iOS-only (I’m not the target demographic, myself, but he works for a company that serves bikers, and is very much a fitness chap). It’s quite mature, and well-maintained. Personally, I know him as an outstanding engineer, so I’m sure it’s well-written. It’s been a labor of love for him, for over a decade.
I am quite happy with Wikiloc app. Feature wise it is not that different from Komoot and the yearly subscription which allows me to use it on my watch was only 20 EUR.
I'm quite unhappy with it, in Europe. It defaults to the completely useless apple maps which is unsuitable for outdoors and rural exploration, and its clustering of routes near each other is difficult to distinguish and click on. All trails had nailed this well by showing clustered trails together in a single point and letting you page through them.
Caveat: I'm not very familiar with Komoot. I only see it as something that locks seemingly valuable data behind a login and a proprietary application.
> I spoke with a few longtime employees in the aftermath, who described it as a rough and cruel betrayal.
>
> Komoot, to them, was more than a job; it was a mission and purpose.
If the data and the code is not open (and thus does not truly benefit everyone), and can vanish at a company's whim, it doesn't seem worth it.
> Many had accepted below-average salaries
I reluctantly accept to be paid less if it allows me to have a job that does not go against my values (but will leave as soon I as I find something paid better). What made Komoot so special that you'd accept below average salary?
I hope that, again, some initiative that values open stuff will save the day and make up for the void this event creates.
I don't feel like I've been Komooted. There are alternative apps that I'll switch to.
However, it really sucks for employees. I know a guy who joined Komoot a few weeks before the sale, and who was among 80% fired right after the sale finalised. They've been negotiating the terms of sale and hiring people simultaneously -- that's just insane.
It makes sense if you realize that there's no certainty a sale will go through and you don't want to pause all operations with the blind hope that a sale will happen
Having said that, if someone just joined before the sale and is laid off, they should get a generous layoff package similar to longer term employees since they may have just quit a job to go there and are now back on the market.
RideWithGPS. No affiliation with them, but have been paying for service for years. Far less glitzy than Komoot/Strava and far less paid advertising, but for my money it's better for route planning - particularly long distance off-road - than anything else I've come across [0].
[0] a) For instance Komoot's exports for GPS head units were not accurate enough to be as helpful with picking/finding faint/overgrown trails
b) RWGPS UI makes it a bit easier to work with OpenStreetMap's inaccuracies.
c) Its auto routing seems to consistently work a bit better than Google's if I want to ride on a roads where car drivers are less likely to try and kill me. (not sure how well Strava does this)
Fun fact about Strava's routing, they don't support ferries, something most other alternatives like RWGPS do. They've been asked for years to support it, just as they've been asked for more than a decade to support multi sport activities, but they don't seem to care. When I was a paying Strava customer I still used RWGPS for routes.
Isn't this the main point of the article? The community feeds such a service with knowledge and in the users and up paying a lot for the all the knowledge they contributed themselves (possibly after an acquisition, leaving the original philosophy behind). The article mentions https://wanderer.to/, which leads to a community-owned data set.
Of course, some new federated service is most likely going to have a subpar user experience, but we will never get there if we are only feeding into semi-closed ecosystems.
I would expect that in this case it would go even beyond that. In many European countries there are protections against unjustified layoffs. I could imagine the law and judges in various countries to be rather unsympathetic towards "yeah we just hired you but we're now laying off 80% of staff because fuck you that's why".
Especially in cases where there is any evidence that the layoffs were planned before the contract was signed - wouldn't that be problematic even in the US?
In some European countries protection is even stronger. If a position becomes unnecessary, you first have to try to find another position within a company that requires a comparable level of education. You can only fire people for grave negligence or for violating rules, or lay them off e.g. if your company has to in order to survive.
From what I have heard (but IANAL), Germany has weaker protections (which is relevant here). Also, typically people sign away their rights, trading them for a good payout + a good recommendation for a next job.
Because in Europe we believe that with ownership also come responsibilities. For instance to care about your employees, prevent destruction of nature, etc. Things you can wrap in insane complex laws or just manage through a social contract between the tarif partners (employees and employers).
Why do people with families to feed and 20-30 year mortgages desire more than a week of job stability when it can take months to find work again? Is this a serious question?
It's a serious question. I have a family to feed and a 30-year mortgage, and I would much rather live in a place where I can be laid off with zero notice (and I have been a couple times). This makes it faster and easier to find a new job. A dynamic economy benefits everyone.
Never believe a company that you are part of a community if the content you create for them cannot be exported and published somewhere else. I am especially sceptical if someone says they never sell.
This happened to pinkbike.com when they sold out; you need to view these sites and communities as vectors. https://bikepacking.com is good right now and there are a lot of legit contributors who really care about bikes. This will change so engage how you want with open eyes.
The users were always the real service provider. All the value is in what they tell each other through their data. All Komoot does is aggregate it, supply the infra structure.
The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.
Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.
A for-profit company, owned by a few founders, takes your data and provides no data licensing terms or contractual guarantees. It’s legally speaking their data. Everyone else has basically no legal rights to anything on the ”platform”.
Then they attract both employees and users due to their good mission, ”we will never sell”. Surprise! They sell and leave everyone hanging.
From a EU perspective I get it. This is upsetting and surprising even. But from a US perspective this is just business as usual.
That privately owned data is a pile of gold that grew by the day, eventually big enough to buy out even the most passionate and stubborn founders. The company was never what the author expected it was, even before the sale – it was a projection of what they wanted it to be.
I applaud the efforts to fix the business model and lack of data sovereignty. The more people that ”wake up” and understand the flaws of current system, the better chances we can fix it.
Other than entirely community-driven projects (like https://wanderer.to/ mentioned in the article), are there company "forms" that legally protect against this kind of sell-out? Like non-profit or public-benefit-corporation?
If users are contributing the content of the app, it seems they should have a way to hold the owners accountable.
Honestly it can be quite difficult, generally speaking the best you can do is release the data in raw machine readable format with a permissive license.
Unless you already have large interested parties "bribing" (not technically of course) the group of controlling members tends to be a weakness of anything crowd sourced.
Especially since it is rarely cut and dry. If the finances aren't working out is it better to sell and keep the site online or not? Are intrusive pop ups begging for donations a better option? There isn't a singular true best option.
There are non-profit corporations which seem on their face to address the issue, but not knowing much about how they work, it seems to me that it is often too easy to convert them to for-profit corporations, as happened with Raspberry Pi. I think in Europe a lot of open source organisations are "foundations" which seem to operate on similar principles.
IMO non-profit or charitable status is a must for sustainable, open, community-driven projects. One of the dumbest takes I often hear is "this for-profit corporation was good and kind before financial capitalism came along". Financial capitalism was always there, the for-profit corporation is pretty much a pure product of financial capitalism. Don't believe any for-profit startup that tells you it is all about the social mission, it is not. Even if the company is European.
A similar thing happened with the mountain bike-centric mapping app TrailForks. It was created by pinkbike.com and, while a decent app, gets msot of its value from the huge set of largely community sourced GPS data. They then went subscription for most functionality as PinkBike sold to the Outside media company. This happened quite a while ago but a large part of the community is still very upset - including me.
As someone who always rejected Komoot and stuck to OpenStreetMap, and had to justify that decision multiple times: I'll play them the world's smallest violin.
This article is about people who liked their company and their job and lost it all. It's something to lack empathy, but I'm always amazed that there are people so full of themselves that they will go out there and proclaim that they don't give a shit about other people's fate, as if it was something to be proud about.
Okay, you're right, and I actually do give a shit about the employees. The comment was coming from the perspective of interacting with users and the app, and I didn't think about the employee-side of the story when I wrote it.
I am the same. I use osmand and sync the recorded tracks with syncthing to my desktop. Works for me but not comparable to sites like komoote of course.
Counterpoint: I used Komoot during the pandemic because it was the only app that would recommend new, interesting trekking routes every week in the small corner of the world where I was at the time. For my SO at the time, who was losing their mind due to cabin fever, Komoot was a literal lifesaver. No other app that I know of offered that.
I am therefore thankful to the old Komoot Team and I'm sad for them.
The users were always the real service provider. All the value is in what they tell each other through their data. All Komoot does is aggregate it, supply the infra structure.
The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.
Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.
> Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do
Not all the time, see the success of GPL software.
But yes, each community has to relearn the lesson: promises don't matter what matter is whether the data are 'open' or not.
I've been using Komoot a lot for bike tours in Germany and never have been particularly happy with it. It served the core purpose of telling me where to go but there were so many obvious flaws about it that I sometimes wondered if the people at Komoot actually even use it themselves.
Then there is the obvious Geschmäckle of taking advantage of OSM (a free open source project) while not providing a way to give back to it. For example marking a bridge or path as no longer functional or existent.
The main feature of importance for me was a convenient way of visual representation of the trip on a map + being able to easily take pictures and have them added into the tour route visualization. This is provides for a really neat trip summary. Maybe someone has an app or service suggestion for such a feature?
> Couchsurfing, Reddit, Twitter, and many more were similarly komooted.
I'd like to add another company to the list: carpooling.com aka mitfahrgelegenheit.de
> Capital does not invent interesting new ideas like gravel and bikepacking. It swoops in from the outside to appropriate.
That seems a little warped. Bikepacking (isn't new) is as old as the bike and gravel biking is pretty much a capitalist rebranding of bikepacking. Selling the idea that you need a "gravel bike" to for bike packing. Pretending that the tried and tested way of laterally attached baggage is not good enough anymore and now has to be attached medially and you need those special tires yada yada
> The main feature of importance for me was a convenient way of visual representation of the trip on a map + being able to easily take pictures and have them added into the tour route visualization. This is provides for a really neat trip summary. Maybe someone has an app or service suggestion for such a feature?
> Then there is the obvious Geschmäckle of taking advantage of OSM (a free open source project) while not providing a way to give back to it. For example marking a bridge or path as no longer functional or existent.
Something something paradox of tolerance. I don’t know exactly what type type of conditions should apply to open source data, but this shouldn’t be permitted by the license. I’m leaning more and more towards that permissive licensing (and their popularity) is basically destroying open source ”public goods”.
I’m not anti market by any means. You could provide a service and get paid for well… good service. The problem is the ”digital enclosure” where they own the data, and the social graphs. If the value of the service goes down, the value of their accumulated data remains, and can be sold as private property.
Now that copyright is near dead, due to the fair use loophole for AI, it’s getting much more adversarial, fast. Data will become much more fragmented again.
I was also Komooted - by Komoot. They brought out ViewRanger, who I had paid money to provide a service. Month by month they removed the features and access that I had paid for, and made the app less useful. I am not sure I can feel any pity for Komoot, an organisation that met a fate down a path it seemed to choose.
Reading this, I was getting vibes from another book I read recently: "Less Is More" by Jason Hickel, which I can recommend. A lot of the topics in this article like enclosure are covered in the book, with complementary conclusions drawn.
That's actually both funny and sad, I recently used WeTransfer and wondered when their product got so bad. Turns out Bending Spoons bought them about a year ago.
> I’ll argue that Komoot is neither a moral failure nor an outlier but the capitalist system of value extraction working exactly as intended for the platform owners.
If it wasn't for Bending Spoons it would have been another private equity firm. It's not about them being particularly evil, it's about living in a system that makes their existence inevitable.
The base premise was already bent: sell access to community-uploaded material. I know Google Maps does this on a much grander scale but at least the data is more or less accessible for everyone.
I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.
There is openstreetmaps of course and osmand as a navigation app. There is also a biking specific project related to openstreetmaps. None of it is as polished as komoot of course. Far from it. This sell-out was totally predictable. Why the outrage? Do people never learn? It's so frustrating.
I think it is fair to be annoyed that crowd sourcing is used to enrich a select few.
Honestly the best course of action is to let it die. $300M is enough money that losing the user base would be enough for similar things to stop happening.
> I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.
Well, there are still costs involved (not just financial but also labour), and someone has to pay them. We are lucky to have a number of great open source and community-driven projects where people do contribute time and money to make data freely available to everyone, but it's not guaranteed. If there aren't enough people who are willing and able to contribute, or the costs get too great, the project will founder.
OpenStreetMap seems like it is already doing this to an extent, or at least is a good platform on which something like this could be built. Hopefully this saga encourages more people to contribute that way.
I’ve been using https://cycle.travel for a similar purpose. I may not be quite as polished, but it does its job, and it’s developed by a person from the OpenStreetMap community.
The article is really really well written, beautiful! Thank you for making it available freely.
I'd say it's about time for the komoot folks to organize and create a coop and stick it to komoot. A coop would probably be even more compatible with the dirtbag lifestyle!
1. Bending Spoons (BS) is an itallian conglomerate, who is specialized in acquiring marginally-profitable software companies.
2. After an acquisition, BS attempts to cut the cost structure agressively. This normally involves massive axing of employees.
3. BS also raise the pricing agressively, which would shock long-term users.
4. Now the acquired compnay is cashflow-positive.
5. Using that cash flow, BS proceeds to acquire another company.
Based on this playbook, Bending Spoons has acquired Evernote, Remini, Meetup, WeTransfer, Brightcove ... and now Komoot.
So in short, Bending Spoons is a roll-up vehicle for software business, pretty similar to what Brad Jacobs (who founded United Rentals and XPO) has been doing for decades.
Such as what? I found it a very fair deal, you can have functionality for your area for free, which will likely be good enough for 70%+ of people, but if you want larger regions you have to pay. It seems to me a totally fair and transparent pricing structure, without resorting to filling the app with ads.
The people who need the paid portion of the app are also likely enthusiasts, and in that light the pricing seems fair too.
Until capitalism is fixed or replaced with a better system (not communism) it will happen.
This is a very popular area of interest for general public, with millions using it. Such service should be run by government. And everyone laughs. But that’s the idea behind government and society. Not just collect taxes and provide basic services. the ineffective and outdated democratic system that needs update for modern times.
Any accumulation of power, especially government, becomes a target of corruption. Every single country and post has eventually proven that. The real innovation would be to prevent abuse of power systematically, and thus restore trust systematically. Anything else is just promises waiting to be broken.
Just yesterday there was a thread about startups, compensation and what happens to promises when real money enters the picture.
Your best bet to keep a social platform for a long time is a coop. You’ll never get investors, which is the point, but you also aren’t a foundation or a nonprofit with shackles (unless you get to OpenAI levels of creativity.)
Somewhat related: How bankruptcy laws mean many promises like "we won't misuse your data" become void in the name of extracting value for creditors. (The potential outcome affects decisions even if bankruptcy doesn't happen.)
So there's a system that needs to be reformed, it's not so much a matter of executives' personal attitudes.
Sounds like some kind of GDPR law is required so that companies don't get to treat people's private data as their own. It's ridiculous that in a bankruptcy they can sell off the data that belongs to others - companies should be treated as merely protecting PII data and can never own it.
I’d love a founder perspective on this. If they kept saying “we won’t sell” and then sell, is that just plain breaking all promises and selling out, as this article suggests? Or was there more going on?
Any time anyone says they will never do X, they are saying they will never do X unless they are presented with a very very compelling offer. This is generally true in life and not just in business.
> Unsustainable growth is not just ideology but an imperative, and it’s blatantly unsustainable. In a 2023 interview, Hallerman revealed that Komoot’s revenue was roughly split between recurring subscriptions and new users making one-time payments for map regions, with ad revenue making up a small remainder. That means they had to keep signing new users and expanding into new markets to stay in business. Komoot relied on continual growth in a finite world—an impossibility. What cannot continue forever is, by definition, unsustainable.
Relying solely on "community" to build and maintain these spaces is equally unsustainable. I worry that people will look at this and think that the alternative is to reject all forms of businesses, when the problem is simply of scale.
Who says it wasn't in the contract? If they had a terms of service that promised to never sell and then revised it to remove that clause is that legal? Probably not but good luck fighting it.
The problem is legal suits over complex contract law are way too expensive for impacted people to legitimately seek enforcement in cases like this. Especially since courts hate non-monetary enforcement and so at best would allow some pittance of money as a replacement.
This is half right IMO. I'd agree with the first part of the article: when you have a growth-at-all-costs company, which is then sold to someone who wants to control costs to crank out the maximum profit, then users are inevitably going to lose out. It was always entirely predictable that this was the way Komoot would go - lots of us commented way before the Bending Spoons acquisition that 250 salaries (never mind the influencers) was a lot to pay from a routing app.
But even as someone pretty left/liberal fully signed up to the open source gospel, I think the conclusion is unconvicing and rather handwavy:
> Promising projects such as the Mastodon social network, Matrix chat, and Pixelfed social photo sharing are reviving the diversity and abundance of the early, independent internet before it was enclosed by tech giants in the 2010s. More than singular platforms, the Fediverse represents a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons.
No. You don't get performant consumer-level routing without lots of fast servers, and the Fediverse doesn't really have a way to pay for lots of fast servers. Ok, you can run hobbyist projects like Brouter on low-spec hardware - and don't get me wrong, Brouter is absolutely awesome in its own way, and for a certain type of cyclist it's all they'll ever need. But if you want something that appeals beyond the hardcore cyclist - in the way that Komoot does, and in the way that Google and Apple Maps do for motoring (and, increasingly, city cycling) - there has to be some sort of way of paying for the servers. "Open protocols and distributed services" don't fix that.
Entirely personally (and you would expect me to say this), my view is instead: support your local artisan. Your local artisan framebuilder will build you a fantastic bike. Your local artisan bike shop will repair it much better than a chain like Halfords will (or whatever your country's equivalent is). These guys aren't practising "enshittification". They're doing what they love, and being paid for it so that they can feed the family and pay the mortgage. Sure, maybe it's still "capital", but not in the same way that Bending Spoons does it.
So if you're happy going to an artisan bike shop, consider going to an artisan routing/mapping site, rather than a growth-then-sellout project. There are plenty of these - I'm obviously going to plug my own site/app, cycle.travel, but there are many others.
(Incidentally, I hold no brief to support Komoot - quite the opposite, because they've ripped off a bunch of my content - but the bit about "leeching off the open-source commons" is not entirely fair. Komoot developed one of the most popular OpenStreetMap geocoders, Photon, and released it as open source. They're paid-up members of the OSM Foundation. Sure, there's more they could do and some other companies do more, but it's important to recognise what they have done.)
More than that, you won't succeed and your company will probably go in the dustbin of nice failed projects unless some scalable explicit monetization is the goal.
Even as someone who thinks big private equity acquisitions tend to go badly, I’m not sure this article makes very good points. In particular, lots of blame is levied against bending spoons but not much against the founders, yet the founders arranged to not give employees equity, the founders reneged on their ‘never sell’ promise, the founders did not try to negotiate better severance for the employees that would be let go after the sale, and the founders set the business direction before the sale.
I do feel like there is something to the idea that one should be suspicious of some ‘social good’ messaging from companies as it can often be a way to allow or hide existing inequities, eg paying everyone the same (in cash but not equity) or claiming they don’t need equity as you won’t sell the company (except you do). Amusing that it is the relatively left-wing prosocial German startup scene where the workers get fucked over rather than the SF one though maybe this is outliers or startups choosing employees in Germany with things the other way around in the US.
I think the article also seems to misunderstand the emphasis on growth. The expectation is not for profits to continue growing forever. The expectation is that the growth will happen roughly logistically (until some outside force causes a loss/increase of market share), so under this model a slight slowdown in growth implies that the maximum is nearer, and this maximum has a big impact on the value of the business. If one is hoping to sell the business then maintaining growth is important because it implies something about the size of the market and therefore the valuation. It was the founder’s desire to sell for a high price (alternatively to try to gain network-effects advantage over competition) that drove the growth, not the existence of private equity firms.
Some other thoughts:
As a user, I don’t particularly care about the particularities of how employees in developed countries are treated. The company gets some choice in how it divides its equity and how much revenue goes to paying staff and in what proportions. These things tend to be negotiable for engineers working for software startups (maybe not in Germany??) and these employees negotiating themselves relatively poor contracts isn’t really something I blame on private equity.
I feel like the article implies that capitalism necessarily leads to the way that private equity seems to destroy the communities run by the companies it acquires but I’m not sure that should be true. It seems to me like it ought to be more profitable in the long run to be less destructive (though some of this can look bad to users if they see layoffs as a focus on growth is decreased or the removal of loss-leading products that users like for obvious reasons).
Just look at what private equity did to British Water companies, Toy'R'Us and any number of other organizations. Do private equity companies perform any useful social purpose? Or are they all wreckers, asset strippers and carpet baggers?
In the 80s the abuse was concentrated in the management layer of companies - executives would store cash and buy private jets and lavish properties for the “company” leadership to enjoy. Private equity trimmed that fat at the time.
Private equity can sometimes save failing businesses unfortunately there aren't a lot of businesses that go public out of private equity so it is difficult to measure their effectiveness.
Since after all the only time private equity is interested in going public is unicorns.
That’s why, and call me unethical, I never do more than necessary at work. Never help outside of business hours, never engage with rich bosses. Switch every 2-3 years to new places. Maximise my income (in real money, not imaginary stocks) while trying to work the minimum.
For dreams and craft, I have my side projects.
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