market forces would pressurize that. investor-owner pressure, the core of what differentiates capitalism from markets in general, require companies to do things that decrease how intuitive designs are in order to capture more value than is economically viable for the product, leading the product to get worse and worse as users get trapped, until finally the bad product’s bubble pops and users move on to the next one. If we were in a ubi-seeded worker-driven market economy, where the technical employees didn’t have to answer to investors and only had market forces to guide them, they’d be perfectly able to maximize their income directly without taking on the high risk changes that investors push for in order to achieve their target returns.
You can see this in the monetization strategies companies use. Companies that only have to answer to their users, rather than additionally having to answer to creditors like investors, are able to keep their design more reasonable; they also typically don’t scale as far, because they have to compete against companies pressured by investors to grow as fast and hard as possible. In an economy where a greater proportion of companies had no-repayment-necessary seed funding and no investors, we wouldn’t have quite such desperately attention-seeking recommenders, because users would have been centered from the beginning.
...actually, looking at this list, I’m quite surprised how many companies I think of as being some of the best ones around were bootstrapped: https://eqvista.com/successful-bootstrapped-startups-without-funding/ - I was initially only talking about coop-style funding models, which I know exist out there as well and are even more able to center the actual user, but the list includes some heavy hitters like Valve, SparkFun, AdaFruit, Jetbrains, Mojang, Github...
I think it incorrect to paint with such a broad brush that external capital ruins design.
Apple is publicly traded. If I think of software with design that I personally love a lot—Notion, Raycast, Figma, Partiful, Discord, Supabase—are all venture-backed or were early on. Some exceptions are Sublime Merge, the personal site dimden.dev, and I guess a lot of open-source packages although that is more engineering than design.
The startup wisdom I’ve heard is that VCs should mostly leave founders alone to do whatever crazy thing they think is right. I agree with this take.
I can think of many examples of software getting worse due to growth pressure (insomnia.rest) or acquisition by a big company (OkCupid). You mention investors pushing founders to take risks being bad. I disagree—risk is good. It’s interesting to ask whether the median venture-backed software is better or worse than than the median bootstrapped software. But in terms of utilitarian value I think the user-weighted average is what matters. And personally what matters to me is how good the very best software is, because that’s what I’ll use if I can.
I’m sorry, but Atlassian’s Jira is bad design. Steam is bad design—it’s slow, ad-filled and hard to find your friends; compare its design to Itch.io (also bootstrapped). Jetbrains is fine, I guess.
I agree with your thesis when it comes to game design. I grant that Minecraft is very well designed (actually not entirely, it just gets the important things really right). I feel like AAA games are punching way below their weight compared to indie games in terms of how fun they should be. … actually do indie devs/studios seek venture capital? I am much less informed about how game development is financed.
I’m much more interested in late in life products and the risks I speak of are the ones where you keep taking more risk of the user basec revolting due to overmonetization. I’m not so much talking about taking risks in early development in any sort of general sense.
market forces would pressurize that. investor-owner pressure, the core of what differentiates capitalism from markets in general, require companies to do things that decrease how intuitive designs are in order to capture more value than is economically viable for the product, leading the product to get worse and worse as users get trapped, until finally the bad product’s bubble pops and users move on to the next one. If we were in a ubi-seeded worker-driven market economy, where the technical employees didn’t have to answer to investors and only had market forces to guide them, they’d be perfectly able to maximize their income directly without taking on the high risk changes that investors push for in order to achieve their target returns.
You can see this in the monetization strategies companies use. Companies that only have to answer to their users, rather than additionally having to answer to creditors like investors, are able to keep their design more reasonable; they also typically don’t scale as far, because they have to compete against companies pressured by investors to grow as fast and hard as possible. In an economy where a greater proportion of companies had no-repayment-necessary seed funding and no investors, we wouldn’t have quite such desperately attention-seeking recommenders, because users would have been centered from the beginning.
...actually, looking at this list, I’m quite surprised how many companies I think of as being some of the best ones around were bootstrapped: https://eqvista.com/successful-bootstrapped-startups-without-funding/ - I was initially only talking about coop-style funding models, which I know exist out there as well and are even more able to center the actual user, but the list includes some heavy hitters like Valve, SparkFun, AdaFruit, Jetbrains, Mojang, Github...
I think it incorrect to paint with such a broad brush that external capital ruins design.
Apple is publicly traded. If I think of software with design that I personally love a lot—Notion, Raycast, Figma, Partiful, Discord, Supabase—are all venture-backed or were early on. Some exceptions are Sublime Merge, the personal site dimden.dev, and I guess a lot of open-source packages although that is more engineering than design.
The startup wisdom I’ve heard is that VCs should mostly leave founders alone to do whatever crazy thing they think is right. I agree with this take.
I can think of many examples of software getting worse due to growth pressure (insomnia.rest)
or acquisition by a big company (OkCupid).
You mention investors pushing founders to take risks being bad. I disagree—risk is good. It’s interesting to ask whether the median venture-backed software is better or worse than than the median bootstrapped software. But in terms of utilitarian value I think the user-weighted average is what matters. And personally what matters to me is how good the very best software is, because that’s what I’ll use if I can.
I’m sorry, but Atlassian’s Jira is bad design. Steam is bad design—it’s slow, ad-filled and hard to find your friends; compare its design to Itch.io (also bootstrapped). Jetbrains is fine, I guess.
I agree with your thesis when it comes to game design. I grant that Minecraft is very well designed (actually not entirely, it just gets the important things really right). I feel like AAA games are punching way below their weight compared to indie games in terms of how fun they should be.
… actually do indie devs/studios seek venture capital? I am much less informed about how game development is financed.
I’m much more interested in late in life products and the risks I speak of are the ones where you keep taking more risk of the user basec revolting due to overmonetization. I’m not so much talking about taking risks in early development in any sort of general sense.