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.
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.