Thanks for taking the time to put this together and for sharing. It’s wonderful to see such engaged community members. I apologise that I cannot address every detail, because there are simply too many and a few are not quite relevant/accurate.
Investor influence and the board
This is not the best framing to give the community because it overly focuses on the board. Focusing on the board seat is a detail, sure, but it misses the forest from the trees.
As long as a startup is an unprofitable business that cannot sustain itself from customer revenue, it must rely on taking in external money to pay the bills. As long as that paradigm exists, a startup must juggle two things: please customers to gain traction and please investors to keep the product alive. These two are interconnected and ideally aligned, but it’s not always the case (for many reasons too verbose to explain here).
As stated in our previous post you referenced, this is why focusing on revenue/profitability is important. It’s not because people are greedy and just want to milk the community, it’s because it’s a way to stay alive and aligned to a mission.
In short, as long as Anytype relies on external money to pay the bills, it will always be under investor influence—just like any unprofitable startup. A way reduce/remove this dynamic is actually very simple: get customers to pay. However you can see how this solution feels ‘against users’ at times, because users naturally want as much free stuff as possible—we’ve all become accustomed to it due to VC-backed startups and data harvesting products being able to offer products for free.
It’s easy to paint the investors as the villain, but the reality is that every business wants to be able to sustain itself. Anytype is not profitable today. I understand why looking at the ‘90% free-tier cut’ seems like an unhealthy signal. And indeed, it’s a decision to try and spur more users to pay for the product. But I would argue it’s less of a VCware bait-and-switch thing. It’s just fundamentally a business sustainability thing.
VC backed startup
Again, this framing is too simple and that looks at things in a linear way. We just need to think about it from fundamentals.
A startup that takes VC money in the first place is a very specific kind of business. VCs take very big bets in hopes of very big returns. This is a completely different paradigm from taking $20k from friends and family to setup a food truck. VCs are not interested in small % year-on-year growth otherwise investors would just invest their money into other asset classes. This is why VCs overwhelmingly invest in software companies that have very high growth potential models, they don’t invest in boutique fashion stores.
VCs will always look for some kind of exit where they earn big returns on their investment. The framing of “VCware trajectory hardening at Series B” may hold true from a narrow frame, but it misses the main point: any VC-backed startup is pushed toward big growth from day one. Anytype is no exception, and that fundamental dynamic persists across all funding rounds. Importantly, the Anytype team couldn’t have built what is, dare I say, genuinely innovative local-first sync technology without external funding—because it’s incredibly expensive to do so (many years of engineering and its still a work in progress).
To be clear, ‘big growth’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘bad’. Although I understand and can agree with that perspective in many circumstances, especially from a sustainability perspective (shoutout to fellow solarpunkers). In the case of Anytype growth, if more people in the world used local-first software vs. cloud software, I think it’s growth in a more positive direction.
I would argue the better framing is: you should not use a product from a VC-backed startup that is unprofitable if you worry about high velocity growth dynamics, period. Instead, look for bootstrapped startups or already profitable businesses, you’ll likely be better served there. 37signals writes a great post about this.
Roadmap priorities and bug fixes
To set the stage first: what one part of the community sees as a priority is not what the other part sees as a priority—there is no such thing as ‘one Anytype community opinion’. Our recent community survey shows that the majority of our users want new features, they don’t want us to focus only on bug fixes (20% of respondents). I will share these results in the next Town Hall.
To your point, your framing states: if we work on a chat-related feature instead of local-only mode, we are not prioritising correctly and exhibit VCware velocity prioritising behaviour.
Our local-only user base is close to 1% and the amount of users using chat is many orders of magnitude larger than this—these are objective stats. I know it doesn’t sound accurate to community sentiment, but it’s because local-only users are over-represented with their data issues. But by simple maths, the reality is actually the opposite of your position: prioritising development on local-only over chat, is in fact, not aligned with our community needs.
This proposition of ‘bug fixing-to-feature ratio being a VCware pattern’ is, frankly, just false.
I’ll add the obvious point that we’re able to know this objective information, have this discussion with you, and make better product decisions because we have product telemetry. Without telemetry, we would not know how many active local-only vs. chat users exist.
Again, it’s important recognise that every user feels like they represent the average Anytype user, but we have a very diverse user base.
Telemetry
I wrote a very detailed post summarising general points on how we approach data security, privacy, and anonymity—it’s worth reading for context.
To be clear to non-technical readers, telemetry is not visibility into the content in your spaces. Your content remains private to you. Telemetry is anonymised product usage data that is not correlated with user identifiable information and is compartmentalised on our internal systems. It is viewed in aggregate to inform product decisions (such as how many people are using local-only mode) and this data is obviously not sold on. All of this is covered in our privacy policies, which are clearly stated to all users and not hidden.
There’s little point in debating the legitimacy of collecting telemetry data here. However, I will say it’s a strong position to hold that ‘sovereignty marketing is hollow’ if a product collects anonymised telemetry. From my point of view, sovereignty is not a binary state, it’s a spectrum with multiple dimensions. This argument ignores the many aspects of sovereignty in Anytype—local-first, permissionless sign in, self-hosting, etc.
I think a fairer framing could be: sovereignty will improve if telemetry was turned off. In relative terms, I feel Anytype is a high sovereignty product in its class compared to what is available in the marketplace. I understand this is a subjective opinion.
A separate but relevant point: recently we removed Graylog because we found a better way to go about it.
Licenses
To add clarity: today, anybody is able to use Anytype and modify it to their hearts content—for use in their personal or work life. The big ‘sticking point’ of the ‘source available’ license is that if you want to earn money from it (commercialisation), you have to get permission. This is what’s being described as the ‘lever’. How much this change of commercialisation permissions would be meaningful to Anytype users is a matter of perspective and opinion. Yes, MIT License and open source is great, but I think adding specifics on what the practical difference would be to the average user is important.
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I hope this additional context was helpful to the community.