<story><title>100% User-Supported</title><url>https://stephango.com/vcware</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>doesnt_know</author><text>&amp;quot;VCware&amp;quot; is a nice succinct term to use, I hope it catches on in the wider tech&amp;#x2F;power user scene and the first comment about any launch is whether it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;vcware&amp;quot;. Of course it will be a bit awkward here on HN due to somewhat obvious reasons but hopefully elsewhere the term becomes used.&lt;p&gt;I think one thing that royally pisses me off even more then an initial VC backed launch is a seemingly stable, premium product going from &amp;quot;user-supported&amp;quot; to accepting VC funds (eg: Bitwarden). Just the absolute worst. Now I know I have to deal with this migration away for the whole family at some point in my (probably near) future.</text></comment>
<story><title>100% User-Supported</title><url>https://stephango.com/vcware</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lmeyerov</author><text>+ this&lt;p&gt;It was super painful transition for Graphistry. Certainly as a founder responsible for payroll and having only so many hours in a day. Likewise, as business where people in serious gov, enterprise, etc teams are making mission bets on our team, it is both enabling &amp;amp; stress-relieving to know that we can prioritize listening to our customers more than what we think the next funding round&amp;#x27;s VCs need to hear. It&amp;#x27;s been night &amp;amp; day launching our new genAI analytics tool louie.ai: this time around, we&amp;#x27;ve gotten to work entirely based on customer design partner feedback &amp;amp; revenue, vs next round VC funding pressure. Still major pressure given who our customers are etc, but of the positive kind.&lt;p&gt;We haven&amp;#x27;t taken further fundraising off the table. Importantly, this time around, if&amp;#x2F;when we do an A, it can now be very much on our terms, and in a way we feel won&amp;#x27;t unnecessarily jeapordize our customers &amp;amp; team.&lt;p&gt;As always, context matters. If a company is making $500K in month 3 because the founder is selling back to his old F500 buddies, or it&amp;#x27;s an n-th time serial founder who VCs line up to burn $100M on no questions asked, or it&amp;#x27;s yet another Cisco spin-out-and-in, sure. Likewise, we&amp;#x27;ve been figuring out sustainable growth, and that changes a lot. But most pre&amp;#x2F;seed&amp;#x2F;A software startup situations nowadays aren&amp;#x27;t these.</text></comment>