ello.co
Out of context: Reply #65
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http://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello…
"They seemed genuine in their desire to build an ad-free/privacy-respecting network and I felt like their hearts were in the right place. I knew Ello would not be the long-term solution we needed as it was closed and centralised but I thought it could be a good stopgap.
What I didn’t know at the time was that they’d taken $435,000 in seed funding from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based Venture Capital firm. This had apparently been announced by FreshTracks Capital in March.
When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have. It’s called an exit plan. And no investor will give you venture capital without one. In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic.
And so it is doubly disappointing and worrying that Ello doesn’t mention that they are venture capital funded anywhere on their About page. Instead, as Andy Baio points out in his post on Ello, “The About section makes it seem like Ello was built independently”."