Yeah I’m also worried about profitability, tho not particularly concerned about that particular investor, personally; all VCs are inherently amoral profit generators. They are a “benefit corporation” like anthropic, which gives them some leeway to deny shareholder requests in the name of public good. Which is nice!

In general I feel like social media is in the perfect spot for a huge shakeup as display ads breathe their last breath. Even if Google wins/draws out its Display Ads antitrust case and successfully implements some new interest-tagging system, I think anyone with a calculator and a newspaper subscription can read the leaves at this point; people are concerned about their data, and the money it generates is peanuts compared to more traditional advertising schemes. All of this is of course not even mentioning what I think intuitive algorithms will do (cynical or no, there’s lots of credentialed scientists saying that AGI (!!) is within reach in the coming decade, if not the coming few year).

All that to say: I feel like they can find a way to make it work. Revenue doesn’t need to be as high anyway if you a) don’t have 1000 devs optimizing Display Ad A/B tests all day, and b) have the support of the open source community.

If they can get ~100k subs to a $10/mo premium service similar to discord nitro, they are probably close to breaking even at the current scale and ops methodology. Which seems feasible.