This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire.

Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture, and says nothing about the health of a business.

If you’re looking to ‘be open’ about the health of your business, then the operating costs would be shared, the amount the founders are ‘taking out’ of the business in dividends would be shared.

There are businesses that operate 20MM a year in revenue, but practically speaking are broke, because of the way the business is being run.

So for folks that don’t know better, this is a very cool thing ente is doing. For folks that run businesses and know better, this is a way to show off and ‘gain cred’ without actually having to be open about how the business operates.

▲

jadbox an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> "Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture"

Showing revenue is not "tiny" by any means. Considering that the vast majority of businesses hide this from the public, I think it's very notably "something larger than tiny".

> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"

How do you know this?

	▲	iamjs 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke" > How do you know this? They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.

▲

dewey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's wrong with that? This is a post to show users that other people are paying for it (social proof) and that the project is developing well, similar to other projects sharing how many contributions or first time pull requests they got this month. That doesn't mean that you have to show everyones salary, how much the lunch in the office is costing and include a raw export of their bookkeeping setup.

There's room for both.

	▲	chadash an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The accompanying blog post says "The one thing you couldn't see was how well Ente is doing as a business. Now you can." To the parent commenter's point, we don't have enough information to know if that's true. EDIT: the founder is on this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905) providing more info and explains that adding expenses on would be too burdensome.

▲

monooso an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.

This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.

	▲	gortok an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Public IPO as Ponzi scheme/shell game is a time-honored tradition. You can operate at a loss so long as you can get folks to bet they’ll get a return. The more people you can convince, the better you can do for yourself without being left holding the bag.

▲

turbocon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They poster goes into more details here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905

But also, this is not a very constructive comment. They're pushing a new product that based on the upvotes this community is interested it.

▲

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]