How many times have we seen it happen? An information application that benefits from user-contributed content at scale has some novel utility for organizing the world, and takes on debt to finance the ambitious vision. People get excited and join the collective effort to wring order from chaos, to mediate the conversation themselves. Then the debts come due and this infrastructure they built over begins to tax and suffocate them.

The users get bought and incorporated into an adjacent platform, or the IPO means there's a "responsibility" to profit, to extract, to capture rent.

How do we fund this kind of infrastructure without falling into the same cycle? In theory you can bootstrap, you can grow organically– but if you need people as a fundamental ingredient of the product, it'll be hard to get them without stacks of cash.

I think the answer is to design products that don't depend on network effects to succede; build what can provide value instrinsically. That generally means relying on open protocols.