I've used their services for ages and even got to briefly meet the founders once in Wellington who gave a talk on Erlang.
Ah well, while it sucks that the good times may be over, I'm glad the founders got their exit :)
I'm not.
I mean, I am happy for them but this concept of growing a business to an exit is not going well for society as a whole (at least the exits that are in my areas of interest, so I assume it extrapolates to all exits).
Every single business that gets bought out gets instantly enshittified in one way or another, always to the detriment of the customer. Depending on how entrenched it was it takes a different amount of time for people to move on as the new shareholders extract its economical value, but it almost always destroys societal value in the process as the company becomes a shadow of its former self (and hopefully dies, leaving way for the cycle to start again).
I wish there was a way for founders to get rich without the need for an exit, so the business could keep running... but I guess ruthless enshittification is the only way to get rich?
Apologies for the tangent, this is something that's been bouncing in my mind for a while...
Domains are like car insurance – there's no reward for loyalty, so makes sense to shop around come renewal time.
The last thing I want is to be a 70 y/o still supporting a registrar. Especially considering the margins.
Richer Sounds boss in £3.5m staff giveaway https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48269171
Nationwide is another example of a successful cooperative as well (large UK bank, particularly in the mortgage space). They're customer and employee owned I believe, my wife and I got £200 last year as a profit share for being customers.
I'm a huge fan of the model, but it's difficult to get going. I think they're also more expensive to run as their operations tend to be a little more complex.
A business is supposed to be an ongoing, perpetual enterprise. Maybe it grows, maybe it stays the same, but it isn't something that should (in my opinion) be designed as a product, in itself, with a "sell by" date. If it gets brought up, then that's [maybe] good, but it shouldn't actually be in the business plan. It's just a random lifecycle event. We can plan to be ready for it, but it shouldn't be a corporate goal.
It's quite possible to do that. I worked for nearly 27 years, for a company that is over 100 years old. I think the world's oldest company is over 1,400 years old, and just got brought out, for the first time, about 10 years ago.
And it's not like running a registrar is something what can even have a mission other than earning money.
I would honestly be surprised if that was the case, but if you really tried, then you tried.
You pick who you’d hope would continue the mission OR you try to sell to employees.
> And what if they do 180 a week later?
Then you picked wrong, but the risk of picking wrong is not a good reason to not try to pick correctly.
Oh yeah, I fully agree with the enshittification sentiment.
Admittedly, a DNS registrar for me personally is something I'd just swap without much thought but I can think of a few services I use where I wouldn't be so loosely coupled from the product if those founders were to exit.
It's a bit paradoxical on my part I think and I do wish we had more lifestyle businesses that don't have to become massive.
Mind you, I would have put iwantmyname in that basket now that I think about it.