

Profit is Good - ryancarson
http://ryancarson.com/post/50920451769/profit-is-good

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petercooper
Amen. I've bumped into the "anyone trying to make a profit is a sinister
shark" types in the event organization world. More intimate, non-profit
community events provide a totally different experience to large, commercial
events, yet there are people who would irrationally love to wipe out the
latter rather than live and let live.

Doing things for profit is certainly not the only (or even best) way but it's
a perfectly legitimate approach that _can_ be done honestly and with
integrity, and not one worth dismissing out of hand even if it doesn't fit
into your worldview.

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ryancarson
Yes, that backward mentality was especially prominent in the event space. We
experienced that a lot when I was running Carsonified.

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KuraFire
Kickstarter projects are not allowed to be turned into for-profit companies,
even though KS themselves broke their own rules in this by turning a blind eye
for Penny Arcade.

If they want to turn Ghost into a for-profit company and not a non-profit
organization, they can follow in Wordpress’s footsteps exactly: create an open
source, non-profit blogging platform, then later create a separate entity (a
for-profit company) to offer additional services for money.

But that’s assuming that is their goal. Who’s to say their goal isn’t simply
to create a much better blogging experience than Wordpress for the same reason
Wordpress was created in the first place (to offer a much better blogging
experience than existed at the time)?

I’m all for companies having a business model and focusing on both quality and
profit, but that does not preclude the valuable existence of non-profit
organizations and open source projects, like jQuery or my own project,
Modernizr.

I think a better use of time would be to criticize the obviously for-profit
startups that obviously have no business model than an exit strategy of hoping
to eventually sell, or get enough users and investment capital to grow to the
point where ads become viable.

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dragonwriter
> Kickstarter projects are not allowed to be turned into for-profit companies

Kickstarter is used very much for projects by for-profit companies. Maybe
there is some accurate but confusingly presented point behind this, but if so
it could definitely use clarified (and perhaps a specific reference to the
rule at issue.)

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KuraFire
> Can Kickstarter be used to solicit investment or loans?

> Nope. Kickstarter is a new form of commerce and patronage, not a place for
> investment or lending. You’ll never give up ownership or pay back any funds
> raised on Kickstarter. Ever.

<http://www.kickstarter.com/start>

