Your company's product will never be the best version of itself if your only business goal is to lead a VC backed mindless race to an IPO. Your company will almost always have to dilute it's value proposition to make more money to satisfy greater returns for shareholders.
If your only goal as a founder is to eventually sell out and make yourself a billionaire, this is fine. If you want to build something of long lasting quality/consistency, then exploring other business models isn't just noise.
When you're free of outside influence you're enabled to perfect your business offerings, or at least be consistent in what you offer, without worrying about greater and greater shareholder returns.
It's no coincidence that Craigslist looks the same as it did 20 years ago, Arizona Ice Tea is still 99 cents, and Chicfila has the best fast food customer service.
I think OP is asking for any alternatives that are more fullproof than simply holding into a cane or walker. It can only take one stumble or slip and fall for someone at 80-90 to break a bone, never completely recover, and lose their ability live independently and be forced to go to a nursing home or other assisted care facility.
Though more intrusive to wear/use, I would imagine there are some bionic leg braces that could keep legs stable 99% of the time.
People that are calling it a failure because of quality are missing the point.
Facebook makes its money by leaving the feed an unorganized mess of random posts, leaving the user disoriented so that more eyeball time can be harvested for advertisements while the user searches for the content they want (or gets stuck mindlessly scrolling the infinite reel of videos and other content for that dopamine hit).
It's not lost on the army of six figure salaried engineers that a lot could be done easily to make the experience better. But that isn't in the interest of the shareholders. The quality is a feature, not a bug.
It's a publicly traded company with a fiduciary duty to increase shareholder value every quarter. For Facebook specifically that means a jumbled mess of a feed of ads, random notifications, and clutter that keeps users as engaged as possible. Any feature you can think of that would improve the service would probably go against the dark patterns that entice a drip feed of dopamine hits to max eye ball time. The system is working as intended.
The question really becomes how do you make any platform/service that will stay true to it's mission and stand the test of time. The answer seems to be private ownership + the will of the founders to keep it that way and not sell out.
Craigslist is a great example of this; I highly recommend looking up Craig Newmark and his ideals. It's been around for nearly 30 years in more or less the exact same form, doing the exact same thing. It's privately owned and Newmark could sell the whole thing and be instantly propelled to billionaire status, but choses not to. There are no outside investors or corporate shareholders pushing for a bigger and bigger return every quarter. And no bloated teams of six-figure salaried engineers inventing work for the sake of work to justify their jobs and their resumes.
That mindset will at least keep the platform going for the rest of the life of the founder. On the 1000 years part, the next question is probably how would one legally structure a private company to restrict outside investments/purchases and straying too far from its original mission.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it a fairly simple answer that most founders just prefer mindlessly chasing rounds of investment and "growth for the sake of growth" and cashing out on an exit, rather than just growing organically with minimal outside investment/influence?
Anyone can choose to build a quality app/service/startup based on the merit of the actual product with company growth fueled by actual need of technical talent and profits from a monetization model, rather than just taking venture capital and hiring six-figure salaried engineers just to fill another open office chair and implement selfie filters.
I wouldn't say it's mindless. Organic growth is okay for a lifestyle business, but if you want to compete with Google/FB/etc you need fast growth (or a really fucking good business plan). If you want fast growth then you need capital that you're okay with pissing away. You can front all that capital yourself if you're rich (e.g. Gabe Newell's M$ money going into Valve) or you go the VC route. VC route is simply less risky. Less chance of competition beating you to the punch, and no chance of losing all your money.
"If your business idea is so fragile that can be blown away by competition, you might want to rethink your strategy."
It may not be that you "want to rethink your strategy," but if you stumbled into becoming a one man show for a super niche unrivaled business app, why talk about that on a forum of developers?
As a long time independent seller, Amazon has virtually already done this by gating nearly every brand under the sun. It's hard to sell so much as a box of pens without a bulk purchase invoice and a picture of you high-fiving the manufacturer's CEO.
I got my current job after getting accepted to Indeed Prime, where my current employer reached out to me for an interview.
I uploaded my resume, and after getting in (every potential candidate has to be accepted) I got free advice over the phone from one of their career coaches on what resume and profile changes to make in order to attract more employers. Soon after that they started reaching out to me for interviews. There is a culture in the service of being respectful of your time as a candidate, so if the recruiter knows they don't offer every single thing you specified wanting in your profile they'll get that out of the way in the first phone call. They almost always discussed salary and remote benefits on the first call so I knew if their offer was in line with my expectations.
I signed up in February and was contacted by 9 employers, interviewed with 7, and accepted an offer with 1 in March.
Full Disclaimer: if you want to check out the service via my referral link, I'd get a commission the first time an employer reaches out to you, and if you accept a job through the service. Also, if you accept an offer through Prime, you get to pick a free gift from Indeed. (I chose a PS4, which I'll start using when The Last of Us 2 comes out).
In short ( and in very broad strokes ): there is virtually zero respect for the enduser's time[1]. And there are no incentives ( regulatory or otherwise ) for things to get better on this front.
[1] Note - I literally mean "time". Not security/privacy/safety/property, but more fundamentally and simply "time". Or in way better words: https://youtu.be/upu0gwGi4FE?t=1548
If your only goal as a founder is to eventually sell out and make yourself a billionaire, this is fine. If you want to build something of long lasting quality/consistency, then exploring other business models isn't just noise.
When you're free of outside influence you're enabled to perfect your business offerings, or at least be consistent in what you offer, without worrying about greater and greater shareholder returns.
It's no coincidence that Craigslist looks the same as it did 20 years ago, Arizona Ice Tea is still 99 cents, and Chicfila has the best fast food customer service.
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