VCs are totally the problem here. It&#x27;s not that VCs are bad people who want to screw over users, but their business model requires them to get payback on their bets, even if it&#x27;s small. It can be hard to know up front if an idea is viable as a hockey-stick software company or if customer acquisition is much, much harder - often because you don&#x27;t know who your target customer will be specifically until you&#x27;ve iterated a few times.<p>And many times, there&#x27;s no other exit option for the VCs. Does it suck for users? Absolutely - which is why companies often have lots of apprehension about being early adopters of a startup&#x27;s technology. It&#x27;s why B2B startups are really hard, and why they tend not to hockey-stick because the customer acquisition costs are high and don&#x27;t shrink with scale.<p>It&#x27;s up to the founders to convince their VCs to pass on the acquihire because they think the company still has hockey-stick potential. Zuckerberg did this a number of times - it was still really arrogant, but it paid off for Facebook and shows why founders need a bit of arrogance to be successful. It&#x27;s a lot harder to do this if you&#x27;re running a startup that doesn&#x27;t have a lot of market traction.