This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Where the VC money leads Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Charles Miller has a very prescient thought about the Six Apart purchase of LiveJournal:

On the other hand, Danga was a casually-run company that existed to keep Livejournal running, and its founders cupboards full. SixApart is a venture-capital backed organisation that has a much more concrete appreciation of the concept of return on investment. It's inevitable that at some point, someone will look at the statistics and realise that fewer than one in fifty Livejournal users are actually contributing to its upkeep.

Any business ultimately needs to have some level of ROI - the difference with VC backed ventures is that the money guys are looking for a large ROI - and ultimately, for the day when they can go public and get paid off. That drives a set of behaviors, and those behaviors are not necessarily the same as those of a privately held concern. The private owner may be ok with a level of "charity", so long as the bills are being paid; VC's simply won't stand for that. This is not to say that VC's are bad - far from it. On the other hand, I would be surprised if LiveJournal didn't see some wrenching changes down the line.