Sure but you can at least try to test some hypotheses. Like they could have said we’ll keep the VC model but try different kinds of companies, or maybe try a bee model for funding classic SV firms, but it seems like what they actually did is a bunch of disparate and not necessarily related things that fit into their conceptual model of “indie”.
One that strikes me as especially confusing is giving the option to sell back their shares to the company at 3x value. Since VC is predicated on moonshot explosions of valuations that seems like a really questionable decision, maybe one you’d want to make in isolation and see if it attracts interest.
Another issue is liquidity. VC funds are famous for insisting on an exit in 10 years or less. That’s an imperfect solution to a real problem, which is that investors want the money back.
So, like what was Indie’s solution to that same problem? It seems like maybe the idea was to pretend that wasn’t a real problem rather than come up with a novel or innovative solution to that issue.
Again, maybe that’s a reasonable thing to do, but maybe you’d want to see if that model works. Perhaps you try a “long exit” model or some kind of dividend model.
What seems to have happened is they tried all these ideas and more at once.
One that strikes me as especially confusing is giving the option to sell back their shares to the company at 3x value. Since VC is predicated on moonshot explosions of valuations that seems like a really questionable decision, maybe one you’d want to make in isolation and see if it attracts interest.
Another issue is liquidity. VC funds are famous for insisting on an exit in 10 years or less. That’s an imperfect solution to a real problem, which is that investors want the money back.
So, like what was Indie’s solution to that same problem? It seems like maybe the idea was to pretend that wasn’t a real problem rather than come up with a novel or innovative solution to that issue.
Again, maybe that’s a reasonable thing to do, but maybe you’d want to see if that model works. Perhaps you try a “long exit” model or some kind of dividend model.
What seems to have happened is they tried all these ideas and more at once.