This outcome is almost certainly seen as a failure by the VCs. It looks like an acquihire. If so, it's quite possible that the VCs didn't even get their money back. Acquihires generally do not return money to VCs -- obviously, given that the employees are free to work anywhere, the acquirer's interest is in paying as much as possible to the employees and as little as possible to the now-worthless acquired company.
It's likely the employees are the ones benefiting most from this outcome, in that their pay has probably gone up considerably and they are no longer nervous about their job security, after many years of high stress and low pay.
It's possible the VCs were even offering some more cash to keep going, but at unfavorable terms, and the team said: "No, we'd rather take the big paychecks from Zoom."
Given Keybase has only had one funding round (according to crunchbase), the founders certainly still had a controlling stake in the company and the VCs couldn't force them to sell or not sell.
You can blame VCs for a lot of things but this kind of outcome is just not one of them (except insofar as that it allowed a company with little viable business strategy to exist in the first place).
(I am the founder of a failed startup. We had multiple "acquihire" offers, none of which offered any money back to investors.)
Wait what? That's called PGP. And people like to hate on it because it's a decentralized web of trust. The whole point of Keybase is to pave over the problems with web of trust by creating a social identity layer that more accurately reflects how trust relationships actually form.
An open source social identity attestation layer that people can operate and federate. Now that sounds cool!
The fact that the ultimate goal of most startups is to "exit" says an awful lot. It's an obvious signal that they are not prioritizing your needs in the long-term.
My two cents: that's part of the game in today's marketplace. It's pretty difficult to 'disrupt' firmly cemented market footholds and play with the big boys with seemingly endless streams of capital (though it certainly is possible, tech is more notorious for this than most industries, though highly improbable).
You really want to lock down some strategic IP that stands in the path of a behemoth and hope they'll want to aquire it under their growth goals or attempts to stomp out potential competitors (by throwing money at them and not through litigation or other paths). The big boys win because they buy out proven effective solutions/IP and models while failed startups eat the market high-risk exploratory costs.
Ghost (blogging software) chose to incorporate as a Company Limited by Guarantee [1], which doesn't have shares and can't be acquired that way: https://ghost.org/changelog/moving-to-singapore/
It only really works for bootstrapped non-profits, and for projects that are entirely volunteer-driven. No VC would be able to invest in something like this (unless it's a grant like what YC does for non-profits [1]).
Even Mozilla Foundation [2] was spun off from Netscape, and heavily supported by AOL in its early years.
That definitely cannot be acquired. No sane business would want to convert actual money into fun bucks and put those into a buggy script that would lock everyone out if someone pwns it.
What is more 'fun'? USD in bank account, USD as cash, DAO, or gold? I would think those are monotonically decreasing in 'fun'-ness. "Actual" money is not a good word for printable items of arbitrary scarcity. Not arguing for or against GP, just saying.
So if I'm reading this right... the participants of the DAO can band together and sell their company to a company as well? It looks like a DAO just requires some kind of cryptocurrency to participate, and then the participants get control over the operations of the DAO. So ownership is transferable at any time by these parties.
Isn't this just all inevitable? Aren't all these startups just lining up all in the hopes just to get acquired?
I guess when we see VC Funded™ on any startup what it _really means_ is that:
"We are prioritising a return for our investors even if it means violating our mission statement".