That’s why, and call me unethical, I never do more than necessary at work. Never help outside of business hours, never engage with rich bosses. Switch every 2-3 years to new places. Maximise my income (in real money, not imaginary stocks) while trying to work the minimum.

For dreams and craft, I have my side projects.

It is weird, but I do not trust the app any more in planning routes either. Sometimes i have the feeling bugs in the planning part already appear. The stability of the service for sure decreased.

Also there are more nag screens about the premium offer (dude I paid for the other great offer already!).

Very unhappy with this. I hope the komooters build an alternative. I’m happy to support them. I know that eventually I might get betrayed again.

For today I planned another route with komoot. If somebody knows an alternative? I like the komoot user photos because it gives an impression of the (gravel) roads. Plus the suggested routes and the planning ux are great. Im stuck with komoot for now.

At least in the US, if you tell me 'We'll never sell out' and I take a job with no equity because of it, that's a verbal legal contract and I have grounds to sue if you then sell out.

In theory, at least, our legal systems discourage/prevent this sort of lying and backstabbing. In practice, perhaps not.

However, it really sucks for employees. I know a guy who joined Komoot a few weeks before the sale, and who was among 80% fired right after the sale finalised. They've been negotiating the terms of sale and hiring people simultaneously -- that's just insane.

Never believe a company that you are part of a community if the content you create for them cannot be exported and published somewhere else. I am especially sceptical if someone says they never sell.

Much of the article is waxing poetic about the commons and the corrupting influence of monetization and capital, yet the main thrust against genAI is training on data from walled gardens and expanding access. As far as I can read it, it's a fairly pro-capital angle as well, in that a nonprofit AI outfit who was training on copyrighted data would also be vilified. Seems incompatible with the rest of their article. But I suppose one has to have a strong stance against AI these days.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Copyright walled gardens/publishers are some of the most flagrant examples of walling off the cultural commons. It's also necessary in order to support livelihoods of individuals, but it can incentivize "bad" behavior like changing the mission in order to pursue mass appeal and profit. Likewise, completely disregarding the fact that 150 employees is something that is funded by growth isn't a fair representation of the whole story here. A group of hikers doesn't magically create a service like that from thin air.

Maybe what the author is trying to advocate for something like a corporate structure with capped profit? Regardless, their arguments need work.

If users are contributing the content of the app, it seems they should have a way to hold the owners accountable.

> Unusually, none of the employees held stock in the startup

Sigh. Even with equity I’d question tying your purpose to the company like that. Without equity it’s just very silly.

I once applied to their job listing. I adored the idea of working there. Now all I can think about is "I'm glad they rejected me"

There should be a tracker specifically for this.

The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.

Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.

Then there is the obvious Geschmäckle of taking advantage of OSM (a free open source project) while not providing a way to give back to it. For example marking a bridge or path as no longer functional or existent.

The main feature of importance for me was a convenient way of visual representation of the trip on a map + being able to easily take pictures and have them added into the tour route visualization. This is provides for a really neat trip summary. Maybe someone has an app or service suggestion for such a feature?

> Couchsurfing, Reddit, Twitter, and many more were similarly komooted.

I'd like to add another company to the list: carpooling.com aka mitfahrgelegenheit.de

> Capital does not invent interesting new ideas like gravel and bikepacking. It swoops in from the outside to appropriate.

That seems a little warped. Bikepacking (isn't new) is as old as the bike and gravel biking is pretty much a capitalist rebranding of bikepacking. Selling the idea that you need a "gravel bike" to for bike packing. Pretending that the tried and tested way of laterally attached baggage is not good enough anymore and now has to be attached medially and you need those special tires yada yada

Your best bet to keep a social platform for a long time is a coop. You’ll never get investors, which is the point, but you also aren’t a foundation or a nonprofit with shackles (unless you get to OpenAI levels of creativity.)

> I spoke with a few longtime employees in the aftermath, who described it as a rough and cruel betrayal. > > Komoot, to them, was more than a job; it was a mission and purpose.

If the data and the code is not open (and thus does not truly benefit everyone), and can vanish at a company's whim, it doesn't seem worth it.

> Many had accepted below-average salaries

I reluctantly accept to be paid less if it allows me to have a job that does not go against my values (but will leave as soon I as I find something paid better). What made Komoot so special that you'd accept below average salary?

I hope that, again, some initiative that values open stuff will save the day and make up for the void this event creates.

I'd say it's about time for the komoot folks to organize and create a coop and stick it to komoot. A coop would probably be even more compatible with the dirtbag lifestyle!

I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.

1. Bending Spoons (BS) is an itallian conglomerate, who is specialized in acquiring marginally-profitable software companies.

2. After an acquisition, BS attempts to cut the cost structure agressively. This normally involves massive axing of employees.

3. BS also raise the pricing agressively, which would shock long-term users.

4. Now the acquired compnay is cashflow-positive.

5. Using that cash flow, BS proceeds to acquire another company.

Based on this playbook, Bending Spoons has acquired Evernote, Remini, Meetup, WeTransfer, Brightcove ... and now Komoot.

So in short, Bending Spoons is a roll-up vehicle for software business, pretty similar to what Brad Jacobs (who founded United Rentals and XPO) has been doing for decades.

I started my biz because I wanted to make products that people love, that create value and timesave for others (specifically restaurants). I've always thought that if I do that and have a good time doing it the money will take care of itself.

I would be horrified if some PE firm rug-pulled our users and screwed our employees. Any such takeover would have to happen over my dead body.

Vaguely reminds me of some company with the motto "don't be evil"

Now, don't get me wrong, it sucks majorly for the employees and it is painful; but particularly for the long-running ones, where is your equity? Komoot was once a startup, why did you accept to work there without equity.

Last but not least, indeed, never believe the bosses, unless you have (almost) the same end-game privileges.

Relying solely on "community" to build and maintain these spaces is equally unsustainable. I worry that people will look at this and think that the alternative is to reject all forms of businesses, when the problem is simply of scale.

If it’s not in the contract, it’s not something you should rely on.

Even as someone who thinks big private equity acquisitions tend to go badly, I’m not sure this article makes very good points. In particular, lots of blame is levied against bending spoons but not much against the founders, yet the founders arranged to not give employees equity, the founders reneged on their ‘never sell’ promise, the founders did not try to negotiate better severance for the employees that would be let go after the sale, and the founders set the business direction before the sale.

I do feel like there is something to the idea that one should be suspicious of some ‘social good’ messaging from companies as it can often be a way to allow or hide existing inequities, eg paying everyone the same (in cash but not equity) or claiming they don’t need equity as you won’t sell the company (except you do). Amusing that it is the relatively left-wing prosocial German startup scene where the workers get fucked over rather than the SF one though maybe this is outliers or startups choosing employees in Germany with things the other way around in the US.

I think the article also seems to misunderstand the emphasis on growth. The expectation is not for profits to continue growing forever. The expectation is that the growth will happen roughly logistically (until some outside force causes a loss/increase of market share), so under this model a slight slowdown in growth implies that the maximum is nearer, and this maximum has a big impact on the value of the business. If one is hoping to sell the business then maintaining growth is important because it implies something about the size of the market and therefore the valuation. It was the founder’s desire to sell for a high price (alternatively to try to gain network-effects advantage over competition) that drove the growth, not the existence of private equity firms.

Some other thoughts:

As a user, I don’t particularly care about the particularities of how employees in developed countries are treated. The company gets some choice in how it divides its equity and how much revenue goes to paying staff and in what proportions. These things tend to be negotiable for engineers working for software startups (maybe not in Germany??) and these employees negotiating themselves relatively poor contracts isn’t really something I blame on private equity.

I feel like the article implies that capitalism necessarily leads to the way that private equity seems to destroy the communities run by the companies it acquires but I’m not sure that should be true. It seems to me like it ought to be more profitable in the long run to be less destructive (though some of this can look bad to users if they see layoffs as a focus on growth is decreased or the removal of loss-leading products that users like for obvious reasons).

On a more robustly positive note, ongoing progress with solid legal frameworks for benefit corporations may address much of this. Such companies serve stakeholders instead of shareholders and have employee ownership as foundational.

Leaning back and declaring Capitalism as flawed isn't good enough. If you have property rights and ability to sell labor then you have Capitalism. Corporations are a new innovation that we can hone. Large, shared allocations of capital will continue to be needed for essential endeavors so we need to figure this out.

But even as someone pretty left/liberal fully signed up to the open source gospel, I think the conclusion is unconvicing and rather handwavy:

> Promising projects such as the Mastodon social network, Matrix chat, and Pixelfed social photo sharing are reviving the diversity and abundance of the early, independent internet before it was enclosed by tech giants in the 2010s. More than singular platforms, the Fediverse represents a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons.

No. You don't get performant consumer-level routing without lots of fast servers, and the Fediverse doesn't really have a way to pay for lots of fast servers. Ok, you can run hobbyist projects like Brouter on low-spec hardware - and don't get me wrong, Brouter is absolutely awesome in its own way, and for a certain type of cyclist it's all they'll ever need. But if you want something that appeals beyond the hardcore cyclist - in the way that Komoot does, and in the way that Google and Apple Maps do for motoring (and, increasingly, city cycling) - there has to be some sort of way of paying for the servers. "Open protocols and distributed services" don't fix that.

Entirely personally (and you would expect me to say this), my view is instead: support your local artisan. Your local artisan framebuilder will build you a fantastic bike. Your local artisan bike shop will repair it much better than a chain like Halfords will (or whatever your country's equivalent is). These guys aren't practising "enshittification". They're doing what they love, and being paid for it so that they can feed the family and pay the mortgage. Sure, maybe it's still "capital", but not in the same way that Bending Spoons does it.

So if you're happy going to an artisan bike shop, consider going to an artisan routing/mapping site, rather than a growth-then-sellout project. There are plenty of these - I'm obviously going to plug my own site/app, cycle.travel, but there are many others.

(Incidentally, I hold no brief to support Komoot - quite the opposite, because they've ripped off a bunch of my content - but the bit about "leeching off the open-source commons" is not entirely fair. Komoot developed one of the most popular OpenStreetMap geocoders, Photon, and released it as open source. They're paid-up members of the OSM Foundation. Sure, there's more they could do and some other companies do more, but it's important to recognise what they have done.)