@LefterisJP: The funding challenge for principled, aligned apps in web3

I see a lot of comments about apps and the app-layer. As an ex core dev and since 2017 an app builder of an app with a very loyal userbase (@rotkiapp) I think I have some useful insight. I am going to talk about apps that do things the right way (OSS, privacy-first, decentralized, self-hosted, non-capturable etc.). There is many kind of apps but these are the apps I am interested in. Let's call them "aligned apps". Being aligned is not a black or white thing. It's more of a spectrum. The more aligned you are, the harder it is to build, but the more useful and principled the product tends to be. The biggest limit aligned app builders face is capacity. Not ideas. Not demand. Not PMF. Just raw capacity. Namely funding + talent. The kind of resources that money can buy. But the cards are stacked against you: 1. You build slower because you won’t compromise on the aforementioned values. The end product is infinitely more challenging to create the more aligned it is. Compare self-hosted apps vs cloud apps, privacy-preserving vs yoloing user data etc. 2. You're not VC-material, because there's nothing to extract. If your product is building on these values it's by its nature non-extractive and not-capturable. That means it's not a good traditional investment. 3. Without funding, you can't iterate fast. And feedback keeps piling in. Good feedback. Feature requests, more feature requests, things to adjust. But you don't have the funding to get to a team size and caliber where you can react on time. So you slowly fall behind. Meanwhile others grow faster by cutting corners. This is the core problem. All the PG funding attempts (grants, retro PGF, etc) are trying to fix this, but often fall short. Either not enough money, too many projects, or grifters draining the pool. If we solve this, we massively accelerate the entire ecosystem in the right direction. We need to stack the deck more in favor of aligned apps!