When we get Komooted
bikepacking.com> Komoot, to them, was more than a job; it was a mission and purpose. Many had accepted below-average salaries and uprooted their lives to commit to the outdoor lifestyle and the dream job. Suddenly, they were left scrambling for new work and visa sponsors with just a few months’ pay as severance. The six bosses, meanwhile, pocketed an estimated 20 to 30 million euros each.
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.
I'm gonna copy paste a comment I wrote yesterday that I think fits perfectly here:
As an engineer if you are gonna be a rank and file employee you need to do it for your own reasons. I think the main good reasons to do it are:
1. It's relatively chill and you value the stability. You deliver competence from 9-5 then go home to your family or some other thing that's more important to you than work.
2. You really enjoy the pure engineering side and find meaning in the technical artifact you're creating. Probably it's open source and has some value/community outside of your employer.
3. You're gaining valuable experience that you can later leverage into something else. Probably you're in the first 5 years of your career.
If the main thing driving you is growing a business, and you don't directly own (not options or RSUs or whatever, actual real equity) a significant slice of it, you are very likely misdirecting your energy.
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It sounds like the staff here thought they were in case 2, but they were not. I think that the article explains the reason why nicely: the thing they were building was not part of the commons.
This is a shame though. We should work towards a world where most people can find meaning in what they do.
For now it can work better to be a contractor and have your 'meaning' be a positive reputation in your industry.
More like being a medieval blacksmith. You don't mind what you're making, but you're known in your village by the quality of your work.
You can be in case 1 and find meaning in what you do. That's where the blacksmith is.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a good job for 40 hours a week in return for a salary. Being a competent professional who does quality work is rewarding!
I just think if you're doing work of that nature (which _most of us are_, BTW) you need to recognise it for what it is. Don't burn yourself out trying to squeeze every drop of initiative/creativity/productivity out of yourself. Definitely don't answer emails at the weekend. Don't tolerate under-payment. Don't accept non-legally-binding promises from the boss.
Just deliver the best work you can in the time you get paid for, then stop.
At the same time we can maaaaaaaybe start pushing back on all of the "capitalism is not the problem" and "capitalism is the least worst of all available options" memes?
Or is it too soon already?
The problem with capitalism is that something like it (concentrated power begetting additional power at the expense of most of the populace) is nearly guaranteed to crop up in a society which doesn't burn resources actively fighting against it. When fishing for alternatives then, you have to consider:
1. What fraction of our resources do we want to burn while eliminating which of the worst parts of capitalistic tendencies?
2. How do we preserve diffuse power distributions in the face of actors who will actively work against that goal?
Not to trivialize it too much, (1) is just a policy decision. Being completely hands-off is probably sub-optimal. Burning 100% of resources fighting fraud and other abuses isn't ideal either. It's a reasonable framing though for comparing strategies. There's no free lunch, so if somebody sells you a governmental structure which eliminates the worst parts of capitalism without _some_ cost, it's likely snake oil.
Point (2) is the harder one. The majority of people wouldn't mind a little extra power and a few extra resources. If that's possible, it's also (usually) possible to create sub-populations which together have much more power than other groups and thus subvert the goals of your anti-capitalist strategy. How do you create a system that's robust against most individual participants (potentially inadvertently) working against it?
So, sure, let's do away with capitalism. What do you replace it with that's both better and won't revert back?
Yes this is the key point imo - power begets power in any system.
However diffuse power distributions aren’t a panacea either imo. As an example, I hold no particular power over the other tenants in my building, and they hold none over me, the building owner has significant power over all of us. It’s easy to imagine a future with no landlord, and the power over the plot of land being diffused among the current tenants. But then I would have some degree of power over my neighbours, and they over me, and all sorts of abuses and nastiness are possible there.
An uncomfortable possibility we should take seriously is that there might not be a perfect distribution of power in human societies. That whether power is concentrated or diffuse, it will be used for good and for ill.
I am not claiming that I know the answer, or that today is just the best that we can do, but I am pretty sceptical that we can wave away these fundamentals, or that we can design or plan societies like this.
This isnt really about using "resources" to fight fraud. None of this was illegal and it was all very profitable - it was encouraged.
This is about us consenting to capital being put at the very heart of society's locus of control, which is what drove this kind of parasitism to be encouraged rather than discouraged.
It is a unique feature of western (especially American) society - something which actually isnt represented in other power centers.
China has "private equity" for instance, but it's not really private - it operates like all financial institutions as an arm of the state (not run by capital) and has no real incentive to destroy healthy and valuable companies for profit.
All of the same human dynamics will be present under socialism or communism or whatever you prefer.
Under capitalism, a boss might try to persuade you to work hard harder than you might otherwise for dubious or illusionary future reward.
Under some form of collectivism, there will still be pressure to attend some sort of goal, even if it is non-financial in nature. That pressure will ultimately come in the form of a leader of some form, and one of the tools they will have to achieve that (possibly collective) goal will be to persuade you to work longer and harder than you might otherwise for some dubious or illusionary future reward. Perhaps this future reward won’t be in money, but that won’t change the underlying dynamic.
You could equally argue that there is no point making murder illegal because "all the same dynamics leading to murder" will still happen. They will. Society exists to either curtail or encourage our instincts for a collective purpose.
This is not about that.
This about an institution being rewarded and operating entirely within the law which takes a valuable asset, systematically disenfranchises the people who made it valuable before parasitically sucking it dry for material gain.
That is a pretty unique capitalist dynamic, actually.
You’ve moved the goal posts.
First, we were talking about an outcome – exploitation of workers.
Your claim, if I understand you correctly is that this outcome is inevitable under capitalism, (perhaps solely possible under capitalism?) and then under some other system you prefer, it would no longer happen, or perhaps be impossible.
My contention is the incentive to exploit exists in all socioeconomic systems, even collective ones. This doesn’t mean there’s no better system, or that we should stop caring, or that we should have no laws regarding it. But if correct, it means the arguing that your preferred system cannot or will not have this outcome, is weak and unconvincing.
Instead of engaging directly with the claim, you pivoted to implying that my argument was that we should not have laws against bad things.
Under capitalism: Both murder and worker exploitation should be illegal. Both murder and worker exploitation will likely occur to one degree or another.
Under collectivism: Both murder and worker exploitation should be illegal. Both murder and worker exploitation will likely occur to one degree or another.
If you want to argue that collectivism is better for other reasons - go nuts! But if your argument is that there will be no power hierarchy, no pressure to achieve goals, and no incentive to exploit then I just don’t think you’re serious.
No. You moved the goal posts actually.
We werent talking JUST about an outcome, we were talking about a process triggered by private equity that destroys value AND exploits workers and rewards the people who do it.
It's not like there are good options out there. USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A most damning example is that it was impossible to leave USSR during the most of its existence, and people had to do crazy things like jump off cruise ship and swim many miles [0] just to get out of country.
If I have a choice between being jailed in the country and having VCs drive some companies into the ground, I'd choose the latter every time.
> It's not like there are good options out there
Yes, there are.
> USSR showed what state-controlled socialism looks like, and the picture is not pretty. A
The USSR and other Leninist-derived regimes showed what one narrow set of models of authoritarian state “socialism” looks like, sure, and its not pretty just like the pure private capitalism that was generally abandoned netween the early and mid 20th century for the modern mixed economy was not.
OTOH, Leninism and its authoritarian state capitalism (that is, featuring a narrow elite that control society via control of the non-financial means of production, just as the private capitalist class does in private capitalism) is not the only option to to the presently dominant mixed economy that reduces or eliminates the private capitalist elements.
Democratic market-oriented socialisms where the private firms still exist but the non-financial means of production are controlled (either entirely in pure forms, or simply more than in the status quo systems in forms which are still mixed economies but with a different mix) by those working in the firms employing them are possible. In fact, variations along this dimension already exist among modern mixed economies, and the ones further along it are not the limit of how far that can go.
I'd love to hear about examples.
Sweden tried to become more socialist in 1970s-80s, and it did not look pretty. (Then Mr. Palme was shot and killed.)
Venezuela... well, does not look like an enticing example either.
I would say that socialism as a state-imposed regime does not work, same as communism. BTW communism does work in communes of like-minded individuals, be it a bunch of hippies or a bunch of monks. The key is self-selecting people who subscribe to that way of living voluntarily. This can't work for a whole country.
OTOH what the TFA suggests does work, exactly because mission-driven open-source projects / foundations and non-profits attract the right kind of motivated people, while providing little to no incentive for entities seeking pure profit to take over. Debian is one example: it exists for decades in the normal capitalist economy, is going strong, and shows no signs (and no ways) of selling out.
This, to my mind, is the future. Maybe 50 years from now our grandchildren will be appalled by the fact that we kept giving our free labor and free time to for-profit entities which did not have our best interests aligned with theirs.
> I'd love to hear about examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
> The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer, and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories.
> Project Cybersyn was ended with Allende's removal and subsequent death during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. After the coup, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.
Yes, it's that Stafford Beer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Yeah, it's always "wrong socialism" when it's built. But the next one (after the next one, after the next one, after the next one) will be the right one and will not murder millions of people, despite the previous attempts doing exactly that. Please go away already, we had enough of suffering caused by ivory-tower theoreticians unable to perceive the reality.
It's important to remember that when the British Empire triggered a famine in Ireland justifying it using the free market, it had nothing do with capitalism.
But when Stalin murders millions with a famine, it's all communism's fault.
This is rightthink, and belief in it is the model for being a good little citizen. Wrongthink would be to consider both of these crimes to be separate from the economic system which they were committed under.
I know a number of places where you were rewarded for "rightthink" and could be imprisoned or murdered for "wrongthink". Most of them had been countries having "People's Democratic" or "Socialist" or something in that vein in their names. I'm sure that's also a pure coincidence having nothing to do with those systems. Though, to be fair, modern followers of those doctrines made a serious headway to implementing the same approach in countries which don't have such words in their names and even considered "capitalist", so I assume in a short while you'd have another excellent argument - that freedom of speech also wasn't particularly suppressed by totalitarian (which is, all of them) socialist governments, it's just something totally separate. Which always happens under socialism, but that's just a coincidence, and it was a wrong socialism anyway, under the right one it won't happen.
Are you just ignoring the whole capitalist systems killing millions of people then?
IMO, the most dangerous (and unique) characteristic of socialism is its immortality and capacity for reinvention. It is indestructible as a vision.
There are many better options right now then US-style kleptocapitalism. Just look at the HDI index.
How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism, but how about getting the proportionality back on track? Does a single person need to make billions and billions of money? Should I, as a CEO, earn millions of dollars while my workforce can barely survive with one job?
I don’t think so. This is what needs to be fixed on a global scale.
> How about good ol' morals? We don't need to get rid of capitalism,
Yes we do. Capitalism, even at the somewhat attenuated level it exists in the modern mixed economy compared to the original system of the same name, creates too strong of a reward system for immoral behavior to correct the moral problems while preserving the system.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” is a systemic, not isolated individual, problem with capitalism.
That's true to an extent but I think that problem increases as that salary (or, more likely, capital gain) increases. So just limiting total wealth increases would likely reduce the temptation to sell out.
Well, sure, but that limitation is very much contrary to capitalism. A very good idea, but definitely moving away from capitalism.
Sounds good to me! :-)
It depends. Is your theory of change to push a welfare state, gradually increase the welfare, raise taxes to redistribute wealth, achieve UBI, fully fund public healthcare, housing, food, water?
Or is it that any day now workers are going to reach unanimous consensus and go on a national strike, siezing power from the owners of capital? Or maybe a violent revolution in which the bourgeoisie and class traitors get guillotineed alongside the capitalist oppressors?
What's your reasoning equating "a medieval blacksmith" serving a village directly with their own work and "a rank and file employee" which is how the post you're commenting on was intentionally framed?
I'm contrasting rather than equating them.
The medieval blacksmith / freelancer may be in a better position to feel meaning in their work, compared with an employee, because of the system of incentives around them.
I'm reminded of the Vshojo collapse just recently, where a whole load of people were convinced that not getting paid on time was a temporary necessity for growing the business.
Which promptly imploded, taking stolen charity donations with it.
4. Golden handcuffs
Or the combination of 1 and 4. If a company is willing to pay you a lot of money for “9 to 5”, there’s all the reasons in the world to just take it.
There is nothing unethical about: you are doing the only sane thing in this system and economics. Morons, who work themselves to death believing bosses shit-talk about “our mission” and “we are in this together” will learn it the hard way.
In principle, we can imagine jobs that contribute positively to the world.
When a builder builds a house, or a doctor mends a broken arm, the community has one more home and one less broken arm - and the community is left richer even after the builder and doctor have been paid.
That house will be keeping a family warm and dry 20, 40, 100 years into the future, and the patient will be using that arm for the rest of their life.
I can see how a person with a job like that could take pride in the fact they've contributed to their community, in addition to the fact they've gotten paid.
Of course, a lot of jobs aren't that way, but have tricksy bosses who will try to convince you they are. Which is what it sounds like happened in Komoot's case.
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of jobs don't exist to enrich the community, they exist for the exact opposite purpose. They exist to make the world a worse place. They exist to make people sicker, or cause more children to die, or maybe even to accelerate acts of war.
You don't need to do good things to make money. You can do bad things and make lots of money, and actually, that's typically a little easier. You can even create your own unique evils and then sell solutions to them.
In the workers side they could be doing good but on the corporations side not, like insurance companies charging way more for the broken arm than it should be and the house prices being way more higher than they should
plus the sepsis and subsidence
Try saying that on LinkedIn and watch the reactions. There is a huge difference between what you can feel and do, and what you can say.
I saw a post recently on linkedin. A founder was saying "If you had one year to live, would you still choose to work at this company? That is the bar to join <crappy nonsensical startup>". It was so incredibly sad.
Since slavery is forbidden, morons are the next best thing, I guess.
Boy, please share. I need something depressing to laugh about
Managed to find it again, there you go: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arnau-ayerbe_met-brian-chesky...
Way more depressing than i thought. If that's what these YC folks are even in public, i want my time back wasted listening to their messages.
Interesting:
"How fast do you want to learn?": in my experience many companies in my opinion don't want employees that learn fast, because otherwise these employees would immediately see and call out a lot of bullshit.
"Would you feel ownership on day one?": in my experience many software companies don't want employees to really feel ownership about their code, since "ownership" means that the respective employee will be willing to fight hard that his vision of this "owned" code is retained and this code won't be "tainted" by "unworthy" ideas of other colleagues.
Wow, this is low even by LinkedIn standards.
Why would you say anything on Linkedin in the first place? There is absolutely no reason to engage there unless you are PR for a company or self proclaimed career ̶c̶o̶a̶c̶h̶ liar.
If you are in a game of smoke and mirrors, you play the game according to the rules.
I don’t post on LinkedIn. Got better games to play.
Well, if your boss doesn’t say what they think, you shouldn’t either. And why would even consider posting something to linkedin, in the first place?
> There is a huge difference between what you can feel and do, and what you can say.
Agree 100% - if I were to bring my authentic self to work I'd be fired in about a minute flat.
As a warning: every time I’ve pushed hard, then had to rein it in and do less, I’ve gotten fired.
There’s nothing you can do that makes you irreplaceable, even if you’re the only one in the world that can do it.
It’s fine if you want to stay in your happy place as the only one that can do X and then keep selling them on the value you provide and how you’re doing big things. But, nothing lasts.
Don’t burn out, but sitting on your ass is a bad strategy.
Don’t do that then. Work on 90% with bursts of 130%. Don’t work on 120% all the time because it’ll be assumed you’ve gotten lazy when you just need to slow down.
Those percentages are all too high for a normal salery.
The definition of “100%” varies.
In U.S. even though a full-time job is “40 hours”, many in non-government jobs put in more. The “120%” spoken of would be 48, so let’s say roughly 2 extra hours a day, so 7:30-18:30 with an hour lunch. Tech startups in my experience are usually 44-46 hours for low-mid IC dev or more if higher or any lead/manager responsibilities. Some dev/IT managers may be on-call most of the week. But some people literally are working 40 hours/week.
Other countries “100%” hours/week are roughly: Europe 35-40, Eastern Europe ~40, India 45-55, China 45-50, Africa 40-50.
And similar applies for dev/IT startups and management.
Some work > 100 hours week on average, but I think that’s difficult to do in dev/IT for more than a month at a time without burnout, even if you just keep hitting a button over and over.
If a country expects 40+ hours on average then they should also expect an inverted demographic pyramid within a generation or two. Many such cases. It's a great way to commit national seppuku.
The goal is to not push hard from start, to set up moderate expectations.
The recipe of success is also to do a little bit more (15%) than your colleagues, be reliable and punctual.
> 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.
That's not unethical at all, in fact I think that's a highly intelligent strategy to look out for the little guy (namely you) in the bear pit of tech capitalism. Anyone buying into the "we're more than a company, we're family" schtick is just another sucker to be worked remorselessly to line the pockets of the VPs and C-suite.
My previous employers included me in their Director/VP meetings, and the family schtick evaporates pretty quickly when they start talking cuts. One VP in a meeting, quite literally, proposed laying off an entire team of veteran engineers (most with young kids) and the very next thing that came out of this doucebag's mouth was "are we ordering in some lunch?". They do not care a whit about you and once you realise that then you should just look to yourself first and foremost and forget accepting below-average salaries just for some "mission".
They will happily kick you to the curb for any of the following reasons, which I have personally witnessed in the past few years,
- Their pal is looking for a job that's currently occupied by someone else. So they fire and hire.
- They want to deflect blame for their own failures, so they fire a bunch of folks who had nothing to do with the failures.
- They want to appear 'ruthless' to the CEO, so fire people to enhance their own image.
- They do a clear out of their previous incumbents staff once they replace someone and bring in their own crew.
This approach doesn't work ethically if you are working for (say) public service organisations.
There's also the argument an abundance of cynicism - as well as being occasionally aimed at a misjudged target (eg you work for bosses who do try to do the right thing) - is corrupting to the self and wider society.
> This approach doesn't work ethically if you are working for (say) public service organisations.
This remark is specially apt with regard to the leitmotiv of TFA; one sees, indeed, an entirely different picture when the goal of an organization is something else than growing and making profits.
Of course the argument works for everybody who works in public service. You do the duties you are paid for. If you think that's not enough you are welcome to volunteer for free.
I agree. Or if the task is so important they should get a bigger salary.
Somewhat disagree. If a public service organization is demanding more than that approach, it either needs to hire more people, or manage projects more effectively. I'll take a lower salary for public service, but it doesn't help anyone for me to burn out.
> it was a mission and purpose
Is this "we are a family here" for the people that don't fall anymore for the "family" con?
This is the approach that most workers took in our eastern European countries during socialist era.
It was shitty. Pretty much all services were terrible since people just did the minumum.
I've noticed US going down this path for a few years now and I can't figure out why in the frigging world would you cheer on towards such horrible society.
All the best places I've lived at were great because people cared about the jobs and other work they did.
There’s nothing wrong with caring about your job and what you do. Just don’t buy into any of the horse shit about missions and so on. The bosses are ruthlessly capitalist so it’s immoral to expect the workers to be any less self interested.
At the end of the day your own life will be miserable if everyone is self interested because of those "bosses".
Just with work. Loads of things to do outside of work. I volunteer for example. Feels good.
I like to remind those I mentor that The Company’s sole goal for their employment is to extract more value from them than they are paid - not because The Company is evil, but because that’s just what’s required in a capitalist endeavor. But, what it does mean, is that you shouldn’t feel like you owe any company anything - the goal of any for-profit corporation is to extract more value from you than they give back to you, period.
> For dreams and craft, I have my side projects.
In very infrequent cases can you achieve any noticeable (for society) results without being part of a large org.
That depends on what you consider noticeable. A lot of things are noticeable (and noticed) on the local level. The folks that organise reading sessions with the kids a my sons school. The people managing the local hockey club. People doing local education in IT. Organizing the neighborhood meetup. The people that do hack and tell. Blog about what they’re doing by as fun projects.
They may not be known beyond their local communities, but they have impact on society. Most of them are contend with that. If you’re looking to change the world, then that’s likely not good enough, but then again, if you’re looking to do that it’s unlikely that you will achieve that as a rank and file employee in a corporation.
I agree, but I also see how even a regular employee in, say, space travel corp (or in pharma and so on) can consider their work to be more impactful than running a local community (even in reallity their impact is minimal).
There’s some maturity in being happy doing things that are not significant for society.
Bosses always want workers who treat their job and the company like family, but when it comes to them treating their workers like family somehow it is all about the numbers and they barely even treat them like people (if the law permits it).
It may seem over the top, but my feeling is we as a society need to stop accepting, excusing or even applauding behavior like this for our own good. This should be a stain on their names for the rest of their lives and the rest of society might consider treating them as outcasts.
I know this is an extremely unpopular position to take on a platform where half of the people dream of creating a company, pretending it is the mission of their lives, just to sell it to the highest bidder and live a life in luxury after. Everybody has to watch out for themselves they would say. If your goal is to leave the planet worse off than before that is the sure way to do it. This is a model for a society of sociopaths who kill everything good and it is time we start putting up some resistance.
Yup, when headhunters reach out with all these idiotic startups that I know full well are just playing the game of "see if you can bullshit long enough for someone to buy your useless company" I don't even laugh anymore, just shake my head. If you have real life obligations and can't afford to hop jobs every year, never work for a startup.
I felt betrayed as well. Just paid €30,- the month or so before because I liked the app and the service, but I also needed more maps. It offered great value to me. If I knew 80% of the employees would be fired, inevitably leading to a degrading service, I would have never done that.
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.
The article mentions one example: https://wanderer.to/. Haven't used it personally but seems promising (albeit less "social" than something like Strava).
Less "social" would be a feature for me. I just want one that can plan routes, track journeys, and give me directions. I don't want to be worried that I'm accidentally sharing what I'm doing/where I am with the world.
I'll do you one better: I just want the GPS data. I use https://alpinequest.net on android which is a 15 euro one-time purchase and they focus on the app, and that's all. I don't want every activity I do turn into some version of facebook.
Eh, the social features of Komoot were never intrusive to me, and among social features of most apps they were some of the most well designed. Local community, very much focused on actually sharing tracks and trying out other people's routes (and maybe commenting with your experience afterwards).
There was a guy in his 60s regularly doing very nice circular hiking routes of 40 to 60 km in our nearby forests, and apart from that just being kind of awesome and impressive to see when you look at local routes, actually walking his routes was often a very nice experience with diverse landscapes often along nice small, less used paths. It was great seeing nice weather in the morning, and then oftentimes without any pre-planning just walk or bike to the forest and just start along one of this guy's routes within a few minutes, all in an incredibly hassle free manner and with a result which pretty much always beat out just following the official hiking trails shown on signs etc. I don't know if there's another app right now where you can so easily profit from the experience and knowledge of your local community.
I organise an mtb event, always refused to use Komoot, Strava or other apps just to display an XML file on a map.
I have used brouter.de as a GPX editor instead of going on site to the route, and used Umap on OSM.ch to upload a GPX:
https://brouter.de/brouter-web/ http://www.vintagemtb.org/maps https://umap.osm.ch/
One only need a web server to share gpx files really.
Planning routes can be easily done offline with desktop apps. Don't even start with mobile use, I have never seen a web based tool where you could plan a route by tapping on a smartphone screen without pulling your hair out of desperation.
Well, Komoot worked quite well for exactly that use case. I have also only very rarely found tools even in the desktop space that were quite as mature as Komoot for that use case.
Also the question remains, what do you navigate the planned routes / gpx traces? What happens if you notice you want to improvise and replan to hit some target on the way you saw in the distance while on the trail? This was (and currently still is) absolutely trivial and intuitive to do on Komoot. The best alternative I can think of is maybe brouter+ osmand, but that's really quite clunky in comparison with Komoot (similar to the experience you probably mean when talking about pulling your hair out)
Most people doing this on a regular basis do not use komoot on a smartphone anyway as the battery life of a smartphone with gps activated at all time is very short compared to a dedicated bicycle or hiking computer.
I've been using https://bikerouter.de/ to plan my ride and then import the GPX into OsmAnd~. Works quite well. It is possible to host brouter (which is what bikerouter is running) on your own http server.
In OsmAnd~ just remember to fix the track to existing paths, otherwise OsmAnd~ routing engine may have difficulty to guide you. I've never dig into it, but it looks like there can be a small offset between the GPX and Osm map.
I'm really happy with locus maps 3 classic in combination with brouter as a local routing engine with my own routing profile using my preferences.
In combination with downloadable map tiles, I can plan and ride my route completely offline which saves battery and keeps things running in the more rural areas.
The route planner is really nice. I actually plan all my routes in the smartphone and export to gpx if necessary because it's the most comfortable way to do it.
What I also really appreciate is, that it's not a subscription based payment model. So you pay once for downloadable tiles etc. and for the app and can just use it without worrying about updated terms etc.
BUT, and that's a major BUT, the version is deprecated and will be ended soon in favour of the subscription based locus map 4. I don't miss anything in locus map 3 and don't see any benefits. I'll just hope the app will work as long as possible without official support.
Friend of mine wrote this app[0]. It’s iOS-only (I’m not the target demographic, myself, but he works for a company that serves bikers, and is very much a fitness chap). It’s quite mature, and well-maintained. Personally, I know him as an outstanding engineer, so I’m sure it’s well-written. It’s been a labor of love for him, for over a decade.
I am quite happy with Wikiloc app. Feature wise it is not that different from Komoot and the yearly subscription which allows me to use it on my watch was only 20 EUR.
I'm quite unhappy with it, in Europe. It defaults to the completely useless apple maps which is unsuitable for outdoors and rural exploration, and its clustering of routes near each other is difficult to distinguish and click on. All trails had nailed this well by showing clustered trails together in a single point and letting you page through them.
I don't feel like I've been Komooted. There are alternative apps that I'll switch to.
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.
It makes sense if you realize that there's no certainty a sale will go through and you don't want to pause all operations with the blind hope that a sale will happen
Having said that, if someone just joined before the sale and is laid off, they should get a generous layoff package similar to longer term employees since they may have just quit a job to go there and are now back on the market.
Ironically, German law says that the first six months are a trial period for both sides, and you can be fired during that time with a two week notice for no reason.
I don't know about German law, but in Finnish law you can only appeal to the trial period if you have an acceptable reason related to the trial period. For example, if the employee isn't performing well, that is a legal reason to annul the work agreement during the trial period. But selling the business to investors or having financial difficulties because of the economy are not acceptable reasons, since they are not related to the specific recently-hired employee.
It cuts both ways: the employee can walk out during the trial period for reasons such as feeling like they didn't fit in, or the work being different from what they imagined. But if they merely find a better-paying job elsewhere, they cannot invoke the trial period but have to give notice in the usual way.
Germany mandates two weeks' notice while person is on probation period, which is usually first 6 months. I haven't heard details about layoff package, but given sentiment I am not sure that it was great.
Recommend any alternatives?
RideWithGPS. No affiliation with them, but have been paying for service for years. Far less glitzy than Komoot/Strava and far less paid advertising, but for my money it's better for route planning - particularly long distance off-road - than anything else I've come across [0].
[0] a) For instance Komoot's exports for GPS head units were not accurate enough to be as helpful with picking/finding faint/overgrown trails b) RWGPS UI makes it a bit easier to work with OpenStreetMap's inaccuracies. c) Its auto routing seems to consistently work a bit better than Google's if I want to ride on a roads where car drivers are less likely to try and kill me. (not sure how well Strava does this)
paying for service for years
Isn't this the main point of the article? The community feeds such a service with knowledge and in the users and up paying a lot for the all the knowledge they contributed themselves (possibly after an acquisition, leaving the original philosophy behind). The article mentions https://wanderer.to/, which leads to a community-owned data set.
Of course, some new federated service is most likely going to have a subpar user experience, but we will never get there if we are only feeding into semi-closed ecosystems.
Fun fact about Strava's routing, they don't support ferries, something most other alternatives like RWGPS do. They've been asked for years to support it, just as they've been asked for more than a decade to support multi sport activities, but they don't seem to care. When I was a paying Strava customer I still used RWGPS for routes.
RideWithGPS
Why is that insane? A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.
To assume otherwise is foolish and naive. That’s simply not how employment works.
> A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.
It is in Europe - one or three months are the standard notice periods I believe?
I would expect that in this case it would go even beyond that. In many European countries there are protections against unjustified layoffs. I could imagine the law and judges in various countries to be rather unsympathetic towards "yeah we just hired you but we're now laying off 80% of staff because fuck you that's why".
Especially in cases where there is any evidence that the layoffs were planned before the contract was signed - wouldn't that be problematic even in the US?
In some European countries protection is even stronger. If a position becomes unnecessary, you first have to try to find another position within a company that requires a comparable level of education. You can only fire people for grave negligence or for violating rules, or lay them off e.g. if your company has to in order to survive.
From what I have heard (but IANAL), Germany has weaker protections (which is relevant here). Also, typically people sign away their rights, trading them for a good payout + a good recommendation for a next job.
Germany has a 6 month probation period for new hires in which both sides can terminate the contract with 2 week notice. After that, it is one month, two months after 3 years going up to 7 months after 20 years.
Hiring senior employees sounds like it requires crystal ball level planning. Are there any tricks to make growth easier?
The trick that most startups seem to use is to simply operate in a different country.
(I write this comment from Berlin, where I wish it were much much easier and simpler to start and operate a business.)
The trick I see the most is actually hiring consultants. They're basically like employees but it's not you who hire them, it's the consultancy company. So you can have them working for your startup in short contracts of a few months (which can be prolongued and without much trouble even terminated early). But normally, they also have clauses against trying to hire the consultants directly, so if they are really good and write a good chunk of your stuff, when they leave you might be left in a bit of trouble.
The time that counts is when the employee is at the company, not their total employment time.
Komoot was located in Germany. Workers' rights are a bit better over here.
I agree that insane isn't exactly the right word for this. More like "assholish" -- this person has just switched jobs, and now they have to go through all this stress over again. This could have been easily avoided.
> A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.
If this is the case, I'm just gonna sit on my ass this week and take my paycheck. If there is no long term assurance, why should I even try?
You’re technically right. But it’s disappointing that that’s the normal state of affairs.
Why?
Because in Europe we believe that with ownership also come responsibilities. For instance to care about your employees, prevent destruction of nature, etc. Things you can wrap in insane complex laws or just manage through a social contract between the tarif partners (employees and employers).
We all lose if this contract is broken.
Don't presume to speak for "Europe". It's a big place with a wide diversity of viewpoints.
We all lose when employers have a paternalistic relationship with employees. It's better for everyone to keep things strictly transactional.
It's not an equal transaction - it's like a child negotiating with an evil sorcerer.
The reality is that you have little to no power or leverage in labor relationships. You may think you do, because it is very valuable to the other party for you to believe as such. But you do not.
Things being purely transaction can work when it's a fair transaction. When your life is on the line and the other party is risk fuck-all, it's not a fair transaction. When you have a few sheckles at your disposal and the other party has billions, it's not a fair transaction. When you don't know shit about their decision making but the other party knows as much as possible as they can about you, it's not a fair transaction.
The reality is that if you equate a typical employer with an "evil sorcerer" you're so disconnected from reality that you have nothing of value to contribute here.
That's not what I did, please read more carefully.
The power dynamic and information dynamic is that of a child compared to a sorcerer. The sorcerer knows all, and does not need the child. They can turn the child into a frog, and the child cannot perform any magic in retaliation.
You must realize your leverage is close to non-existant in negotiations. You are, frankly, irrelevant, and of the negotiations you can attempt you must do so with just a tiny fraction of the information required.
You hold none of the cards. I'm not even sure how this could be controversial - its just plainly true. Denying reality is one thing, aspiring to something that harms you is another.
Why do people with families to feed and 20-30 year mortgages desire more than a week of job stability when it can take months to find work again? Is this a serious question?
It's a serious question. I have a family to feed and a 30-year mortgage, and I would much rather live in a place where I can be laid off with zero notice (and I have been a couple times). This makes it faster and easier to find a new job. A dynamic economy benefits everyone.
> "A dynamic economy benefits everyone"
Everyone is equal, just some are more equal than others. It benefits people who are highly skilled, clever, healthy, wealthy, young, with market-desirable skills in a market-desirable area, with no external family or life problems or responsibilities, and those who own and run companies, more than 95% of everyone else.
> "where I can be laid off with zero notice (and I have been a couple times). This makes it faster and easier to find a new job."
I don't see that follows; jobs can have probationary periods where employers can reject new hires quickly, while still having notice periods.
There's no need for either designated probationary periods or notice periods. Social safety nets are a good thing in general but should be provided directly by governments rather than by private employers obeying government mandates. Imposing any requirements on employers beyond basic health and safety rules slows down economic growth and hurts everyone in the long run.
Risk of having your life upended by someone else's whim causes stress, chronic stress on a population has a long term health cost. Imposing requirements on employers reduces stress and helps everyone in the long run.
Define health and safety rules, and then define the basic ones that are a subset of the entire ruleset.
lol
Yes, absolutely. If you have a family and a mortgage without first having enough savings to support those things through anomalies, you’re acting irresponsibly.
Nobody should be expecting their employer (or any second party, really) to be their income stream’s low pass filter. That’s what your savings account is for.
If you can’t support your family and mortgage through 6-9 months (minimum) out of savings, you shouldn’t have them because you can’t afford them.
(Also, mortgage term is irrelevant here, I’m not sure why you mention it. I would venture a guess that most 30 year mortgages end by being paid off at sale in less than 30 years. A 30 year mortgage doesn’t mean 30 years of mandatory payments, you can sell the place and move and pay off the mortgage at any time.)
The best part about living under the Sword of Damocles is that when it falls on someone else I can lecture them about how they deserved it. I can't imagine it would ever fall on me, because I don't deserve it.
> "you’re acting irresponsibly"
If things were arranged so that you didn't need the savings to cover the constant worry of being fired, then not having the savings wouldn't be acting irresponsibly. Americans need health insurance, not having health insurance is irresponsible. In countries where healthcare is free at the point of use, not having health insurance is not irresponsible. You're arguing a logical tautology.
> "(Also, mortgage term is irrelevant here, I’m not sure why you mention it."
As an example illustration that people do not live life in 1-day or 1-week increments, but in decades. People want to - and do - put down roots and settle in for a long time.
So what. People want a lot of things. Employers aren't responsible for providing those things.
Okay. Why not? This isn't an argument. You aren't making any argument.
Because, to me, this sounds good. Okay, so let's do it. Seems pretty simple and straightforward.
I mean, I want a 401K. Employers should provide that. Okay, then let's do that. They... aren't responsible? Don't we make the laws? Let's just force them to be responsible. Problem solved. I'm happy, you're happy, everyone is happy.
Do you, like, aspire to be exploited? Why are you advocating against your own best interests? Is this selflessness, or some strange form of self-harm I haven't been exposed to?
I aspire to be paid for my labor. Forcing employers to handle things like health insurance and retirement plans is just stupid. It's a waste of resources, detracts from their core mission, and slows down economic growth. I would prefer to handle those things myself without an employer getting involved.
> "slows down economic growth"
Is this a problem? Can I eat economic growth? I'd be pretty happy to have fewer cars in city and town centers, which would reduce things like death, injury, lung cancer, sleep disruption, and make foot journeys shorter and more pleasant, make biking easier. It would involve making and selling fewer cars and less executive compensation for the CEO of Ford, but that's about the worst reason to argue against it.
The problem is you're not explaining how this would be a preferable situation. Youre mistakenly assuming that if employers don't provide things like 401K match or whatever that instead you would pocket that money.
I have no reason to believe that to be the case. In fact, everything I've seen in my life makes me confident that is not the case. This reads like self-sabotage.
> If you have a family and a mortgage without first having enough savings to support those things through anomalies, you’re acting irresponsibly.
Or maybe it’s the collective us acting irresponsibly because how you get young people to start families if it’s irresponsible until biologically too late?
This presupposes the value of families and reproduction, especially those by young people who can’t afford them.
Tail is wagging the dog.
It's people who make the economy; if the economy makes it so there are no new people, it crumbles under its own weight - see every developed nation in the next 20-30 years when the social security system collapses, and the economy will follow soon after.
The nihilist take here would be that nothing matters, but money is more fake than people.
Next years article: When We Get Bikepacked
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.
The users were always the real service provider. All the value is in what they tell each other through their data. All Komoot does is aggregate it, supply the infra structure.
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.
Is someone even trying to open source that type of content (routes, pois)?
Open Street Map.
But otherwise this is really something that tourist organisations could champion, in combination with national mapping services. It's not like the routes are somehow obscure, or user-generated they're often national trails strung together. Switzerland Mobility is a good example of this. You can also hook official weather providers. The fact that we need private apps is bizarre.
I know of this eu effort for long distance bike routes: eurovelo.com, but it's government afaik, not open source. I don't think anyone is doing it.
This happened to pinkbike.com when they sold out; you need to view these sites and communities as vectors. https://bikepacking.com is good right now and there are a lot of legit contributors who really care about bikes. This will change so engage how you want with open eyes.
About Pinkbike Trailforks, I submitted some trails to their platform to find out users needed to be logged in to download the GPX, also to discover they had edited the GPX XML to force/steal their own copyright on top of mine.
bikepacking.com doesn't look like it's a for-profit company, in their about page.
It is. And it is a media company, not a "community".
The owners could still sell it though
bikepacking.com looks like it's a for-profit company based on their about page.
If anyone is interested i develop a free and open source alternative to komoot. I am currently using it for a 6 months trip in Europe : https://github.com/Akylas/alpimaps The idea of it is to be able to do everything offline, from map browsing to route computing, elevation profile... I am 99% sure i use the same library for route computing which is the amazing Valhalla computing framework. It propose multiple routes likes komoot, can show route stats, compute elevation profiles. But it can also do much more like compute different ascents or show slopes percentages without online data.
To use the full potential of AlpiMaps you need to generate your maps. I can generate them but i dont have the fundings to host the maps on a server (would need a lot of space and computing power to regularly generate maps per country, per regions ...). Instead i explain how to generate the maps for any region you see fit.
Also AlpiMaps has a very small user panel right now so it had many bugs i am sure (especially on iOS which i dont use daily). I am though 100% willing to fix/improve/add any feature. Just share/explain on github.
I am not often on HN so if you have any question please use github
The key feature for me -- and one reason why I've used Komoot, is to sync routes with my Wahoo bike computer.
I use Garmin so it may be different, but if Wahoo is like Garmin, you should be able to import a GPX file into their app and then tell it to sync to the computer, without needing Komoot to do the syncing. A bit more work but then you don't rely on Komoot directly to handle this for you.
Other than entirely community-driven projects (like https://wanderer.to/ mentioned in the article), are there company "forms" that legally protect against this kind of sell-out? Like non-profit or public-benefit-corporation?
If users are contributing the content of the app, it seems they should have a way to hold the owners accountable.
In the UK a CIC (Community Interest Company) is an option, which can legally oblige the company to act in the interest of "the community they serve". I think in the USA a benefit corporation might be similar.
Alternatively if Komoot was a worker co-op a sell-out would only be possible with consent from the employees. Consumer co-ops (where users can vote too) are also an option but with more caveats.
Honestly it can be quite difficult, generally speaking the best you can do is release the data in raw machine readable format with a permissive license.
Unless you already have large interested parties "bribing" (not technically of course) the group of controlling members tends to be a weakness of anything crowd sourced.
Especially since it is rarely cut and dry. If the finances aren't working out is it better to sell and keep the site online or not? Are intrusive pop ups begging for donations a better option? There isn't a singular true best option.
There are non-profit corporations which seem on their face to address the issue, but not knowing much about how they work, it seems to me that it is often too easy to convert them to for-profit corporations, as happened with Raspberry Pi. I think in Europe a lot of open source organisations are "foundations" which seem to operate on similar principles.
IMO non-profit or charitable status is a must for sustainable, open, community-driven projects. One of the dumbest takes I often hear is "this for-profit corporation was good and kind before financial capitalism came along". Financial capitalism was always there, the for-profit corporation is pretty much a pure product of financial capitalism. Don't believe any for-profit startup that tells you it is all about the social mission, it is not. Even if the company is European.
I’d you do some research into non-profits you’ll find there are tons of entirely legal ways to milk them for profit, legally.
Easiest? Pay yourself a nice fat salary and use most of the rest of the money to hire “nonprofit management companies” which may or may not be you or your friends in a cheap costume.
Wow, this is awesome! I had seen the little Strava plug-in, but didn’t realize it was something that was self host able!
First you would need a Data license of the GPX files (like Creative Commons) that prevent corporate sell out.
> Komoot, to them, was more than a job; it was a mission and purpose.
> 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.
Yes. Equity is ownership. Basically:
A for-profit company, owned by a few founders, takes your data and provides no data licensing terms or contractual guarantees. It’s legally speaking their data. Everyone else has basically no legal rights to anything on the ”platform”.
Then they attract both employees and users due to their good mission, ”we will never sell”. Surprise! They sell and leave everyone hanging.
From a EU perspective I get it. This is upsetting and surprising even. But from a US perspective this is just business as usual.
That privately owned data is a pile of gold that grew by the day, eventually big enough to buy out even the most passionate and stubborn founders. The company was never what the author expected it was, even before the sale – it was a projection of what they wanted it to be.
I applaud the efforts to fix the business model and lack of data sovereignty. The more people that ”wake up” and understand the flaws of current system, the better chances we can fix it.
The more I see Bending Spoons in the news, the more I realize how shitty of a company it aims to be.
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"
Say what you want of Bending Spoons, but they know what they're doing. They buy companies with a faithful user base that are losing money, and jack up prices to force the user base to show if they really are faithful. Then either they make money or they close the service, but it turns out it's the former more often than not.
For example, Evernote was losing money on server costs and after almost 20 years of existence did they really need a generous free tier to build up a user base? All that BS had to do for Evernote to make a profit was nerfing the free tier.
I agree. And Evernote has improved a lot since then.
Without 20/20 hindsight, it's hard to be so sure about the dividing line between one epoch and another as time marches on.
For instance it took until about 2010 to confirm that we were already headfirst into the Garbaceous Period by 2005, but it was just not that obvious at the time.
Before you know it the Enshittocene crept up without fanfare but the type of extinction it foments might not have been possible without the decline in conditions that came before.
I mean they own meetup which is one of the worst platforms that has failed to die in-spite of how terrible a product it is.
Network effects + inertia are a hell of a drug.
I am not a lawyer, but don't employees (and maybe even users) have a breach of contract claim here?
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.
You’ll have to hire a lawyer, and then hope yours is at least as tenacious as their expensive team of lawyers. It becomes quite a gamble, and one that can drag on for years costing you more and more until you’re broke.
The generative AI argument seems flawed.
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.
I interviewed at Komoot some 4-5 years ago and the people there were probably some of the worst I've ever interviewed with.
The task was to create a React app with no other dependencies other than vanilla Leaflet, which would allow you to draw routes on the map, and it should allow you to export the route as a GPX. I had 8 hours to do it.
They kept shitting over my solution for a good hour on the call for god knows what reason. Snarky remarks the whole time. If you're so dissatisfied, there's no point unless you take joy in doing so.
Knowing better today, I should've just thanked them and left the meeting.
As someone who always rejected Komoot and stuck to OpenStreetMap, and had to justify that decision multiple times: I'll play them the world's smallest violin.
This article is about people who liked their company and their job and lost it all. It's something to lack empathy, but I'm always amazed that there are people so full of themselves that they will go out there and proclaim that they don't give a shit about other people's fate, as if it was something to be proud about.
Okay, you're right, and I actually do give a shit about the employees. The comment was coming from the perspective of interacting with users and the app, and I didn't think about the employee-side of the story when I wrote it.
I am the same. I use osmand and sync the recorded tracks with syncthing to my desktop. Works for me but not comparable to sites like komoote of course.
Also there can be some really great country specific apps.
E.g. in Switzerland there's the free official Swiss Topo app with all the official maps incl. all the trail data. Can easily create/import/export tours.
Counterpoint: I used Komoot during the pandemic because it was the only app that would recommend new, interesting trekking routes every week in the small corner of the world where I was at the time. For my SO at the time, who was losing their mind due to cabin fever, Komoot was a literal lifesaver. No other app that I know of offered that.
I am therefore thankful to the old Komoot Team and I'm sad for them.
That's a bit like saying you don't need a guide book because you have a globe at home.
replace globe with a complete set of detailled maps.
And not at home but on your phone, with integrated GPS tracking.
OpenStreetMap doesn't have that. Services downstream from OpenStreetMap, like Komoot, OsmAnd, and Organic Maps do, but OpenStreetMap doesn't have any offline mode or anything (and only has very rudimentary GPS tracking on the website, for centering the map on your general location to make editing easier)
I see OpenStreetMap primarily as the dataset and community, not the website. So OsmAnd is in that same ecosystem for me and qualifies as "OpenStreetMap" in a wider sense of the term. For me, at least.
Whenever you read that your favourite app got purchased by Bending Spoons, run away as fast as you can.
There should be a tracker specifically for this.
Oh how I miss the old Paper by FiftyThree. Even have their stylus which is no longer supported by the app.
>In getting komooted, we feel the pain of not being represented in the companies we work for and the platforms we use. Komoot was supposed to be special, the darling of the German startup scene. A unicorn not only in terms of prospective valuation but also in its good working conditions and a progressive mission of enabling access to the outdoors.3 The owners’ assured their long-term commitment with the mantra “we won’t sell.”
Is there a legal way to ensure that a company adheres to claims like "we won't sell"? It seems that trusting companies with their word without any underwriting is foolish
Do users share some “responsibility” (for want of a better word) as well? If people were happy to share their experiences to personal, or at least smaller, groups rather than with some implicit desire to be widely acknowledged then a portion are of the use of these platforms would not exist. Keep a blog of your routes, shared with your friends - others can stumble upon it (obviously less easily these days) - or even go with your friends and don’t bother sharing it to the rest of the world. Your activity might not be the best by some metric, but who really cares? Some of my favourite trips have been those that have gone completely wrong, as compared to the original plan, and enjoying that with the people who care about you is far better in the long run.
Users are humans, you might as well say do humans share some responsibility.
As a user, nothing much will probably change. You will still be able to share your personal data with the world.
It’s a little overreaching to say because users did this , they are responsible for making the company popular and then getting sold off to a make money for the founders and then these users are responsible for the blight of the employees (who were also “users” probably).
I see a lot of love for Komoot but for me that died when their "top 10 ride in <region>" had a bunch of auto-generated routes linking points of interests, that tried to take me through horrible paths or 4 lane roads.
The author directly addresses this in the article. This was engagement farming driven by growth metrics.
Yeah; though I've always just ignored that and used it to create my own cycling routes and sync with my Wahoo bike computer. With this news I'll switch to Ride with GPS for that.
> The owners’ assured their long-term commitment with the mantra “we won’t sell.”
Vaguely reminds me of some company with the motto "don't be evil"
But Apple will never sell my data. They promised it.
Here is a bittersweet video of the self organized goodbye meeting of the ex Komoot team: https://youtu.be/qLJkK4Wn1HI
Just yesterday there was a thread about startups, compensation and what happens to promises when real money enters the picture.
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.)
Somewhat related: How bankruptcy laws mean many promises like "we won't misuse your data" become void in the name of extracting value for creditors. (The potential outcome affects decisions even if bankruptcy doesn't happen.)
So there's a system that needs to be reformed, it's not so much a matter of executives' personal attitudes.
Sounds like some kind of GDPR law is required so that companies don't get to treat people's private data as their own. It's ridiculous that in a bankruptcy they can sell off the data that belongs to others - companies should be treated as merely protecting PII data and can never own it.
Bending Spoons strikes again.
Podcast with them from October of last year: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
(Transcript available, search for and hit the "transcript" button.)
I wonder how they'll do long-term.
> Takeaways: The CTO of Bending Spoons found it completely normal that each team decides on their approach to testing: e.g. more mature products have a lot more automated tests like unit, integration, UI tests in place. New products or less mature ones will still have less.
No shit
That's actually both funny and sad, I recently used WeTransfer and wondered when their product got so bad. Turns out Bending Spoons bought them about a year ago.
I don't think enough people know about them and their profit-squeezing strategies.
From the article:
> I’ll argue that Komoot is neither a moral failure nor an outlier but the capitalist system of value extraction working exactly as intended for the platform owners.
If it wasn't for Bending Spoons it would have been another private equity firm. It's not about them being particularly evil, it's about living in a system that makes their existence inevitable.
The article is really really well written, beautiful! Thank you for making it available freely.
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!
Visa sponsorship isn't really a thing in Europe the way it is in the US. Article is written by a US person with limited understanding of Europe.
> Joshua Meissner is a young writer, photographer, and engineer who tours in ever-widening circles around his home in Berlin, Germany.
I don't think that's true. Not even sure what your point is
The users were always the real service provider. All the value is in what they tell each other through their data. All Komoot does is aggregate it, supply the infra structure.
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.
> Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do
Not all the time, see the success of GPL software. But yes, each community has to relearn the lesson: promises don't matter what matter is whether the data are 'open' or not.
Thanks to the GPL and open source software movement, we have these hype-capitalist FAANG corporations that reduce everything down to making a profit as fast as possible - or just dump it.
No long term goals, no guarantees for users, no job security, no ownership in a renters economy. Just take the data and make as much money with it as possible.
But that’s just one interpretation, perhaps it will have a happy end. If not, I’m sure there will be an app to fix it.
I've been using Komoot a lot for bike tours in Germany and never have been particularly happy with it. It served the core purpose of telling me where to go but there were so many obvious flaws about it that I sometimes wondered if the people at Komoot actually even use it themselves.
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
> 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.
Something something paradox of tolerance. I don’t know exactly what type type of conditions should apply to open source data, but this shouldn’t be permitted by the license. I’m leaning more and more towards that permissive licensing (and their popularity) is basically destroying open source ”public goods”.
I’m not anti market by any means. You could provide a service and get paid for well… good service. The problem is the ”digital enclosure” where they own the data, and the social graphs. If the value of the service goes down, the value of their accumulated data remains, and can be sold as private property.
Now that copyright is near dead, due to the fair use loophole for AI, it’s getting much more adversarial, fast. Data will become much more fragmented again.
> 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?
Strava has this.
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216917387-Addin...
Poor one out for local Mitfahrzentrale!
And ze Mitesszentrale [1]
To be fair, komoot already had plenty of dark patterns in place to produce growth and conversion.
Such as what? I found it a very fair deal, you can have functionality for your area for free, which will likely be good enough for 70%+ of people, but if you want larger regions you have to pay. It seems to me a totally fair and transparent pricing structure, without resorting to filling the app with ads.
The people who need the paid portion of the app are also likely enthusiasts, and in that light the pricing seems fair too.
A practical observations independent from the komoot future.
In the past I switched to komoot from osmand because it produced better trail running routes. In both apps you set some anchor points to get a gpx, but osmand often sticks to the shortest path between them (often boring roadways) while komoot chose scenic trails where available. Also osmand heats up my phone significantly both then when doing pathfinding and when just drawing a complicated piece of terrain.
I recently discovered a new feature in the Strava subscription: you just "draw" a route how you like it and the app glues it to the nearest available track. Even though komoot may have resolved ambiguities better, the strava ui is just faster to get what you want, so I switched to it.
IMO the Strava UX overall is not pleasant, I don't like their business model, and this is the second useful feature in the subscription ever since heatmaps. But it's genuinely good and I'll stick to it until a better alternative comes around. I still pay for osmand though and I hope it survives. Strava doesn't work offline for one thing so the first thing I do is exporting the gpx to osmand.
The base premise was already bent: sell access to community-uploaded material. I know Google Maps does this on a much grander scale but at least the data is more or less accessible for everyone.
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.
There is openstreetmaps of course and osmand as a navigation app. There is also a biking specific project related to openstreetmaps. None of it is as polished as komoot of course. Far from it. This sell-out was totally predictable. Why the outrage? Do people never learn? It's so frustrating.
I think it is fair to be annoyed that crowd sourcing is used to enrich a select few.
Honestly the best course of action is to let it die. $300M is enough money that losing the user base would be enough for similar things to stop happening.
I’ve been using https://cycle.travel for a similar purpose. I may not be quite as polished, but it does its job, and it’s developed by a person from the OpenStreetMap community.
*waves
(I've just commissioned a designer for a bit of a refresh, so it should get a _little_ more polished soon!)
> 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.
Well, there are still costs involved (not just financial but also labour), and someone has to pay them. We are lucky to have a number of great open source and community-driven projects where people do contribute time and money to make data freely available to everyone, but it's not guaranteed. If there aren't enough people who are willing and able to contribute, or the costs get too great, the project will founder.
OpenStreetMap seems like it is already doing this to an extent, or at least is a good platform on which something like this could be built. Hopefully this saga encourages more people to contribute that way.
I was also Komooted - by Komoot. They brought out ViewRanger, who I had paid money to provide a service. Month by month they removed the features and access that I had paid for, and made the app less useful. I am not sure I can feel any pity for Komoot, an organisation that met a fate down a path it seemed to choose.
I think that’s Outdooractive which is a Komoot competitor
Caveat: I'm not very familiar with Komoot. I only see it as something that locks seemingly valuable data behind a login and a proprietary application.
> 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.
That's why I am so reluctant to participate in "community-driven" projects anymore. I don't even mind people making money from my free contributions. But if they eventually sell it to a bunch of private equity piranhas, which would just cannibalize it for spare parts, suck out all the brand value and leave the carcass rotting - why should I be a part of it? I am glad to contribute my work to the society, with no compensation but feeling good about it. But enriching some random private equity dude and then letting it all burn - why bother?
Can someone explain me this: the article is basically about the dedicated employees who now feel betrayed by the company. But why would anyone be emotionally involved with a for-profit private company that appropriates user-generated data? Outside of specific cases and normal employer-employee relationship, I can understand being dedicated to something if it contributes to a "greater good" in some form. Condition for this in this case is that user data is open (at least for private use) or the app is open.
I’d love a founder perspective on this. If they kept saying “we won’t sell” and then sell, is that just plain breaking all promises and selling out, as this article suggests? Or was there more going on?
30M euro each is a lot of money. Do you need more reasons?
Any time anyone says they will never do X, they are saying they will never do X unless they are presented with a very very compelling offer. This is generally true in life and not just in business.
Even if they did break a promise, and there's some contractual oomph behind it... the company responsible is separate from the former owner.
Promises only engage those that believe them.
Everyone has their price. Was the promise legally binding? Was the promise making money?
Just another example of degradation of trust within the western economies. Trust only money and you’ll be on the right side of history - unfortunately.
Trust, moral responsibility and kindness aren’t profitable - in terms of capital.
I think that the stylized picture here is:
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 never understood the appeal of "social" trail discovery when everyone can open up a map of the area and plan their own route.
Until capitalism is fixed or replaced with a better system (not communism) it will happen. This is a very popular area of interest for general public, with millions using it. Such service should be run by government. And everyone laughs. But that’s the idea behind government and society. Not just collect taxes and provide basic services. the ineffective and outdated democratic system that needs update for modern times.
Any accumulation of power, especially government, becomes a target of corruption. Every single country and post has eventually proven that. The real innovation would be to prevent abuse of power systematically, and thus restore trust systematically. Anything else is just promises waiting to be broken.
A similar thing happened with the mountain bike-centric mapping app TrailForks. It was created by pinkbike.com and, while a decent app, gets msot of its value from the huge set of largely community sourced GPS data. They then went subscription for most functionality as PinkBike sold to the Outside media company. This happened quite a while ago but a large part of the community is still very upset - including me.
I'll never forget this. Tons of riders uploaded their rides, charted trails, routes, uploaded pictures... Without any of that data the app would have zero value. And if any of those riders knew that they'll do a rug pull later nobody would've upload anything. So they had to do it with a secret plan to introduce subscription abruptly, locking pretty much everyone out with a subscription and trying to justify this with "data costs money". Then they've packaged this data, along with pinkbike.com and and sold this out to outside.com. I would understand if they've say contributed the user trails to eg openstreetmaps or allowed it to be downloaded, but no, they've just taken what was yours and sold it.
This stuff should be illegal. And f them for doing it.
The more I see how businesses work, the more I think that every employee should be guaranteed a certain amount of shares on selling out, without an end date, and not requiring the employee to be working in the company at the time.
Not monopoly money options, categories, valuations etc, but a guaranteed percentage of the entire price. The same privileges that the founders & C-suite has.
Well that sucks for the users too. If i knew this would be the outcome i wouldn't have contributed anything to the platform.
But you should have known given it is such a common pattern.
Reading this, I was getting vibes from another book I read recently: "Less Is More" by Jason Hickel, which I can recommend. A lot of the topics in this article like enclosure are covered in the book, with complementary conclusions drawn.
This piece ignores some potentially critical points. Having large amounts of capital to carelessly throw at organizations that do not have sustaining cash flow is a recent thing. Zero interest rates are casting their shadow here. Also, with modern analytical tools it is relatively easy to see, for potential investors if not the general public, roughly how profitable or not any given entity is. This makes growth dependent plays hard to hide.
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.
The manifesto reads very leftish with many radical weasel words, as if the alternative is fantastic. Without a capitalistic structure they would have been long ago been headless chicken.
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.
Feature not a bug, ticket closed.
tried komoot and strava, there's a flood of subscription pop upswhen you use the app, i want to use it first to see if there's any value in purchasing it. evernote is another example of this desperation to get revenue.
I seriously didn't expect to find one of the best critiques of capitalism I've ever read on a site about Bikepacking. It's got almost everything one needs to know about the enclosure process and the relationship between platform companies and their users, all nicely described through an example that the Bikepacking community can really feel by just having been owned.
In my opinion, all the criticism surrounding Komoot is just envy. The founders worked hard for over 15 years and have now made a well-deserved exit. People are just jealous. Period.
> Unsustainable growth is not just ideology but an imperative, and it’s blatantly unsustainable. In a 2023 interview, Hallerman revealed that Komoot’s revenue was roughly split between recurring subscriptions and new users making one-time payments for map regions, with ad revenue making up a small remainder. That means they had to keep signing new users and expanding into new markets to stay in business. Komoot relied on continual growth in a finite world—an impossibility. What cannot continue forever is, by definition, unsustainable.
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.
They had 250 employees, plus paid influencers, for a (predominantly) cycle routing app used in Europe. That’s why it was unsustainable. A realistic sized business would have been sustainable.
Which is why I mentioned the issue of scale. Seems like you are agreeing with me?
Absolutely yes. Just expanding on the point that the "scale" in question was how Komoot chose to run their operations, not the size of customer base addressed. Bending Spoons have, quite adroitly, figured that they can serve 90% of the customer base with 10% of the operations costs.
I will never understand why businesspeople consider it a betrayal when business happens.
If it’s not in the contract, it’s not something you should rely on.
Who says it wasn't in the contract? If they had a terms of service that promised to never sell and then revised it to remove that clause is that legal? Probably not but good luck fighting it.
The problem is legal suits over complex contract law are way too expensive for impacted people to legitimately seek enforcement in cases like this. Especially since courts hate non-monetary enforcement and so at best would allow some pittance of money as a replacement.
Founder here of a 300 person startup. It's appalling and infuriating to read stories like these.
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.
How many offers have you rejected so far? What were the amounts?
When founders sell, it's rarely to end up making the same amount of money they would make if they kept ownership. And once you've sold you have no control.
I've been doing this for 13 years. You can use your imagination :)
"Join us as we build ... to do ...! Our mission ..."
There is no effing mission. Build, sell, get rich. That's the "mission".
I've been a long-time Komoot user; not anymore.
Welcome to the capitalist world I guess. Not only does this happen all the time, it's the goal of most tech founders.
More than that, you won't succeed and your company will probably go in the dustbin of nice failed projects unless some scalable explicit monetization is the goal.
But on the other hand it makes business sooooo much simpler: have an idea, create much hype and excitement using marketing and social media, hire some influencers to promote your product, create website that promises a life changing difference if you use my product, hire a bunch of people to build something, wait and the sell to the highest bidder.
Being caught at a concert with the head of HR can be easily turned into a PR success, just add money.
No long term goals necessary, no employee retention programs, no social responsibility. Just pure and beautiful monies in the bank.
Well, no, there are many grifters who do that, and only very few of them succeed. But yes, a successful product is just 5% or so of a successful business.
This is half right IMO. I'd agree with the first part of the article: when you have a growth-at-all-costs company, which is then sold to someone who wants to control costs to crank out the maximum profit, then users are inevitably going to lose out. It was always entirely predictable that this was the way Komoot would go - lots of us commented way before the Bending Spoons acquisition that 250 salaries (never mind the influencers) was a lot to pay from a routing app.
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.)
What a bizarre article.
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).
Just look at what private equity did to British Water companies, Toy'R'Us and any number of other organizations. Do private equity companies perform any useful social purpose? Or are they all wreckers, asset strippers and carpet baggers?
Private equity can sometimes save failing businesses unfortunately there aren't a lot of businesses that go public out of private equity so it is difficult to measure their effectiveness.
Since after all the only time private equity is interested in going public is unicorns.
Freaconomics had a podcast episode on private equity a while back. I don’t quite remember the conclusions, probably mixed. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-private-equity-firms-pl...
In the 80s the abuse was concentrated in the management layer of companies - executives would store cash and buy private jets and lavish properties for the “company” leadership to enjoy. Private equity trimmed that fat at the time.
But presumably all that fat instead went to the private equity company instead?
Public investors have an expectation of not losing their money. Thus public companies have to have either expectation of growth or strong cash flow to feed dividends. If a company has neither of those, Private Equity either turns it around or sells it for parts. They are the vultures of the business world. They buy the company with debt that its cash flows are supposed to pay back, and profit from the tax deduction on the debt and whatever is left in the end. A company is a machine where you put in 1 dollar and it comes back with more than 1. Employees get paid with steady reliable income called salary before investors do until the machine runs out. By law the board has to pay payroll if the employees are not compensated, or the board is personally liable for the salaries. They also have an inside view with how the company is doing better than any investor. They can and will bail when something goes funky. Any equity over is the perk of taking risk by investing in the company. The stress of wondering whether you will make payroll or have a business left after you have worked so hard to create and sweat so hard to work it is so deep that few would take it on - thus you have to give them proportionate carrot to look forward to or there would be no jobs.
Are there any examples of private equity improving a company?