> 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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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 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 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’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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
---
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/app/id605127860
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re technically right. But it’s disappointing that that’s the normal state of affairs.
Why?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Here is a bittersweet video of the self organized goodbye meeting of the ex Komoot team: https://youtu.be/qLJkK4Wn1HI
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.
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.
HN Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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 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 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’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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Feature not a bug, ticket closed.
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?
Promises only engage those that believe them.
Even if they did break a promise, and there's some contractual oomph behind it... the company responsible is separate from the former owner.
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.
> 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.
> 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"
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.
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.
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...