By VC standards we should either "conquer the world or die in a fire" and neither of these are spiritually compelling for me. I never wanted a company I just wanted a home. At this point we have a large and loyal paid community, we build tons of features for them (I think we did >30 releases this year) and they're pretty happy. We have enough revenue to fund tons of crazy R&D and our models are still the best by the metrics we care about (how the images look and how fun it is to make things). We have a huge backlog of exciting things to make our models way better. Zero risk. We did all this with no investors. Honestly, it feels like we are successful. The next metric of success I think about most about is now that we have "all I ever wanted" in terms of a big well funded R&D lab with cool people free to work on whatever we want... Can we now build something that would make baby David proud? And can we tell bold stories about a human future that people want to be a part of? I think we can.
