Ente is a company being built with longevity as its foremost priority.
When I first pitched my idea of starting a "photos company" to my friends, their first questions were about longevity, not privacy. Will Ente be around 50 years from now when they aren't? Because a strong reason for clicking photographs is posterity – so our next generation can inherit and relive the memories we shared.
These conversations were influential in laying the foundation on top of which we built Ente. We learned that while some of us care about privacy, almost everyone cares deeply about longevity.
Longevity has since been the #1 principle in Ente's unwritten manifesto.
Longevity is why Ente
- is fully open source
- has not raised venture capital
- keeps 3 copies of your data, one of them in an underground fallout shelter
- has grown slowly, sustainably over the last 5 years
- offers features like Legacy
These are just some of our visible decisions. There are many more invisible ones across hiring, product, technology, and marketing where we've optimized for longevity over short-term wins.
We understand that not every factor that determines the fate of a company is under our control. We have to be mindful to adapt to external factors, like geopolitics.
Back in 2022 when we relocated Ente to the US, we felt that it was the best base for a resilient internet company. While this industry is less than 100 years old, US is currently the headquarters for most that are likely to outlive our generation. This is not by accident. Their political and economic framework protects and rewards the free market.
The free market is a mixed bag, but for a company like Ente, the good outweighs the bad because it encourages longevity. Among other things, it creates economic incentives for individuals to commit to the future of the company, even in the absence of founders.
One could argue that companies like Ente should be led by mission alone, but if that were true in practice, we wouldn't be witnessing the downfall of stalwarts that shaped the internet.
Lately the geopolitical landscape of our planet has been volatile, and this has created fear, uncertainty and doubt around "American technology". Concerns range from the morality of paying taxes towards an ideology one does not identify with, to the risk of sanctions on these technologies.
If you are familiar with early-stage accounting, you would know that ramen-profitable companies like Ente typically reinvest all their earnings into building a better product – often leaving little to no profit to tax.
As for sanctions, as much as we hate to admit it, the internet is centralized. If the US were to impose sanctions on technology, it would break the free market, and damage trillion dollar companies that influence policies themselves to act as the backbone of the internet. This is an unlikely outcome.
Ente is prepared for unlikely outcomes.
Apart from the US, we also have a registered office in India. This is a nation that is a work in progress, but this is also a nation that holds a safety-first stance in geopolitics. Moving the company back to where we are is just a few signatures. Moving the company to a different address is a few more signatures. Having relocated once, we are familiar with the steps, and better equipped to repeat.
The overarching idea is that open source, remote-first companies like Ente are portable. In the event of a tech blackout, we might need to find non-American alternatives to some pieces of our infrastructure (like payments), but we wouldn't be alone and we will have our lights on.
All this is not to say Ente will last for eternity. All empires fall. Our job is to see this through to the next generation, and in the process leave behind some beautiful FOSS.