To add three more just off the top of my head. Maybe we can do a more thorough analysis of different privacy tools over the past 10 years if we want more data to establish this pattern, but it does feel rather self-evident to me.
- ownCloud raised VC funds in 2014, had to be forked to Nextcloud in 2016 as a result.
- Wire raised VC money in 2019, and that same year ditched some of their privacy policies and reorganized as a US company
- Rocket.Chat was momentarily looking like a promising new player in the Matrix ecosystem, raised VC funding last year and dropped support for federation.
The only difference is that I can’t see a way that the other two were predictable. Some things will just happen and we will have to just work with that, although I will note that we very intentionally never recommended Simple Mobile Tools!
However, as far as I can tell VC-funded startups follow a very predictable schedule of events, and waiting them out feels prudent to me.