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… ... But we sustainably grow primarily by selling cloud/on-prem self-hosting licenses to enterprises, govs, and data companies to our GPU graph viz server. Thankfully, after years of grinding, that business is growing well. As a natural experiment, our alternate SaaS hosting revenue does support a tiny team... but not the majority of our team. Most of our innovation cycles would disappear without our self-hosting license revenue. There's some cross of winning lottery ticket, SaaS market profile, and technical defensibility getting missed in the article that I can't put my finger on. Our launches of Louie.AI + GFQL are changing the OSS viability story in our particular case (I'd love to chat w successful founders here!), so I'm not saying it can't work, but our experience to get to this point makes me worried for new founders reading the article.