@whatsup, you said,

It makes sense for the largest stakeholders to determine the direction of a project.

Maybe that's the problem. When you start a project, it looks like it's the wrong way to get the biggest stakeholders first to decide what the functions should look like. Wouldn't it be wiser, if you want to create a good product/service, to really want to bring this product to its full potential first?

Everything seems to be the other way around here. First the investors and then the development up to the product maturity? That would be like putting a seedling in the soil and pumping it so full of fertilizer that it can yield a lot very quickly, although the fruit tastes much better when the process has enough time to get to the true goodness.

Take for example a service like WordPress or deepl.com. The former was an open source project and the developers were interested in the product and how to do it so well that you could be satisfied with it yourself.

Along the way, many minds have tried to make it good, just like with Linux. At deepl. I don't know how open source the whole thing was. But it was, similar to facebook and youtube, in an initially slow growth. While the users tried it, the developers learned to make changes and the programmers learned to write the code.

The investors came later: A company that wants to make first-class products chooses its investors well. These selected investors don't exist here. Anyone can join in and then say that they are an investor. On the basis of this logic, wouldn't one have to say that no matter how big a share someone holds, he should have the same voting entitlement?

Why should those with many shares be wiser than those with few? Or vice versa? It has nothing to do with intelligence, how much or how little I have. It's more about how well you want to make a product and whether you can imagine that the later beneficiaries will like it so much that it will inevitably develop into a mass market.

I find one can better rely on the intelligence of the many interested and curious ones instead of that of the largest stakeholders.