Raising hundreds of millions of dollars for a built, profitable product with a tight scope and millions of users usually means the product scope will increase as part of their new remit to drive shareholder return. If people liked the existing tightly scoped product, and for password management simpler is better for many users, this investment indicates the product will necessarily move away from the existing use cases as a condition of accepting the funds.

They will probably invest in business integration/sales. TBH we need more password management in this world and not less. Increasing scope in enterprise domain means reaching users who would otherwise just use post it's for the passwords.

I think lotsofpulp is on to something, but the other major possible answer that comes to mind is moving more into the enterprise space. If that happens, it'll no longer be for "us" because if they succeed, they'll inevitably make much more money in that space and be all but forced to pivot harder into it. That'd be much less of a betrayal than selling more data, but it would still mean that slowly but surely it would simply focus less and less on single user concerns.

IMHO it isn't intrinsically impossible to serve both enterprise and single customers, but the business people will always be internally grumbling about the slight additional expense that doesn't have a good ROI vs improving their enterprise product, and the marketing team will want every other screen to be an ad to upgrade to enterprise which discriminating users will rapidly get tired of. It'd take strong and even a bit quirky executive leadership to overcome those issues. Not impossibly strong, but strong.

Edit: Also, they don't have the option of slathering their app with generalized ads. Running ads in the context of a password manager would be insane and lose all their thought-leader users in a heartbeat, permanently. So that door is not open to them.

1Password is a SaaS utility that provides a tool for generating and storing login info and other sensitive information.

To me; that’s immensely valuable, but it’s solved for most by a combination of just using the same passwords or, on iPhones, iCloud Keychain.

Now some folks have dumped the better half of a billion into a tool I pay about $35/year for and is basically feature complete. They’ll want a return on their investment. How do you expect 1Password will give it to them?

> but it’s solved for most by a combination of just using the same passwords

That's not what I'd call a "solution"

Neither would I but they do it anyway. I’ll convince anyone I can to just pull the trigger on 1Password, but not many do.

Because the need to meet ROI always leads to selling data.

Doesn't always lead to that but...now that the company has these investors who demand returns the company no longer has alignment with the customer. The needs of the customer and the needs of the investors are in direct opposition.

Only Sith deal in absolute slippery slope fallacies. Besides, this is a paid product with steady MRR, there's plenty of growth to be had without compromising the product. The recent integration with Fastmail for one-click creation of disposable addresses is a great example.