France here. I knew some Evernote developers and PO. They were blowing money and adding features like there’s no tomorrow. When there was indeed no tomorrow at Evernote, they used their unemployment benefits from our state and worked in parallel, which was legally dodgy and ethically out of the line. They created a consultancy which almost exclusively works on state-derived funding, a bit like half of science projects in USA depend on Darpa, except it was education money which they used to invent some AI model to find at-risk pupils that every teacher could qualify anyway, but you know, AI+education makes a sexy startup. They only got public funding and customers who themselves were publicly funded.

Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone.

Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.