Mark Pilgrim put up an excellent post: Placating people with options, which touches upon a reoccuring conversation about Deki. Like most of his posts, the comments thread is immensely interesting, especially this comment:

I think Steven Den Beste summed it up best when he wrote “… if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren’t also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.”

Unfortunately one never hears about people not complaining, so it's hard to stand in the face of all the complaints. Anyways, one of the coolest aspects of working on a piece of software like Deki is that I know that it not only improves the lives of people using it, but it also is a tool of social change: it promotes open collaboration and the notion of transparency. To me, it's one of the pleasures of being at MindTouch: the software I influence is a reflection of my beliefs and my ideas. The decisions I help shape can force organizations to change.

In the grand scheme of things, writing has always been very important to the human condition (My one piece of advice to anybody in the world: start writing a blog). The printing press was a monumental achievement in letting written ideas disseminate more rapidly. And the Internet makes the cost of these written ideas close to zero. Now it's about removing the singular voices and replacing them with a chorus of voices, which is where I believe we kick in. This is the social impact we can leave on the world.

To me, that is the essence of a great startup: the ability to impact the world around you, spur social change and to actually improve lives. I think that's what a lot of start-ups miss; they're so concerned with how to turn a buck that they lose sight of their original vision.