The offer arrived, as these things apparently do, in a very short email. It came from a senior executive at one of the largest technology companies in California, and it proposed a figure with nine zeroes for Lanternfish, a journaling and planning app with a devoted following and a staff of twenty-three. Beatriz Lemos read it on her phone in a queue at a pastelaria in Campo de Ourique. She remembers finishing her coffee before forwarding it to her co-founder.
Tomasz Wierzbicki was in Kraków visiting his parents. He read the email twice, then called Lemos from his childhood bedroom. Neither of them, they both insist, was seriously tempted. They spent the following week drafting a polite refusal, which went through eleven versions before it was sent. The executive replied within an hour, raising the offer. They declined again. Then, in the most surprising move of all, they told their users what had happened.
Lanternfish began six years ago as a side project, a digital notebook that borrowed its structure from the paper planners Lemos had kept since childhood. It grew slowly, largely by word of mouth, and it has never taken venture capital. Users pay a modest annual subscription, and the company has been profitable since its third year. Its offices occupy the top floor of a tiled building near the Estrela gardens, and nobody works on Fridays.
Enough, defined
What makes the founders unusual is not that they rejected a fortune, but that they had already decided, years earlier, how much growth was enough. Lemos keeps a single sheet of paper pinned above her desk on which the company's long-term ambitions are written in pencil. Revenue targets are there, but so are limits: a maximum headcount of forty, no advertising, no selling of user data, and a commitment to keep the app running for at least twenty years.
Selling would have been the end of the thing we actually wanted, which was simply to keep making it. — Beatriz Lemos
Their stance has made them minor celebrities in a certain corner of the technology world, where burnout and acquisition fatigue are common complaints. Founders visit Lisbon to ask for advice, and Wierzbicki now spends part of each month answering their emails. His counsel is usually unglamorous. Work out your costs honestly, he tells them, charge a fair price, and resist hiring anyone whose job would exist only to justify further growth.
Not everyone is persuaded. An investor in London, who asked not to be named, described their decision as sentimental and warned that small companies rarely survive long in markets dominated by giants. Lemos has heard this before. She points out that several apps acquired by large firms over the past decade have since been shut down, their users scattered. Independence, she argues, is itself a feature, and increasingly one that customers will gladly pay for.
On the afternoon I visited, the team was gathered on the roof terrace for a weekly lunch of grilled sardines and salad, with the red roofs of Lapa tumbling toward the river below. Somebody had pinned the original offer to a corkboard beside the door, the figure carefully blacked out. Lemos says it serves as a reminder, though she will not say of what. Perhaps simply that the door was open, and they chose to stay.
