My understanding is that VCs actively encourage the behavior of “grow then figure out the business model.” Of course, if you are a free product at scale, the most simple solution is to start selling data, since it avoids the challenge of trying to get consumers to pay for something they “believe” is free. This obviously leads to free products that are less and less in the interest of the user, but it’s very very difficult to convince someone who got a thing for free that it can’t continue forever that way, even if there are obvious costs that must be converted to supply the free good. This is especially true if the competitors are offering free based on selling data. There’s definitely an interesting and challenging future in finding ways to scale in spaces that are currently dominated by “free” in exchange for data and privacy.