Personally, I don't think too uncharitably of Patreon's founders; I genuinely don't get the impression that they started the service because they thought it was a way to make oodles of money, but that they genuinely saw it as doing good for small creators. But I think they let themselves be talked into the idea that they could be the Next Big Thing if only they took enough VC money to follow the "ramp up, get big, and then figure out how to pay for it" model that a lot of startups during the last decade took. The vast majority of those startups failed while they were still small, and the vast majority of the rest only ended up "successful" by selling out to someone else before the bills started coming due... but that's not the story that most of us wanted to hear back then.
Personally, I don't think too uncharitably of Patreon's founders; I genuinely don't get the impression that they started the service because they thought it was a way to make oodles of money, but that they genuinely saw it as doing good for small creators. But I think they let themselves be talked into the idea that they could be the Next Big Thing if only they took enough VC money to follow the "ramp up, get big, and then figure out how to pay for it" model that a lot of startups during the last decade took. The vast majority of those startups failed while they were still small, and the vast majority of the rest only ended up "successful" by selling out to someone else before the bills started coming due... but that's not the story that most of us wanted to hear back then.