Totally agree. Investors are the worst at pushing this. And they do it with a lot of psychological tactics. We’ve been really fortunate to have great lead investors who are available to us and support us too. I think it’s very rare.
We (OP here - Estimote) have a significant team in Europe doing just that. Working on sensor networks. Interestingly our customers are in the US and we went through YC and have mostly Silicon Valley investors.
As far as winning out vs competitors, efficiency can be key. There is no question there.
One of the things about frontier tech (autonomous, AR, sensor networks, ML) is that many people are funded and do it too early. So they need to somehow last.
Most startups spend the money within two years or less. It’s programmed into the psychy. A Sequoia would never admit this but they want you to spend your money fast and move on to the next thing if you aren’t growing fast enough. Buying one more year can be crucial.
Actually every VC I’ve spoken to freely admits this. It’s “grow big, fast, or try again later”
That’s why it’s a horrendous idea to take VC funding if you’re not looking to spend it fast, and take huge risks. If you want to be capital efficient, do that, then raise when you know you can spend the money and the ROI is “guaranteed” (meaning you have a successful sales and execution engine), because then you can do it on your terms.
Otherwise, you raise, lose control, and are beholden to VCs for your next dollar. Good luck with that negotiation; they have the leverage.
Profit and revenue gives startups leverage, in nearly every way.
I need to build my v2 and am avoiding accepting angel funding from an investor who wants 30% for $250k. Sales are not stopping at this point. I am using stripe for all sales. Do you have a suggestion for me to get a loan? I need $150k to build v2 AND keep the lights on for say 12-14 months. Thanks.
I'd tell the investor they can do 5-10% at that, or better, a convertivle note w 20% discount and $3-5M cap and (A) pointing to YC and (B) pointing out no follow on investor would join if they did higher -- after seed/A/B, only 50-60% of co should be sold. If a real investor followed, you'd be stuck paying legal fees to wash out the angel investor.
This all assumes a scalable startup, not a consultancy etc
I agree. But I'm on WP and the sales are not slowing down.I need to build out offWP to a web app. Keep the WP version running while standing up the web app build. But the engineers want $12,500 for 100 hours/sprint for both. I get a designer + Engineer. I'm thinking just pay enough to get to a web app with maybe 2 sprints $12,500 X 2 = $25k. Start making sales and then use the sales to keep paying if needed to increase sales / expand add new features from customer feedback.
I applied to tiny seed i don't think they want me. I filled out the Lighter capital form today (no reply) i think i applied to earnest capital , kabbage no. MainVest never heard of them but i am gonna look and point9 same. looking for money is taking time away from making sales and improving the product. I think i "may" be able to swing it from sales!
Aren’t some of the frontier tech investments to also understand the space, where the tech is currently at, and what team members to back or grab when the space is ready? To me, it would make sense for Sequoia to allocate some capital to these situations in order to capitalize on when the tech is ready to move from frontier to viable?
I am confused by this—-aren’t ASICs the costliest option until some (high) number are fabricated and put into use?
If FPGAs can implement these changes efficiently—more efficiently than cpu miners—-and be re-synthesized to implement further changes, doesn’t that advantage them?
Thanks yes I totally meant scale. Main cost of new ASIC chips is design and fabrication. Only serve a very narrow specific purpose and all that cost is sunk. But after that, unit production chip cost is negligible.
"How would you decide when to use an FPGA and when to create an ASIC? That depends. FPGAs waste a large amount of silicon compared with an ASIC, so the cost floor, which depends in large part of the surface area of silicon required for the chip, is often an order of magnitude higher than you’d want it to be. But fabricating an ASIC isn’t cheap either."
ASICs are only costly from an R&D perspective. Which means once someone has all the R&D, they can be a monopoly and get really cheap hashrate, and since they are an incumbent monopoly it's much harder for another company to step in and complete.
I mean, a serious FPGA lab would simply keep their FPGA techniques secret until they build a sizable advantage. There's a lot of tech that would be built up: a custom memory controller, an implementation of various Cryptocoin PoW systems, and of course, the Bill of Materials for the ideal power-efficiency for various designs, etc. etc.
Something like an FPGA + Interposer to HMC would be a huge R&D effort, and just as centralizing.
BTW: None of the designs I've talked about are strictly speaking commodity. They'd require at a minimum, custom PCBs. Maybe more advanced techniques for the best technology (again: Custom Interposer to HMC + FPGA interface + all the Verilog / VHDL code to make it happen).
As long as an FPGA-based shop kept their FPGA PCB secret, as well as their code secret, and their Device Drivers secret (You'd probably run Linux / Windows to talk to the FPGA over PCIe) then they're basically going to be ahead of the rest of the competition. Eventually, the competition would catch up, but a constant R&D effort into newer designs (ie: testing HBM2 vs HMC vs RLDRAM3 vs QDRIV, building relationships with suppliers, etc. etc.) could lead into a sustainable business edge.
Heck, early on in Monero's life, some dude got to like 40%+ of the entire network's Hash Rate by simply writing better CPU code and keeping it for himself, and then spending hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on AWS: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone...
> By the 14th of May, we were 45% of the total hashing power on the coin. Things started to get a little exciting
FPGAs would be that on steroids. There are way fewer Verilog / FPGA engineers. It also would require custom PCBs and hardware engineers to make it all happen. I wouldn't even know who to ask to design an Hybrid Memory Cube interposer and to fit it on an FPGA for example.
Seems like a lot of room to innovate with technology, and I bet Amazon is banking on that.
This reminds me a lot of Amazon marketplace, where they took the core service (Amazon e-commerce) and opened it up to others without holding inventory. They can use other people’s orders to gain even more scale and drive costs down lower in the distribution network, commoditizing the complement layer (delivery, in this case UPS and FedEx).
Analog circuitry is the most complex in chip design. It's part art part science. At the end of the day radio waves are traveling through the air and a lot of things can go wrong.
Author of the piece here. Thanks for the perspective. Note it's interesting that Tesla was able to start out (with a fraction of Apple's resources) by building their first car on the Lotus platform. The mechanical stuff is interestingly not expensive compared to technology R&D at all. Which makes sense when you think about modern manufacturing and materials.
We have a team of data engineers in data science and PhD's measuring all the signals we receive from the beacons and performing algorithms (e.g. trilateration, least squared etc) and combining this with positioning signals we can process based on positioning of the device. The trick is to account for different devices, different antenna placement on models etc. So over time we build a database that improves accuracy based on usage. Regarding people being present, we can account for that if we predict that signals are reflecting differently based on estimated density. These are super challenging problems so we have a team dedicated to it, and iterate quickly.
