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Plenty of thermostats are sold per year. Certainly enough to sustain the many existing vendors. E.g. I'm in the UK. There are 25 million homes here and pretty

Plenty of thermostats are sold per year. Certainly enough to sustain the many existing vendors. E.g. I'm in the UK. There are 25 million homes here and pretty much every home has a thermostat. If I assume that a thermostat lasts 20 years so that about 5% must be replaced in a given year that means a market of 1.25 million thermostats every year. Every DIY and plumbing supplies shop sells thermostats, so they must sell.

scarface74 7y ago
How many companies sustain entire businesses just based on selling thermostats? If Nest captured the entire market and sold $225 thermostats, that's less than a $300 million a year revenue in an entire year. That doesn't take into account wholesale prices. What does the net income look like?
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago
  Being sustainable does not mean being a unicorn. As said the issue is that the aim always to exit. And also that they approach this as a Silicon Valley tech company and not as a "standard" company... So spending goes out of hands and it's a billion dollars or nothing.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Personally, at this point I refuse to use products and services made by startups unless I have no other choice. Seeking "an exit" is startup code word for "we don't give a flying fuck about customers and our products; it's only a vehicle to get us rich".
    - scarface74 7y ago
      From a B2B side. I’ve been on both sides of a startup. On one side we were a small company with a large company as a customer who demanded that our code be put in escrow in the case we went out of business. The company did, but the customer hired me as a contractor because I was one of a few people in the world who knew how to develop on the proprietary platform. Even better, I was one of only three people in the world who knew how to modify the C++/MFC platform itself. On the other side, I was the dev lead for a company and our business consisted of 60-70% of the vendors revenue. We had them put the code in escrow as part of our contract.

scarface74 7y ago

How many companies sustain entire businesses just based on selling thermostats? If Nest captured the entire market and sold $225 thermostats, that's less than a $300 million a year revenue in an entire year. That doesn't take into account wholesale prices. What does the net income look like?

NotPaidToPost 7y ago
Being sustainable does not mean being a unicorn. As said the issue is that the aim always to exit. And also that they approach this as a Silicon Valley tech company and not as a "standard" company... So spending goes out of hands and it's a billion dollars or nothing.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Personally, at this point I refuse to use products and services made by startups unless I have no other choice. Seeking "an exit" is startup code word for "we don't give a flying fuck about customers and our products; it's only a vehicle to get us rich".
  - scarface74 7y ago
    From a B2B side. I’ve been on both sides of a startup. On one side we were a small company with a large company as a customer who demanded that our code be put in escrow in the case we went out of business. The company did, but the customer hired me as a contractor because I was one of a few people in the world who knew how to develop on the proprietary platform. Even better, I was one of only three people in the world who knew how to modify the C++/MFC platform itself. On the other side, I was the dev lead for a company and our business consisted of 60-70% of the vendors revenue. We had them put the code in escrow as part of our contract.