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I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions for buildings. People do want them. VCs, less so, unless it's as high margin as a photo sha

I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions for buildings. People do want them. VCs, less so, unless it's as high margin as a photo sharing app, destructive and lucrative as consumable businesses like Kurig, etc. Consumers don't know what they want until the possibilities are presented to them. VCs are literally the gate keepers of much innovative possibilty at the early phases of enterprises. It's not an issue with want, it's that making a quick buck for VCs doesn't come from capital intensive, long ROI cycle businesses. Other asset classes may be better about this but they tend to participate at less innovative stages.

pc86 6y ago
> I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions Can you explain what it is you do without copying and pasting a line from your pitch deck? This sentence could literally mean any of at least a dozen completely different things.
- hawaiianbrah 6y ago
  Yeah, that really is not enough for me to visualize what they meant.
- danimal88 6y ago
  Sure. Tbh, I didn't really want this comment to be an opportunity to pitch my company or make it too specific about our solution as there are many different types of solutions, categories and problems that could use innovation capital that are second in line. flair.co is us. We have taken money from investors, those that aren't afraid of energy problems, that aren't afraid of energy efficiency, and that invest in meaningful problems (and some others too, but much better portfolio mixes than most). Things are (minus covid 19) changing. We are already a key transitional electrification solution, we are solving peak problems on the grid, and we are poised through a few partnerships to redefine home energy consumption in North American homes. I'm adding that for context as our website doesn't publicly lay that out. All that said, I'm so thankful for the investors that we do have. They listened to our larger vision from the get go, focus on meaningful problems, and put their money where their mouth is. Now that we are realizing this vision, they will realize returns and leadership ROI as this particular blog post fades into the past.
  - antsar 6y ago
    TLDR (actually, the site title): Smart Vents & Wireless Thermostats
  - anamexis 6y ago
    Is this post a parody?
    - danimal88 6y ago
      No
  - sah2ed 6y ago
    Your post still reads like marketing-speak — it is not immediately clear how you differ from other home builders. Anyway, I’m not really sure the point of your criticism of VCs. That you eventually found investors is good, but your grouse is that you don’t have prominent venture capitalists among your investors? Venture Capital, by definition, has a different appetite for risk than private equity for instance, so it is understandable why your idea may not have been interesting to them. Why? Because it is inherent in their name: venture, noun; ‘a risky or daring journey or undertaking’. Building an energy efficient home is an innovative undertaking, but I’m sure many will agree it hardly qualifies as risky the way social-oriented startups like GitHub, Slack, Pinterest were risky before they matured into going concerns. Social businesses live and die by the power of network effects, so those startups had no choice but to seek out venture funding to fuel their hockey-stick growth and in exchange they promised their VCs high returns. Home building OTOH may not benefit from seeking out venture funding compared to traditional funding since the risks of construction are pretty well understood. Also, there are no network effects to ride on to massive growth, as is abundantly clear from the WeWork story. That’s a summary of the purpose of VC. In practice, the fact that VCs herd towards funding the next big cat video sharing app that would surpass TikTok is a different story. More of a failure of imagination of the VC class as a group.
    - danimal88 6y ago
      We are not home builders and our site seems like it makes it pretty clear what our consumer offering is. I'm not advocating for home builders to take VC money although there are plenty of construction tech companies with unique ideas that have taken VC.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
silexia 6y ago
What do you think of my proposals to fight regulatory capture? https://joelx.com/how-to-beat-regulatory-capture/15780/ https://joelx.com/how-to-beat-regulatory-capture/15780/
- webXL 6y ago
  Seems like a plausible solution, although I don't think we can trust a single institution like github with that kind of ledger. Why not a public blockchain? We need a large jurisdiction to experiment with these kinds of ideas though. Doesn't the U.S. have fifty of these??
- lucio 6y ago
  >allowing someone to own an idea is insane Let's say you have an inspiration, then you work hard on that for 5 years designing up to the last detail of a [business online idea/product]. You put your service online/start selling your product. It's a hit. Aware of your early success. $BIG COMPANY$ with thousands of engineers and millions of users copies all the details that make your idea a success. Your early users migrate, now your site goes into the drain, along with all your years of thinking and hard work. Are you sure that allowing someone to own an idea is insane?
  - cloverich 6y ago
    Good implementations of good ideas are rarely easy to copy, which is why so many acquisitions ask not only to buy the product but the team that made it as well. Moreover the last part of your argument also omits that big companies regularly buy the ideas (patent) meaning idea ownership mostly translates into big co idea ownership. Couple that with trivial ideas being patentable (eg website shopping cart), frivolous lawsuits abound, etc. I think your argument sounds good in theory but in practice leads to the exact detriment it proclaims to protect. Lastly I think the last part of your argument is less compelling if you view it from the customers angle: you shouldn’t be able to go to a different company just because they can offer something you want (better / cheaper), you should have to stick with whoever came up with it first.
sanderjd 6y ago
Yep, if anything good comes from this open letter it will be from people in his own demographic (investors) reading, internalizing, and acting on it.
- jekoeoe9njdjr 6y ago
  I’d rather he cram this letter up his arse and lead by example with a letter announcing deep investment in infra Otherwise this is just someone with the freedom to sit around rambling at length trying to look woke The model of investing he got rich on is part of the problem Is he actually going to change that or peddle warm fuzzies and never follow up? Academia knows where the problems are States know where the problems are Pay taxes and they can get on it right away What is it with rich guys who think they’ve suddenly figured out exactly what societies already well known problems are? What is it with sycophantic men who kowtow to rich daddy types? The professional world I live in is pretty disgusting with its reverence for wealth stolen from workers who do the actual manual labor to enable his creature comforted up the arse life
  - ausbah 6y ago
    success in one sphere subconsciously molds people to believing their opinion matters in other spheres - even if they are completely disjoint?
    - jekoeoe9njdjr 6y ago
      Yes See Trump & Kushner Math models show financial success is luck and government collusion Limbic brain function takes on a habit of connecting to facts from past success stores in the cortex, to convince the person that their literal agency will always lead to success And society continually rewards past success even in the face of nothing but failure in other endeavors Again, see Trump and all the CEOs and hedge funds that keep being bailed out
    - Wistar 6y ago
      Absolutely. Even when the first success was largely luck. I know a lot of early Microsoft employees who became successful (read: wealthy) very quickly and many of them harbored a belief that they were capable of success at anything and that their advice was of a superior caliber. This belief has, through the subsequent years, proven to not be all that true.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
What happened with SBA loans that forced everyone into needing VC funding? Didn't people used to just get SBA loans to fund inventions and small businesses? Now it seems like everyone defaults to VC funding.
- danimal88 6y ago
  The issue imo is that SBA is still too narrowly focused on the first 25% or less of commercialization. Perhaps that works for some, I'm not sure. I agree, getting innovation to market is way too dependant upon VC. Worth noting that the traditional banking sector entirely abandoned the innovation economy despite their willingness to fund breweries, coffee shops, restaurants ad nauseum and other business that have huge failure rates but have more collateral and hard assets they can grab on failure.
- indymike 6y ago
  The issue is that SBA loans require founders to put their house up as collateral or have sufficient real property or capital equipment to collateralize the loan. VC does not.
vvpan 6y ago
I am not the first to point out that our issue is not the lack of resources, but the inability to direct them in a meaningful way. The idea that free-market dynamics will create the best resource allocation is just hard to believe. People will say that "well other system do we have!?" which to me is defeatist, assume the worst from human race kind of approach. There are people out there doing much research on coordination, new ways to have a democracy, novel voting systems (say, quadratic voting). We need to believe that we can do better. A seminal article on the failure of the chaotic human coordination to-date is "Meditation on the Moloch". https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ Here's a passage I liked: > Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear: > It is glorious that we can create something like this. > It is shameful that we did. > Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?
- wool_gather 6y ago
  If you haven't read it already, "Moloch Hasn't Won" is an interesting series of essays expanding from "Meditations on Moloch": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ham9i5wf4JCexXnkN/moloch-hasn-t-won https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ham9i5wf4JCexXnkN/moloch-has...
  - vvpan 6y ago
    No I have not. Thank you!
tempsy 6y ago
this sounds like it’s more directed at governments. To build whole institutions at the scale he’s referring to requires trillions. Biggest problem I see is that we consistently elect people into political positions who are biased toward maintaining the status quo. The word “radical” is a dirty word to voters. We don’t like change. Until we change that mindset we won’t ever have people in government who could even begin to think about what building the future looks like.

pc86 6y ago

> I build tech enabled, innovative physical infrastructure solutions Can you explain what it is you do without copying and pasting a line from your pitch deck? This sentence could literally mean any of at least a dozen completely different things.

hawaiianbrah 6y ago
Yeah, that really is not enough for me to visualize what they meant.
danimal88 6y ago
Sure. Tbh, I didn't really want this comment to be an opportunity to pitch my company or make it too specific about our solution as there are many different types of solutions, categories and problems that could use innovation capital that are second in line. flair.co is us. We have taken money from investors, those that aren't afraid of energy problems, that aren't afraid of energy efficiency, and that invest in meaningful problems (and some others too, but much better portfolio mixes than most). Things are (minus covid 19) changing. We are already a key transitional electrification solution, we are solving peak problems on the grid, and we are poised through a few partnerships to redefine home energy consumption in North American homes. I'm adding that for context as our website doesn't publicly lay that out. All that said, I'm so thankful for the investors that we do have. They listened to our larger vision from the get go, focus on meaningful problems, and put their money where their mouth is. Now that we are realizing this vision, they will realize returns and leadership ROI as this particular blog post fades into the past.
- antsar 6y ago
  TLDR (actually, the site title): Smart Vents & Wireless Thermostats
- anamexis 6y ago
  Is this post a parody?
  - danimal88 6y ago
    No
- sah2ed 6y ago
  Your post still reads like marketing-speak — it is not immediately clear how you differ from other home builders. Anyway, I’m not really sure the point of your criticism of VCs. That you eventually found investors is good, but your grouse is that you don’t have prominent venture capitalists among your investors? Venture Capital, by definition, has a different appetite for risk than private equity for instance, so it is understandable why your idea may not have been interesting to them. Why? Because it is inherent in their name: venture, noun; ‘a risky or daring journey or undertaking’. Building an energy efficient home is an innovative undertaking, but I’m sure many will agree it hardly qualifies as risky the way social-oriented startups like GitHub, Slack, Pinterest were risky before they matured into going concerns. Social businesses live and die by the power of network effects, so those startups had no choice but to seek out venture funding to fuel their hockey-stick growth and in exchange they promised their VCs high returns. Home building OTOH may not benefit from seeking out venture funding compared to traditional funding since the risks of construction are pretty well understood. Also, there are no network effects to ride on to massive growth, as is abundantly clear from the WeWork story. That’s a summary of the purpose of VC. In practice, the fact that VCs herd towards funding the next big cat video sharing app that would surpass TikTok is a different story. More of a failure of imagination of the VC class as a group.
  - danimal88 6y ago
    We are not home builders and our site seems like it makes it pretty clear what our consumer offering is. I'm not advocating for home builders to take VC money although there are plenty of construction tech companies with unique ideas that have taken VC.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

silexia 6y ago

What do you think of my proposals to fight regulatory capture? https://joelx.com/how-to-beat-regulatory-capture/15780/ https://joelx.com/how-to-beat-regulatory-capture/15780/

webXL 6y ago
Seems like a plausible solution, although I don't think we can trust a single institution like github with that kind of ledger. Why not a public blockchain? We need a large jurisdiction to experiment with these kinds of ideas though. Doesn't the U.S. have fifty of these??
lucio 6y ago
>allowing someone to own an idea is insane Let's say you have an inspiration, then you work hard on that for 5 years designing up to the last detail of a [business online idea/product]. You put your service online/start selling your product. It's a hit. Aware of your early success. $BIG COMPANY$ with thousands of engineers and millions of users copies all the details that make your idea a success. Your early users migrate, now your site goes into the drain, along with all your years of thinking and hard work. Are you sure that allowing someone to own an idea is insane?
- cloverich 6y ago
  Good implementations of good ideas are rarely easy to copy, which is why so many acquisitions ask not only to buy the product but the team that made it as well. Moreover the last part of your argument also omits that big companies regularly buy the ideas (patent) meaning idea ownership mostly translates into big co idea ownership. Couple that with trivial ideas being patentable (eg website shopping cart), frivolous lawsuits abound, etc. I think your argument sounds good in theory but in practice leads to the exact detriment it proclaims to protect. Lastly I think the last part of your argument is less compelling if you view it from the customers angle: you shouldn’t be able to go to a different company just because they can offer something you want (better / cheaper), you should have to stick with whoever came up with it first.

sanderjd 6y ago

Yep, if anything good comes from this open letter it will be from people in his own demographic (investors) reading, internalizing, and acting on it.

jekoeoe9njdjr 6y ago
I’d rather he cram this letter up his arse and lead by example with a letter announcing deep investment in infra Otherwise this is just someone with the freedom to sit around rambling at length trying to look woke The model of investing he got rich on is part of the problem Is he actually going to change that or peddle warm fuzzies and never follow up? Academia knows where the problems are States know where the problems are Pay taxes and they can get on it right away What is it with rich guys who think they’ve suddenly figured out exactly what societies already well known problems are? What is it with sycophantic men who kowtow to rich daddy types? The professional world I live in is pretty disgusting with its reverence for wealth stolen from workers who do the actual manual labor to enable his creature comforted up the arse life
- ausbah 6y ago
  success in one sphere subconsciously molds people to believing their opinion matters in other spheres - even if they are completely disjoint?
  - jekoeoe9njdjr 6y ago
    Yes See Trump & Kushner Math models show financial success is luck and government collusion Limbic brain function takes on a habit of connecting to facts from past success stores in the cortex, to convince the person that their literal agency will always lead to success And society continually rewards past success even in the face of nothing but failure in other endeavors Again, see Trump and all the CEOs and hedge funds that keep being bailed out
  - Wistar 6y ago
    Absolutely. Even when the first success was largely luck. I know a lot of early Microsoft employees who became successful (read: wealthy) very quickly and many of them harbored a belief that they were capable of success at anything and that their advice was of a superior caliber. This belief has, through the subsequent years, proven to not be all that true.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

What happened with SBA loans that forced everyone into needing VC funding? Didn't people used to just get SBA loans to fund inventions and small businesses? Now it seems like everyone defaults to VC funding.

danimal88 6y ago
The issue imo is that SBA is still too narrowly focused on the first 25% or less of commercialization. Perhaps that works for some, I'm not sure. I agree, getting innovation to market is way too dependant upon VC. Worth noting that the traditional banking sector entirely abandoned the innovation economy despite their willingness to fund breweries, coffee shops, restaurants ad nauseum and other business that have huge failure rates but have more collateral and hard assets they can grab on failure.
indymike 6y ago
The issue is that SBA loans require founders to put their house up as collateral or have sufficient real property or capital equipment to collateralize the loan. VC does not.

vvpan 6y ago

I am not the first to point out that our issue is not the lack of resources, but the inability to direct them in a meaningful way. The idea that free-market dynamics will create the best resource allocation is just hard to believe. People will say that "well other system do we have!?" which to me is defeatist, assume the worst from human race kind of approach. There are people out there doing much research on coordination, new ways to have a democracy, novel voting systems (say, quadratic voting). We need to believe that we can do better. A seminal article on the failure of the chaotic human coordination to-date is "Meditation on the Moloch". https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ Here's a passage I liked: > Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear: > It is glorious that we can create something like this. > It is shameful that we did. > Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?

wool_gather 6y ago
If you haven't read it already, "Moloch Hasn't Won" is an interesting series of essays expanding from "Meditations on Moloch": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ham9i5wf4JCexXnkN/moloch-hasn-t-won https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ham9i5wf4JCexXnkN/moloch-has...
- vvpan 6y ago
  No I have not. Thank you!

tempsy 6y ago

this sounds like it’s more directed at governments. To build whole institutions at the scale he’s referring to requires trillions. Biggest problem I see is that we consistently elect people into political positions who are biased toward maintaining the status quo. The word “radical” is a dirty word to voters. We don’t like change. Until we change that mindset we won’t ever have people in government who could even begin to think about what building the future looks like.