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VCs have been doling out cash by the kilo since 2020. Why haven’t they been able to secure funding, even for the modest goal of making a FPGA proof of concept?

tyingq 5y ago
Perhaps it's hard to scale up a small team with their policy of paying only in equity.
- ghoward 5y ago
  That's only one part of the problem. I contacted them asking if they needed my help because I was interested in the project, and they wanted my help. However, they said I would have to spend at least 5 hours a week on it, every week. They demanded that. Well, that wasn't something I could promise to something I would do on my spare time, so I had to decline.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I assume it's because there's nothing reaching the strata of VCs that tells them that Mill Computing's thesis is a slam dunk for a VC thesis. VCs invest mostly as a herd, not as pioneering eccentric outliers. Unless a company is doing a thing that is already inbounds of where the herd is at or where its vanguard is headed, then those companies will have a comparatively very hard time raising VC money. It might look to you like VCs are just throwing gobs of money around at anything with a pulse, but they're not. They're not throwing money at 100,000 distinctly unique kinds of market making or new category creating ventures. They're throwing lots of money at slightly different flavors of parallel attempts at iterative improvements in mostly established markets. For what Mill Computing is portending to do, I'd expect government grants and maybe strategic investment from industry CVCs to be their only real viable bet. That or finding extremely "smart" or extremely "dumb" money in the VC marketplace, because I'd be very surprised if anybody in between is going to be looking for a Mill Computing to fill out their portfolio. It's way too esoteric. That's not an indictment of Mill Computing of VCs. Neither of them seems like they're in the right place for the other.

tyingq 5y ago

Perhaps it's hard to scale up a small team with their policy of paying only in equity.

ghoward 5y ago
That's only one part of the problem. I contacted them asking if they needed my help because I was interested in the project, and they wanted my help. However, they said I would have to spend at least 5 hours a week on it, every week. They demanded that. Well, that wasn't something I could promise to something I would do on my spare time, so I had to decline.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

I assume it's because there's nothing reaching the strata of VCs that tells them that Mill Computing's thesis is a slam dunk for a VC thesis. VCs invest mostly as a herd, not as pioneering eccentric outliers. Unless a company is doing a thing that is already inbounds of where the herd is at or where its vanguard is headed, then those companies will have a comparatively very hard time raising VC money. It might look to you like VCs are just throwing gobs of money around at anything with a pulse, but they're not. They're not throwing money at 100,000 distinctly unique kinds of market making or new category creating ventures. They're throwing lots of money at slightly different flavors of parallel attempts at iterative improvements in mostly established markets. For what Mill Computing is portending to do, I'd expect government grants and maybe strategic investment from industry CVCs to be their only real viable bet. That or finding extremely "smart" or extremely "dumb" money in the VC marketplace, because I'd be very surprised if anybody in between is going to be looking for a Mill Computing to fill out their portfolio. It's way too esoteric. That's not an indictment of Mill Computing of VCs. Neither of them seems like they're in the right place for the other.