22 ms·

Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

414 points by Archio 4y ago

1123581321 4y ago
Is the $6k/mo revenue from people using the Wi-Fi hotspots, like how someone might pay for an Xfinity hotspot if they aren’t a Comcast customer? Please forgive the ignorance.
- karamanolev 4y ago
  Sorry to be blunt, these have nothing to do with Wi-Fi hotspots, they don't have the same use cases, they don't use the same protocol and it's as far removed from Xfinity and Comcast as possible.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    I don’t mind the bluntness but I think my analogy threw you off. When Helium says things like: “The Helium Hotspot is a small hardware device that creates a large wireless network for devices that use Helium's network. Think of it like a Wi-Fi router, but for devices sending small amounts of data over long ranges.” Is the $6k/month revenue from sending data through a “Helium Hotspot” or something else?
    - karamanolev 4y ago
      Yes, the $6K/month is for paying people for data transfer through their networks, so through a Helium Hotspot. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
      - 1123581321 4y ago
        No problem--thanks.
swamp40 4y ago
Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node. The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money. The problem is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth. And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really needs another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money. Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.
- olsonjeffery 4y ago
  >Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use. Literally the exact opposite of what web3 is. You're arguing for a _public good_, but web3's entire premise only makes sense when the opposite happens: everything is privatized, everything is monetized. THIS is the world that web3 makers envision: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
  - knowaveragejoe 4y ago
    Web3 folks spend a lot of time and effort on public goods, it's one of Vitalik's core visions for the direction of crypto as a whole.
  - swamp40 4y ago
    Crypto is the payment method for this service. It's not an essential element, and there is much more to it. I'm not exactly sure where your definition of 'web3' and crypto overlap, but there are many future public use cases for crypto. Banking the unbanked, protection against hyperinflation, etc. Maybe 10+ years away, but it will happen.
joezydeco 4y ago
Remember the original IoT business plan? Third pivot's a charm.
rchaud 4y ago
The conventional wisdom suggests that governments should not be in the business of 'picking winners' when it comes to subsidizing industries. Private funds can do whatever they want I suppose, but I wonder if there's a term for VCs that spend government-scale funds on things that look like long-term losers. Crypto and 'web3' are just the latest examples of this, and they're coming after a decade of equally uninspiring ideas like social networks, food delivery, Uber, Airbnb and WeWork.
- snarf21 4y ago
  It is called the effects of holding interest rates at 0% and constant QE. Too much money looking for returns with no way to get them.
  - hgomersall 4y ago
    And too many people expecting rents to fund their lifestyle. The core problem is not enough people actually doing. Those that are doing don't see the excessive availability of investment cash as a problem.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Deregulation is like flat power structures. Ultimately it just means that you don't know who the new regulators are. I can't help but wonder the difference between valuing the ideas of unfettered capitalism and the realities.
- justinbaker84 4y ago
  Government scale funds are about 1,000x this amount. For example the US "defense" spending for 2022 is 778 Billion - billion with a B. And defense spending is less than 10% of overall government spending in the US when you include state and local spending.
  - _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
    Government grants come in all kind of amounts. Some a only a few thousand and some are 7 figures.
dougSF70 4y ago
I will build you an $80k ARR business, I just need a $365mn down payment. If you want a business that loses $100mn a year, that will cost you a lot more - probably in the region of a $5bn down payment.
- dougSF70 4y ago
  Of course this view is ridiculous. It is like looking at one hand of black jack in a casino : "you mean you spent millions of dollars building a casino and you let that player win!" Sadly though we only get to see the non-portfolio view of VC firms performance, the case-by-case view, when really the success of the fund (and the casino) is about the distribution of performances. Having said that, my offer still stands. I will build any member of this community a firm with a globally recognized brand name, that loses $100mn a year for $5bn down now. I will even throw in some jail time for securities fraud too.
sumoboy 4y ago
The passive income for hotspot owners prior to Aug, 2021 was very real, many cases thousands per month for a single hotspot. The HNT coin price was much higher also hitting near $50 creating this incredible hope of easy money and for the early players who could get a hotspot they banked. Then Helium halved the coin in Aug/21 and it's been a downward spiral of HNT prices and software updates. The people who made $$ were the hotspot hardware manufacturers at $400 a pop with a lead time of 8-12 months to get one when the hype really started in Mar, 2021. For most today buying a hotspot would take 6-8 months ROI, but HNT prices really dictate that. So now with 900k hotspots installed Helium is pushing aside the lorawan network with less mining payouts in hopes/dreams people will flock to buying 5G cbrs implementations costing over $3k per site. Not sure what customers or applications will use this network, something helium still has to signup customers to create value. The network like 5G has range limitations, so you'll have to spend more to go further. If I recall amazon has a competitive cbrs product also. All I know is it's no simple plug/play. Early adopters really made a lot of $$ with Helium but it's been decline since late last year. It's truly one of the simplest miners to deploy in 5 minutes, but to get value you need a good antenna setup. I'm sure the Helium creators have a huge stash of HNT coins and not really worried.
- CPLX 4y ago
  Yeah but nobody actually "made" any money. To the extent anyone engaged with this project and walked away with real live American dollars they came from either VC investors, or greater fool token investors. That's the whole point of the article. Ostensibly the project exists to provide a valuable service, that's what is supposed to create the rewards. But that ain't real.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Helium is aggressively dropping LoraWAN for all of these reasons, by relegating it to a second class under 5g bands and other wireless protocols Its negligent for an analysis to not mention that
pontifier 4y ago
I may be one of the rare ones, but I'm late to the game, and am trying to set up a bunch of sensors. The biggest problem I have is that I can't get my sensors to work. There is so much talk and focus on miners, but they need more cheap, easy to use, and functional sensors.
danpalmer 4y ago
Building a market for bandwidth as a commodity was the last major initiative that Enron started. Didn’t go well for them, and I can’t see this going well for Helium.
rnk 4y ago
There is the basic use case of getting something like weather sensors broadcasting conditions over time. That could be useful. The way I think this will be used if it ever got market traction is to spy on you. Today if I don't put my tv or my fridge on my home wifi, they can't call home unless they had a phone modem - I hope that doesn't make financial sense (I just realized I was hoping they only spy on you with wifi). I can put my own streaming device on the tv with a defined privacy policy. I don't want my tv showing me ads, and it doesn't, and that's one reason I'm using a 3rd party streaming device. Because I'm paying them there's a much higher chance it will only do what they say. If this ever got popular, your tv would have a direct connection to broadcast outside of your control what you are watching. I don't want devices doing more corporate surveillance things not in my control.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  To be fair to these industries there can be more to it as well: construction operations may require inventory management for a fleet of power tools. Some IoT devices can potentially provide useful services via regular software upgrade, etc. But yes: it's mostly going to be spying and feature upsells. The problem now is that network access is becoming a bottleneck. Many devices have the hardware they need to connect to networks, but don't provide the UI to enable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth pairing, nor do they provide any compelling incentive for users to connect to their own devices. Networks like Amazon Sidewalk and maybe Helium are one answer to this problem. The manufacturers can make very inexpensive deals with the network operator, reflecting the fact that their devices don't actually need very much bandwidth. My personal theory is that networks like Apple's FindMy (AirTags) will also compete in this arena.
Canada 4y ago
Helium is a terrible use case for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is for money, only for money, and not for any other purpose.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wiredone 4y ago
  Isn't the idea that you'd get paid for use of a LoRaWAN access point pretty much the same thing as money. Sure, earning HNT for mining/proof of coverage is nice, but I see the long term game is pretty much earning money (via crypto) for use of your home internet connection. Otherwise why the hell are you building a wireless network in the first place?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Canada 4y ago
    How does that proof of coverage work exactly? https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/ https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/ It has nowhere close to the density for this to work, and there's nothing to stop the Beaconer and Witness from being the same person. If the goal is to enable renting out of WiFi, then the sensible thing is to make a system that automates payment in ETH/USDT/USDC/DAI/BTC/etc... Or to put it another way, use the money cryptocurrency that exists and works already. But no, that was never the point of this. The point of Helium is to mint and dump the shitcoin.
- tradertef 4y ago
  Agree. The amount of spectrum they use for their application is so small (15 MHz?) that there is really no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Helium is just a toy project with good marketing. It is really a scam.
  - dzhiurgis 4y ago
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Look into SoRare’s volume. They raised over $500m. Volume is now lower than it was way back in 2020. The crypto down rounds are going to be hilarious. Note to investors: if you’re investing in crypto projects, carefully consider the ponzinomics and the vesting schedule. You want your unlocks to happen in the middle of the bullrun when exit liquidity is ample. And also remember that whatever you might think of as “normal” volume will crash 90%. And when you think it has stabilized, it will crash 90% more. The number of investors who bought the top is hilarious. But then, this is also a field where risk management is treated like a sin.
- pg_bot 4y ago
  Every single one of these web3 companies is going bust. They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to. There are only two things propping up the entire crypto economy, VC funding and fraud. Once the VC money leaves the ecosystem the dominoes will fall.
  - anony23 4y ago
    VC money won't leave.
    - smachiz 4y ago
      This is what bag holders say.
  - ackbar03 4y ago
    Yet some VCs are still plowing into web3. There was an article today about how Moellis was getting into Web3 companies. I'm genuinely curious what their thought process is. I tend to be in the camp that web3 is just a bunch of hot air seeing how cryptos been around for quite a while now with few use cases, but I also give benefit of the doubt there could be something there given the nature of tech.
    - itsoktocry 4y ago
WALoeIII 4y ago
Don’t the terms of service for nearly all consumer ISPs explicitly prohibit sharing or reselling?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Who cares? It's not like a packet that's a result of sharing/reselling suddenly "weighs" more on the network wires.
  - adrr 4y ago
    People running the hotspots should care, they could get prosecuted for unauthorized access of their ISPs network. Sharing you connection is not authorized. Don't like it, lobby to change the law but what they are doing is explicitly illegal.
    - prepend 4y ago
      The odds of that happening is negligible. I suppose ISPs could try to make an example of a few customers. But I think that would be horrible PR as well as very difficult to prove. How would they distinguish traffic that’s authorized and unauthorized? As their customer, how much do you think I can authorize? Can I grant my guests access? Can my smart lightbulbs access?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Who cares? The people purchasing these hot spots, who find their bankruptcy claims against Helium being inhibited by intentional breach of contract. > not like a packet that's a result of sharing/reselling suddenly "weighs" more It does due to peering arrangements. Data transfer having value is also Helium’s claimed value added. It’s awkward to claim it costs nothing to implement but has value that can be sustainably charged.
  - aetherane 4y ago
    You probably don't want someone distributing something like child porn over your home network
docdeek 4y ago
Interesting - I had never heard of these guys before the most recent episode of the Planet Money podcast on NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-the-blockchain?t=1658816970206 https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-th...
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  It is absolutely mindblowing that nobody questions this bulls** A house that mines crypto ... or the reality, a house with a tiny crypto miner in a corner of the house.
beambot 4y ago
The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates. Cellular is a different story. There are already 3rd-party cellular towers operators who profitably provide data service to handsets on behalf of the big network providers. Tokenomics could work for cellular with carriers providing demand-side token consumption. However, cellular wasn't Helium's initial target, and watching them migrate to multi-band / multi-protocol has been a bit cringey.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates yet. FTFY. Personally, I'd love to relay my home weather station readings over LoRa - then many other things too, if it's cheap enough! (say my TPMS - why not? Then I can retroactively track my car to cross correlate where I went shopping) Helium business model that's paying for the deployment of a worldwide network on a free-to-use band is brilliant: it will replicate Wifi except with a worldwide coverage + full control of the network. Wifi may at first have seemed equally useless, but the network effects from the ubiquity of it's presence and the unification of standards have replaced so many things I've only heard of in tech history books like DECT
  - creeble 4y ago
    But I could put my weather station and TPMS readings on the internet, for free?
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      If your car never leaves your driveway, or the reach of your home wifi, sure! That's not the case for most people though. Also, you can't do that if people don't cooperate, while it may be in your interest (ex: to track customers across the city) As for the weather station, it involves you having a home internet - many people just have cellphones. A device that would ask for wifi passwords etc or require bluetooth pairing or worse would be complicated. Something that works worldwide with no setup would be a hit! It's very easy to not perceive an opportunity which doesn't apply to you - in this case if you have say LTE in your car + on every device + at home.
shaburn 4y ago
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo Relevant Silicon Valley clip. I’ve really enjoyed watching the market reprice a lot of the names he drops as goals in that clip.
ddrdrck_ 4y ago
This thread lacks factual information : no source for the $6.5k/month revenue, and no source for the LoRaWAN market analysis supposedly demonstrating it is a "fake, overblown use case" Actually I would be interested in understanding better the choice made by Helium and the current and future use of LoRaWAN. When I first heard about Helium some years ago I wondered why they focused on this protocol compared to WiFi or cellular network technology. Which kind of devices are supposed to connect to Helium ? I suppose it is IoT devices, but most of them actually work perfectly fine with good old cellular networks
- bmitc 4y ago
  It is my understanding that the goal is to expand the network to include WiFi and cellular devices, in addition to LoRaWAN devices.
- joewadcan 4y ago
  Exactly the reverse. Most IOT sensors suffer because of cost, battery, and engineering complexity for a cell based connection. Helium solves all three - even more important now that 3G is being phased out making thousands of IOT sensors obsolete
- _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
  > Helium’s economy looks moderate or small, depending on how you parse the numbers. According to Token Terminal, Helium’s revenue in June totaled $2.6 million. That’s down from the April high of $5.5 million but a 73% improvement over the same period a year earlier. In 2020, Helium’s June revenue was below $200,000. Eddy Lazzarin, the head of protocol design at a16z, noted that when his firm first invested in Helium, “the last ninety days had something like $600.” It has come a long way since then. > However, this is only part of the picture. Data Credits are used when onboarding a hotspot, asserting a location, and processing a payment. Onboarding hotspots, in particular, is intensive from a Data Credit perspective. Since Helium is onboarding so many new hotspots, this skews results, suggesting greater customer activity than is actually present. Data from The Decentralized Wireless Alliance removes these three uses, demonstrating the size of the Helium economy’s customer demand. By this measure, DC usage was just $6,561 in June. https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/helium https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/helium
janjongboom 4y ago
Reposting an analysis I did 6 months ago, where their numbers did not make any sense to me compared to any other LoRaWAN deployment; and probably impossible - bound by physics - to ever generate enough revenue to pay their gateway operators at their data cost / gateway rewards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29944979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29944979
- popcorncowboy 4y ago
  Facts just don't matter when you're selling hope-ium. To the moooon!
buf 4y ago
I bought ETH when it was $7 back in 2017 and participated in literally every single investment I could until about 2019, resulting in 7 figure returns. I wouldn't touch the stuff now. The ability for regular people to invest in crypto back then made the ponzi-like architecture of it worth the risk. Now the VCs are trying to push their agendas, and it's blatantly obvious it's vapor.
- agentdrtran 4y ago
  Investing in ponzi schemes early is better than later, yeah.
- iamnotarobotman 4y ago
  Any receipts?
- pembrook 4y ago
  Wait...what? You’re complaining about VCs pushing vapor while simultaneously admitting you participated in pumping “ponzi-like” schemes on regular people? You do realize those 7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you? I’m astonished you’re claiming moral superiority over VCs while sitting on wealth you took from thousands of poor people in places like Vietnam, India, Brazil, Nigeria, etc. (whom were all later stage investors in these crypto schemes).
  - tim333 4y ago
    >7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you? That would be true if there is no value in what was sold but taking ETH that he bought for $7, in 2019 when he sold it was about $250 and is now about $1500 so people buying ETH then would have done just fine. Ponzi schemes are cons that collapse, not open source assets that go up for years and years.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Not sure about Ether, but there are plenty of people that 'bought in' to the Bitcoin idea and mined some coins early on without 'taking wealth from others'. VCs are in there for entirely different reasons, and 'later stage investors' are always at risk of having their hair cut if what they invest in isn't worth what they paid for it, after all, they too were trying to take money from later day suckers. I never paid a cent for any bitcoin, but I did pay about $100 to my electricity company to mine some just for the heck of it (and ended up giving it all away).
dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
Every time the so-called web3 is mentioned on HN, it's immediately obvious what it is and why nobody should touch it, in spite of very vocal fans and people with vested interest. It's just another fad just like NFTs - with big hype and no real substance.
ivanche 4y ago
"On average, they spent $400-800 to buy a hotspot. They were expecting $100/month,". These expectations were soooo unrealistic! To have 100% return every 8 months is beyond crazy.
- biglearner1day 4y ago
  Hotspot owner here, my ROI was 1 week when I started. It's still rewarding a good amount after all this time.
rob74 4y ago
And here I was thinking that A16Z has started investing in the chemical industry...
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Regardless of the crypto-ness or VC-ness of the plan, from a business standpoint, in the graph of Traditional Network Effect vs. Token Network Effect, his problem is obvious. Where the y-axis = Utility To User, the Traditional Network Effect can track all the way to the upper end of the scale, and tracks perfectly with the Overall Utility, as an ideal outcome of course. But with the Token Network Effect, no matter how much of a boost there can be at the beginning, the ultimate Overall Utility is about halfway as high by comparison. By design you're building for mediocrity. One of the "secrets" when I was implementing exponential growth strategies was to "prosper better overall, by persuasively giving the customers more of their money's worth". Interesting how that tradition compares to "persuasively give the customers more of our money than it's worth, since our current product isn't really worth money to begin with".
JonathanBeuys 4y ago
Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time. To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
- synu 4y ago
  On the other hand, giving away 365M as cash gifts could probably drive incredible usage growth numbers. Not to say that’s what they are doing but it also isn’t the whole picture.
- dewey 4y ago
  Google had a real use case and solved a problem from day one. What's Heliums use case?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- boffinism 4y ago
  They all laughed at Moviepass, but just look at a chart of its usage growth. Clubhouse too.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Since when did due diligence on companies become "well one time Google made no money so obviously that means this company will be Google-sized because they make no money too!"
- origin_path 4y ago
  You mean, less than two years? Google was founded in August 1998 and they they hired their first sales guy in May 1999. AdWords launched in October 2000 but before that time they had revenue from backend search deals where they powered other sites search engines for a fee, like Netscape which launched in June 1999. So it's not really the case that Google had no revenue for years. They were able to generate revenue very fast by selling their tech to other companies.
- 4y ago
ncmncm 4y ago
I could not, reading this stuff, figure out what any of it was, or was for, or for who, or why I should care about anybody's revenue.
- jkestner 4y ago
  It’s hard to create a two-sided marketplace when both sides have to buy hardware.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    You seem to be suggesting this has something to do with a marketplace? That, what, has two sides? Involving hardware? Didn't get that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shtopointo 4y ago
Two ways to make a name for yourself these days: * crypto * talking sh*t about crypto Crypto is at a low point right now. If you time it right, it's like reporting that investing in the stock market is bad after the '08 recession.
- dijit 4y ago
  Seeing crypto as an investment is a problem. It relies entirely on someone else coming along later and paying more. It’s not a productive asset in any meaningful way.
  - shtopointo 4y ago
    > It relies entirely on someone else coming along later and paying more Yes, just like any part of the economy. Scarcity and/or productivity is why someone pays: either something, or more for it. If it's BTC, the theory is it will be scarce, like gold. If it is one of the other crypto coins, it has to be productive like e.g. this app enabling sharing internet with others.
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      The S&P 500 pays out over a trillion dollars each year in dividends and stock buybacks funded by the profits of their productive economic activity. This is what you are investing in when you buy a stock. The numbers-go-up of the stock market is both directly (through stock buybacks) and indirectly (through expectations of future dividends) a consequence of this productive activity, not just greater fools.
      - shtopointo 4y ago
        We don't disagree. A crypto coin can be that too – stock in a company.
orzig 4y ago
A16Z is obviously well known, but are they respected? I naïvely assumed that they would have access to enough expertise and deal flow to avoid the most absurd losers, but a few examples in the last few months have made me question that. And an important follow up question: do they have enough dry powder to keep sustaining these things?
- thesausageking 4y ago
  a16z is an odd fund. They've made a ton of money in crypto investing in projects, pumping them, and then dumping on retail. Most crypto insiders view them as completely toxic and won't touch projects they've backed. But a16z has such a strong brand in general tech and is so great at PR, I don't see them slowing down anytime soon. They're making way too much money.
- TimJRobinson 4y ago
  Yes and yes, they just raised a $4.5B round a few months ago.
nathan_f77 4y ago
I've had a Linxdot hotspot running in my house for the last few days. Apparently it's earned me 0.08 HNT so far (about $0.70 USD.) I've been thinking about building an IoT device for my mailbox, so I can get a notification when we get a letter. It could be fun to build something that uses the Helium network. Maybe solar powered, and using a weight sensor or something. (I probably don't need Helium for this but it would be fun to try it out.)
- hyperdimension 4y ago
  I'd just go with a ambient light detector/photodetector, as long as no one else is trying to check the mail.
tsujp 4y ago
You can go to the Helium Explorer and look at nodes and their earnings directly: https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/ Zoom in, click a cell, click a node, click "30D" and you'll see the amount of HNT and how much that is worth at the current market rate. I didn't see any $6,500 nodes.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  The Tweet seems to claim that $6.5k is the total monthly revenue of the network. The explorer seems to claim $2M (under "DC spent").
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Right, and the tweet thread explains that the 2m number is inflated by the hotspots that are being activated (activating hotspots is expensive, but the activation fees are one-time)
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
      Thanks!
madsbuch 4y ago
The technology and adaptation is definitely not ripe -- yet! But assessing the success of a web3 product by the ability of selling a specific product is akin to assessing the success of a country by its ability to sell passports. The cost to offset the operations should come from the activity in the economy it encompasses -- these should not be assessed as traditional companies.
tarunmuvvala 4y ago
In an era where movement of money is getting fast, the rich are getting richer by holder higher equity. I find the concept of tokenization as a better way to redistribute equity. I think about the tokens as money with superpowers which can act like equity , API keys and loyalty card too. Think of tokens as a 100x version of managing equity table in a company.
BonoboIO 4y ago
You can only hope that you don’t own any tokens when the music stops
efitz 4y ago
I looked into getting a Helium hotspot, but when I looked at my ISP‘s terms of service, the Helium use case is explicitly forbidden (I use Frontier Internet in Florida.) If you’re not familiar with it, what a Helium hotspot does is allow compatible IOT devices to share your Internet connection. I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of service of most ISPs, especially when you are being monetarily compensated/rewarded for such sharing. Excerpt from ToS: “Customers may not retransmit the Service or make the Service available to anyone outside the premises (i.e. Wi-Fi or other methods of networking).”
- jaywalk 4y ago
  I think you could argue that Helium is not making "the Service" itself available, since it's not providing an actual Internet connection as a Wi-Fi network would. The only thing using "the Service" itself is the Helium hotspot that is within your premises.
- prepend 4y ago
  If it’s any consolidation Apple and Amazon break those ToS by allowing third party devices to connect and use bandwidth. I think these terms are pretty hard to enforce and not sure how your ISP would differentiate traffic.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Not the Terms of Service guys!
- aembleton 4y ago
  > I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of service of most ISPs I suspect that most people don't read the terms of service.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I mean there's a lot of innovation and good things happening from people intentionally breaking these things - "OK, sue me", to test these terms. Except that an ISP will just suspend your account, and if you object they'll be the ones that go "OK, sue me".
Kenneth21 4y ago
[dead]
eternityforest 4y ago
Helium would be so cool if it wasn't crypto-based and used BT instead of LoRa, and was more focused on being local-first. They're doing some pretty amazing stuff as is, but Sidewalk/Tile/AirTags/YoSmart are doing it without crypto, and with small enough bandwidth to work via mobile. I'd much rather have a centralized but selfhostable system, where you choose what network(s) to be a part of, and payments or lack thereof is up to them. They'd have a real chance of building a very large network if they had hardware partners. Ideally, this stuff should be "too cheap to meter" anyway, and could even be ad supported, at least for very low bandwidth best effort stuff.
- detaro 4y ago
  Helium without cryptocurrency stuff is The Things Network, basically.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Which is in fact, an awesome project, aside from being LoRaWan centric, and requiring registration of devices, as opposed to something like how AirTags work.
cryptos 4y ago
At least it is Helium and not only hot air!
bmitc 4y ago
Just a note that Helium, the company, renamed to Nova Labs earlier this year. Helium is now just the name of the network.
kordlessagain 4y ago
I remember, after Loggly raised ~4.2M, our revenues hit $7,500 after about 4-6 months. At the time, I thought the effort to build what we had built, code-wise, could be done by 1-2 people in maybe a couple of years. Marketing plays a big part in how much revenue comes in to a startup. The product also plays a big part, but if the product does what people need it to do, it becomes a marketing task to accelerate growth to justify the investments. Startups are a balancing act, especially when there are multiple stakeholders involved. I'm not sure these crypto offerings offer anything "product wise" that is useful to getting things done, other than making more money. Slight of hand models are tricky to evaluate. With Helium, they need people providing Internet to other people. Helium's "offering" drops to being an exchange from the marketplace (which must be grown) to the user base (which must also be grown). This "burning the candle at both ends" approach requires many multiples of capital influx to achieve, and even then if the business model is not sound (we all already have Internet) it will fail.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Unrelated to cryptocurrency stuff, this is such a great comment everyone going to work for a startup should internalize. The core work building a product is relatively easy to accomplish with time. The bulk of fundraising and spend is about marketing.
boringg 4y ago
Soooo for every $4700 you get $1 ARR or if you assume that ARR is for 10 years not-discounted $470 for $1 ARR/10 years. I mean how much of those investment dollars came from early crypto investments in the first place (i.e. low cost) and are just gettin recycled is the real question. I realize that's an unfair comparison but I think there are many many people who want to throw shade at crypto because a majority of it is rotten and has weighed down on the positive attributes.

414 points by Archio 4y ago

Is the $6k/mo revenue from people using the Wi-Fi hotspots, like how someone might pay for an Xfinity hotspot if they aren’t a Comcast customer? Please forgive the ignorance.

karamanolev 4y ago
Sorry to be blunt, these have nothing to do with Wi-Fi hotspots, they don't have the same use cases, they don't use the same protocol and it's as far removed from Xfinity and Comcast as possible.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  I don’t mind the bluntness but I think my analogy threw you off. When Helium says things like: “The Helium Hotspot is a small hardware device that creates a large wireless network for devices that use Helium's network. Think of it like a Wi-Fi router, but for devices sending small amounts of data over long ranges.” Is the $6k/month revenue from sending data through a “Helium Hotspot” or something else?
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    Yes, the $6K/month is for paying people for data transfer through their networks, so through a Helium Hotspot. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      No problem--thanks.

swamp40 4y ago

Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node. The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money. The problem is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth. And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really needs another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money. Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.

olsonjeffery 4y ago
>Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use. Literally the exact opposite of what web3 is. You're arguing for a _public good_, but web3's entire premise only makes sense when the opposite happens: everything is privatized, everything is monetized. THIS is the world that web3 makers envision: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
- knowaveragejoe 4y ago
  Web3 folks spend a lot of time and effort on public goods, it's one of Vitalik's core visions for the direction of crypto as a whole.
- swamp40 4y ago
  Crypto is the payment method for this service. It's not an essential element, and there is much more to it. I'm not exactly sure where your definition of 'web3' and crypto overlap, but there are many future public use cases for crypto. Banking the unbanked, protection against hyperinflation, etc. Maybe 10+ years away, but it will happen.

joezydeco 4y ago

Remember the original IoT business plan? Third pivot's a charm.

rchaud 4y ago

The conventional wisdom suggests that governments should not be in the business of 'picking winners' when it comes to subsidizing industries. Private funds can do whatever they want I suppose, but I wonder if there's a term for VCs that spend government-scale funds on things that look like long-term losers. Crypto and 'web3' are just the latest examples of this, and they're coming after a decade of equally uninspiring ideas like social networks, food delivery, Uber, Airbnb and WeWork.

snarf21 4y ago
It is called the effects of holding interest rates at 0% and constant QE. Too much money looking for returns with no way to get them.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  And too many people expecting rents to fund their lifestyle. The core problem is not enough people actually doing. Those that are doing don't see the excessive availability of investment cash as a problem.
mikkergp 4y ago
Deregulation is like flat power structures. Ultimately it just means that you don't know who the new regulators are. I can't help but wonder the difference between valuing the ideas of unfettered capitalism and the realities.
justinbaker84 4y ago
Government scale funds are about 1,000x this amount. For example the US "defense" spending for 2022 is 778 Billion - billion with a B. And defense spending is less than 10% of overall government spending in the US when you include state and local spending.
- _fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
  Government grants come in all kind of amounts. Some a only a few thousand and some are 7 figures.

dougSF70 4y ago

I will build you an $80k ARR business, I just need a $365mn down payment. If you want a business that loses $100mn a year, that will cost you a lot more - probably in the region of a $5bn down payment.

dougSF70 4y ago
Of course this view is ridiculous. It is like looking at one hand of black jack in a casino : "you mean you spent millions of dollars building a casino and you let that player win!" Sadly though we only get to see the non-portfolio view of VC firms performance, the case-by-case view, when really the success of the fund (and the casino) is about the distribution of performances. Having said that, my offer still stands. I will build any member of this community a firm with a globally recognized brand name, that loses $100mn a year for $5bn down now. I will even throw in some jail time for securities fraud too.

sumoboy 4y ago

The passive income for hotspot owners prior to Aug, 2021 was very real, many cases thousands per month for a single hotspot. The HNT coin price was much higher also hitting near $50 creating this incredible hope of easy money and for the early players who could get a hotspot they banked. Then Helium halved the coin in Aug/21 and it's been a downward spiral of HNT prices and software updates. The people who made $$ were the hotspot hardware manufacturers at $400 a pop with a lead time of 8-12 months to get one when the hype really started in Mar, 2021. For most today buying a hotspot would take 6-8 months ROI, but HNT prices really dictate that. So now with 900k hotspots installed Helium is pushing aside the lorawan network with less mining payouts in hopes/dreams people will flock to buying 5G cbrs implementations costing over $3k per site. Not sure what customers or applications will use this network, something helium still has to signup customers to create value. The network like 5G has range limitations, so you'll have to spend more to go further. If I recall amazon has a competitive cbrs product also. All I know is it's no simple plug/play. Early adopters really made a lot of $$ with Helium but it's been decline since late last year. It's truly one of the simplest miners to deploy in 5 minutes, but to get value you need a good antenna setup. I'm sure the Helium creators have a huge stash of HNT coins and not really worried.

CPLX 4y ago
Yeah but nobody actually "made" any money. To the extent anyone engaged with this project and walked away with real live American dollars they came from either VC investors, or greater fool token investors. That's the whole point of the article. Ostensibly the project exists to provide a valuable service, that's what is supposed to create the rewards. But that ain't real.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Helium is aggressively dropping LoraWAN for all of these reasons, by relegating it to a second class under 5g bands and other wireless protocols Its negligent for an analysis to not mention that

pontifier 4y ago

I may be one of the rare ones, but I'm late to the game, and am trying to set up a bunch of sensors. The biggest problem I have is that I can't get my sensors to work. There is so much talk and focus on miners, but they need more cheap, easy to use, and functional sensors.

danpalmer 4y ago

Building a market for bandwidth as a commodity was the last major initiative that Enron started. Didn’t go well for them, and I can’t see this going well for Helium.

rnk 4y ago

There is the basic use case of getting something like weather sensors broadcasting conditions over time. That could be useful. The way I think this will be used if it ever got market traction is to spy on you. Today if I don't put my tv or my fridge on my home wifi, they can't call home unless they had a phone modem - I hope that doesn't make financial sense (I just realized I was hoping they only spy on you with wifi). I can put my own streaming device on the tv with a defined privacy policy. I don't want my tv showing me ads, and it doesn't, and that's one reason I'm using a 3rd party streaming device. Because I'm paying them there's a much higher chance it will only do what they say. If this ever got popular, your tv would have a direct connection to broadcast outside of your control what you are watching. I don't want devices doing more corporate surveillance things not in my control.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
To be fair to these industries there can be more to it as well: construction operations may require inventory management for a fleet of power tools. Some IoT devices can potentially provide useful services via regular software upgrade, etc. But yes: it's mostly going to be spying and feature upsells. The problem now is that network access is becoming a bottleneck. Many devices have the hardware they need to connect to networks, but don't provide the UI to enable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth pairing, nor do they provide any compelling incentive for users to connect to their own devices. Networks like Amazon Sidewalk and maybe Helium are one answer to this problem. The manufacturers can make very inexpensive deals with the network operator, reflecting the fact that their devices don't actually need very much bandwidth. My personal theory is that networks like Apple's FindMy (AirTags) will also compete in this arena.

Canada 4y ago

Helium is a terrible use case for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is for money, only for money, and not for any other purpose.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wiredone 4y ago
Isn't the idea that you'd get paid for use of a LoRaWAN access point pretty much the same thing as money. Sure, earning HNT for mining/proof of coverage is nice, but I see the long term game is pretty much earning money (via crypto) for use of your home internet connection. Otherwise why the hell are you building a wireless network in the first place?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Canada 4y ago
  How does that proof of coverage work exactly? https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/ https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/ It has nowhere close to the density for this to work, and there's nothing to stop the Beaconer and Witness from being the same person. If the goal is to enable renting out of WiFi, then the sensible thing is to make a system that automates payment in ETH/USDT/USDC/DAI/BTC/etc... Or to put it another way, use the money cryptocurrency that exists and works already. But no, that was never the point of this. The point of Helium is to mint and dump the shitcoin.
tradertef 4y ago
Agree. The amount of spectrum they use for their application is so small (15 MHz?) that there is really no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Helium is just a toy project with good marketing. It is really a scam.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Look into SoRare’s volume. They raised over $500m. Volume is now lower than it was way back in 2020. The crypto down rounds are going to be hilarious. Note to investors: if you’re investing in crypto projects, carefully consider the ponzinomics and the vesting schedule. You want your unlocks to happen in the middle of the bullrun when exit liquidity is ample. And also remember that whatever you might think of as “normal” volume will crash 90%. And when you think it has stabilized, it will crash 90% more. The number of investors who bought the top is hilarious. But then, this is also a field where risk management is treated like a sin.

pg_bot 4y ago
Every single one of these web3 companies is going bust. They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to. There are only two things propping up the entire crypto economy, VC funding and fraud. Once the VC money leaves the ecosystem the dominoes will fall.
- anony23 4y ago
  VC money won't leave.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    This is what bag holders say.
- ackbar03 4y ago
  Yet some VCs are still plowing into web3. There was an article today about how Moellis was getting into Web3 companies. I'm genuinely curious what their thought process is. I tend to be in the camp that web3 is just a bunch of hot air seeing how cryptos been around for quite a while now with few use cases, but I also give benefit of the doubt there could be something there given the nature of tech.
  - itsoktocry 4y ago

WALoeIII 4y ago

Don’t the terms of service for nearly all consumer ISPs explicitly prohibit sharing or reselling?

Nextgrid 4y ago
Who cares? It's not like a packet that's a result of sharing/reselling suddenly "weighs" more on the network wires.
- adrr 4y ago
  People running the hotspots should care, they could get prosecuted for unauthorized access of their ISPs network. Sharing you connection is not authorized. Don't like it, lobby to change the law but what they are doing is explicitly illegal.
  - prepend 4y ago
    The odds of that happening is negligible. I suppose ISPs could try to make an example of a few customers. But I think that would be horrible PR as well as very difficult to prove. How would they distinguish traffic that’s authorized and unauthorized? As their customer, how much do you think I can authorize? Can I grant my guests access? Can my smart lightbulbs access?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Who cares? The people purchasing these hot spots, who find their bankruptcy claims against Helium being inhibited by intentional breach of contract. > not like a packet that's a result of sharing/reselling suddenly "weighs" more It does due to peering arrangements. Data transfer having value is also Helium’s claimed value added. It’s awkward to claim it costs nothing to implement but has value that can be sustainably charged.
- aetherane 4y ago
  You probably don't want someone distributing something like child porn over your home network

docdeek 4y ago

Interesting - I had never heard of these guys before the most recent episode of the Planet Money podcast on NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-the-blockchain?t=1658816970206 https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-th...

BonoboIO 4y ago
It is absolutely mindblowing that nobody questions this bulls** A house that mines crypto ... or the reality, a house with a tiny crypto miner in a corner of the house.

beambot 4y ago

The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates. Cellular is a different story. There are already 3rd-party cellular towers operators who profitably provide data service to handsets on behalf of the big network providers. Tokenomics could work for cellular with carriers providing demand-side token consumption. However, cellular wasn't Helium's initial target, and watching them migrate to multi-band / multi-protocol has been a bit cringey.

csdvrx 4y ago
> The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates yet. FTFY. Personally, I'd love to relay my home weather station readings over LoRa - then many other things too, if it's cheap enough! (say my TPMS - why not? Then I can retroactively track my car to cross correlate where I went shopping) Helium business model that's paying for the deployment of a worldwide network on a free-to-use band is brilliant: it will replicate Wifi except with a worldwide coverage + full control of the network. Wifi may at first have seemed equally useless, but the network effects from the ubiquity of it's presence and the unification of standards have replaced so many things I've only heard of in tech history books like DECT
- creeble 4y ago
  But I could put my weather station and TPMS readings on the internet, for free?
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    If your car never leaves your driveway, or the reach of your home wifi, sure! That's not the case for most people though. Also, you can't do that if people don't cooperate, while it may be in your interest (ex: to track customers across the city) As for the weather station, it involves you having a home internet - many people just have cellphones. A device that would ask for wifi passwords etc or require bluetooth pairing or worse would be complicated. Something that works worldwide with no setup would be a hit! It's very easy to not perceive an opportunity which doesn't apply to you - in this case if you have say LTE in your car + on every device + at home.

shaburn 4y ago

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo Relevant Silicon Valley clip. I’ve really enjoyed watching the market reprice a lot of the names he drops as goals in that clip.

ddrdrck_ 4y ago

This thread lacks factual information : no source for the $6.5k/month revenue, and no source for the LoRaWAN market analysis supposedly demonstrating it is a "fake, overblown use case" Actually I would be interested in understanding better the choice made by Helium and the current and future use of LoRaWAN. When I first heard about Helium some years ago I wondered why they focused on this protocol compared to WiFi or cellular network technology. Which kind of devices are supposed to connect to Helium ? I suppose it is IoT devices, but most of them actually work perfectly fine with good old cellular networks

bmitc 4y ago
It is my understanding that the goal is to expand the network to include WiFi and cellular devices, in addition to LoRaWAN devices.
joewadcan 4y ago
Exactly the reverse. Most IOT sensors suffer because of cost, battery, and engineering complexity for a cell based connection. Helium solves all three - even more important now that 3G is being phased out making thousands of IOT sensors obsolete
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
> Helium’s economy looks moderate or small, depending on how you parse the numbers. According to Token Terminal, Helium’s revenue in June totaled $2.6 million. That’s down from the April high of $5.5 million but a 73% improvement over the same period a year earlier. In 2020, Helium’s June revenue was below $200,000. Eddy Lazzarin, the head of protocol design at a16z, noted that when his firm first invested in Helium, “the last ninety days had something like $600.” It has come a long way since then. > However, this is only part of the picture. Data Credits are used when onboarding a hotspot, asserting a location, and processing a payment. Onboarding hotspots, in particular, is intensive from a Data Credit perspective. Since Helium is onboarding so many new hotspots, this skews results, suggesting greater customer activity than is actually present. Data from The Decentralized Wireless Alliance removes these three uses, demonstrating the size of the Helium economy’s customer demand. By this measure, DC usage was just $6,561 in June. https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/helium https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/helium

janjongboom 4y ago

Reposting an analysis I did 6 months ago, where their numbers did not make any sense to me compared to any other LoRaWAN deployment; and probably impossible - bound by physics - to ever generate enough revenue to pay their gateway operators at their data cost / gateway rewards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29944979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29944979

popcorncowboy 4y ago
Facts just don't matter when you're selling hope-ium. To the moooon!

buf 4y ago

I bought ETH when it was $7 back in 2017 and participated in literally every single investment I could until about 2019, resulting in 7 figure returns. I wouldn't touch the stuff now. The ability for regular people to invest in crypto back then made the ponzi-like architecture of it worth the risk. Now the VCs are trying to push their agendas, and it's blatantly obvious it's vapor.

agentdrtran 4y ago
Investing in ponzi schemes early is better than later, yeah.
iamnotarobotman 4y ago
Any receipts?
pembrook 4y ago
Wait...what? You’re complaining about VCs pushing vapor while simultaneously admitting you participated in pumping “ponzi-like” schemes on regular people? You do realize those 7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you? I’m astonished you’re claiming moral superiority over VCs while sitting on wealth you took from thousands of poor people in places like Vietnam, India, Brazil, Nigeria, etc. (whom were all later stage investors in these crypto schemes).
- tim333 4y ago
  >7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you? That would be true if there is no value in what was sold but taking ETH that he bought for $7, in 2019 when he sold it was about $250 and is now about $1500 so people buying ETH then would have done just fine. Ponzi schemes are cons that collapse, not open source assets that go up for years and years.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Not sure about Ether, but there are plenty of people that 'bought in' to the Bitcoin idea and mined some coins early on without 'taking wealth from others'. VCs are in there for entirely different reasons, and 'later stage investors' are always at risk of having their hair cut if what they invest in isn't worth what they paid for it, after all, they too were trying to take money from later day suckers. I never paid a cent for any bitcoin, but I did pay about $100 to my electricity company to mine some just for the heck of it (and ended up giving it all away).

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago

Every time the so-called web3 is mentioned on HN, it's immediately obvious what it is and why nobody should touch it, in spite of very vocal fans and people with vested interest. It's just another fad just like NFTs - with big hype and no real substance.

ivanche 4y ago

"On average, they spent $400-800 to buy a hotspot. They were expecting $100/month,". These expectations were soooo unrealistic! To have 100% return every 8 months is beyond crazy.

biglearner1day 4y ago
Hotspot owner here, my ROI was 1 week when I started. It's still rewarding a good amount after all this time.

rob74 4y ago

And here I was thinking that A16Z has started investing in the chemical industry...

fuzzfactor 4y ago
Regardless of the crypto-ness or VC-ness of the plan, from a business standpoint, in the graph of Traditional Network Effect vs. Token Network Effect, his problem is obvious. Where the y-axis = Utility To User, the Traditional Network Effect can track all the way to the upper end of the scale, and tracks perfectly with the Overall Utility, as an ideal outcome of course. But with the Token Network Effect, no matter how much of a boost there can be at the beginning, the ultimate Overall Utility is about halfway as high by comparison. By design you're building for mediocrity. One of the "secrets" when I was implementing exponential growth strategies was to "prosper better overall, by persuasively giving the customers more of their money's worth". Interesting how that tradition compares to "persuasively give the customers more of our money than it's worth, since our current product isn't really worth money to begin with".

JonathanBeuys 4y ago

Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time. To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.

synu 4y ago
On the other hand, giving away 365M as cash gifts could probably drive incredible usage growth numbers. Not to say that’s what they are doing but it also isn’t the whole picture.
dewey 4y ago
Google had a real use case and solved a problem from day one. What's Heliums use case?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
boffinism 4y ago
They all laughed at Moviepass, but just look at a chart of its usage growth. Clubhouse too.
arcticbull 4y ago
Since when did due diligence on companies become "well one time Google made no money so obviously that means this company will be Google-sized because they make no money too!"
origin_path 4y ago
You mean, less than two years? Google was founded in August 1998 and they they hired their first sales guy in May 1999. AdWords launched in October 2000 but before that time they had revenue from backend search deals where they powered other sites search engines for a fee, like Netscape which launched in June 1999. So it's not really the case that Google had no revenue for years. They were able to generate revenue very fast by selling their tech to other companies.
4y ago

ncmncm 4y ago

I could not, reading this stuff, figure out what any of it was, or was for, or for who, or why I should care about anybody's revenue.

jkestner 4y ago
It’s hard to create a two-sided marketplace when both sides have to buy hardware.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You seem to be suggesting this has something to do with a marketplace? That, what, has two sides? Involving hardware? Didn't get that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shtopointo 4y ago

Two ways to make a name for yourself these days: * crypto * talking sh*t about crypto Crypto is at a low point right now. If you time it right, it's like reporting that investing in the stock market is bad after the '08 recession.

dijit 4y ago
Seeing crypto as an investment is a problem. It relies entirely on someone else coming along later and paying more. It’s not a productive asset in any meaningful way.
- shtopointo 4y ago
  > It relies entirely on someone else coming along later and paying more Yes, just like any part of the economy. Scarcity and/or productivity is why someone pays: either something, or more for it. If it's BTC, the theory is it will be scarce, like gold. If it is one of the other crypto coins, it has to be productive like e.g. this app enabling sharing internet with others.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    The S&P 500 pays out over a trillion dollars each year in dividends and stock buybacks funded by the profits of their productive economic activity. This is what you are investing in when you buy a stock. The numbers-go-up of the stock market is both directly (through stock buybacks) and indirectly (through expectations of future dividends) a consequence of this productive activity, not just greater fools.
    - shtopointo 4y ago
      We don't disagree. A crypto coin can be that too – stock in a company.

orzig 4y ago

A16Z is obviously well known, but are they respected? I naïvely assumed that they would have access to enough expertise and deal flow to avoid the most absurd losers, but a few examples in the last few months have made me question that. And an important follow up question: do they have enough dry powder to keep sustaining these things?

thesausageking 4y ago
a16z is an odd fund. They've made a ton of money in crypto investing in projects, pumping them, and then dumping on retail. Most crypto insiders view them as completely toxic and won't touch projects they've backed. But a16z has such a strong brand in general tech and is so great at PR, I don't see them slowing down anytime soon. They're making way too much money.
TimJRobinson 4y ago
Yes and yes, they just raised a $4.5B round a few months ago.

nathan_f77 4y ago

I've had a Linxdot hotspot running in my house for the last few days. Apparently it's earned me 0.08 HNT so far (about $0.70 USD.) I've been thinking about building an IoT device for my mailbox, so I can get a notification when we get a letter. It could be fun to build something that uses the Helium network. Maybe solar powered, and using a weight sensor or something. (I probably don't need Helium for this but it would be fun to try it out.)

hyperdimension 4y ago
I'd just go with a ambient light detector/photodetector, as long as no one else is trying to check the mail.

tsujp 4y ago

You can go to the Helium Explorer and look at nodes and their earnings directly: https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/ Zoom in, click a cell, click a node, click "30D" and you'll see the amount of HNT and how much that is worth at the current market rate. I didn't see any $6,500 nodes.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
The Tweet seems to claim that $6.5k is the total monthly revenue of the network. The explorer seems to claim $2M (under "DC spent").
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Right, and the tweet thread explains that the 2m number is inflated by the hotspots that are being activated (activating hotspots is expensive, but the activation fees are one-time)
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    Thanks!

madsbuch 4y ago

The technology and adaptation is definitely not ripe -- yet! But assessing the success of a web3 product by the ability of selling a specific product is akin to assessing the success of a country by its ability to sell passports. The cost to offset the operations should come from the activity in the economy it encompasses -- these should not be assessed as traditional companies.

tarunmuvvala 4y ago

In an era where movement of money is getting fast, the rich are getting richer by holder higher equity. I find the concept of tokenization as a better way to redistribute equity. I think about the tokens as money with superpowers which can act like equity , API keys and loyalty card too. Think of tokens as a 100x version of managing equity table in a company.

BonoboIO 4y ago

You can only hope that you don’t own any tokens when the music stops

efitz 4y ago

I looked into getting a Helium hotspot, but when I looked at my ISP‘s terms of service, the Helium use case is explicitly forbidden (I use Frontier Internet in Florida.) If you’re not familiar with it, what a Helium hotspot does is allow compatible IOT devices to share your Internet connection. I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of service of most ISPs, especially when you are being monetarily compensated/rewarded for such sharing. Excerpt from ToS: “Customers may not retransmit the Service or make the Service available to anyone outside the premises (i.e. Wi-Fi or other methods of networking).”

jaywalk 4y ago
I think you could argue that Helium is not making "the Service" itself available, since it's not providing an actual Internet connection as a Wi-Fi network would. The only thing using "the Service" itself is the Helium hotspot that is within your premises.
prepend 4y ago
If it’s any consolidation Apple and Amazon break those ToS by allowing third party devices to connect and use bandwidth. I think these terms are pretty hard to enforce and not sure how your ISP would differentiate traffic.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Not the Terms of Service guys!
aembleton 4y ago
> I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of service of most ISPs I suspect that most people don't read the terms of service.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean there's a lot of innovation and good things happening from people intentionally breaking these things - "OK, sue me", to test these terms. Except that an ISP will just suspend your account, and if you object they'll be the ones that go "OK, sue me".

Kenneth21 4y ago

[dead]

eternityforest 4y ago

Helium would be so cool if it wasn't crypto-based and used BT instead of LoRa, and was more focused on being local-first. They're doing some pretty amazing stuff as is, but Sidewalk/Tile/AirTags/YoSmart are doing it without crypto, and with small enough bandwidth to work via mobile. I'd much rather have a centralized but selfhostable system, where you choose what network(s) to be a part of, and payments or lack thereof is up to them. They'd have a real chance of building a very large network if they had hardware partners. Ideally, this stuff should be "too cheap to meter" anyway, and could even be ad supported, at least for very low bandwidth best effort stuff.

detaro 4y ago
Helium without cryptocurrency stuff is The Things Network, basically.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Which is in fact, an awesome project, aside from being LoRaWan centric, and requiring registration of devices, as opposed to something like how AirTags work.

cryptos 4y ago

At least it is Helium and not only hot air!

bmitc 4y ago

Just a note that Helium, the company, renamed to Nova Labs earlier this year. Helium is now just the name of the network.

kordlessagain 4y ago

I remember, after Loggly raised ~4.2M, our revenues hit $7,500 after about 4-6 months. At the time, I thought the effort to build what we had built, code-wise, could be done by 1-2 people in maybe a couple of years. Marketing plays a big part in how much revenue comes in to a startup. The product also plays a big part, but if the product does what people need it to do, it becomes a marketing task to accelerate growth to justify the investments. Startups are a balancing act, especially when there are multiple stakeholders involved. I'm not sure these crypto offerings offer anything "product wise" that is useful to getting things done, other than making more money. Slight of hand models are tricky to evaluate. With Helium, they need people providing Internet to other people. Helium's "offering" drops to being an exchange from the marketplace (which must be grown) to the user base (which must also be grown). This "burning the candle at both ends" approach requires many multiples of capital influx to achieve, and even then if the business model is not sound (we all already have Internet) it will fail.

eatonphil 4y ago
Unrelated to cryptocurrency stuff, this is such a great comment everyone going to work for a startup should internalize. The core work building a product is relatively easy to accomplish with time. The bulk of fundraising and spend is about marketing.

boringg 4y ago

Soooo for every $4700 you get $1 ARR or if you assume that ARR is for 10 years not-discounted $470 for $1 ARR/10 years. I mean how much of those investment dollars came from early crypto investments in the first place (i.e. low cost) and are just gettin recycled is the real question. I realize that's an unfair comparison but I think there are many many people who want to throw shade at crypto because a majority of it is rotten and has weighed down on the positive attributes.