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Main question I have that is not minor is how to get funding after I have simulations that show my design's merit. I have no such experience at all.

simne 3y ago
This is impossible to answer, because investors thinking totally other way. Investor want to see MARKET fit. They are reasonable people, but best you can do, give them formula with good foundations, like: "if on January 10, you invest x1 amount of cash, in x2 days will receive product, which x3 number of people will buy for x4 dollars, before end of year". For example, for Arduino-like products, number of potential customers is just about few millions persons, and it have relatively low barriers for new producers. Because of these characteristics of Arduino-like market, there near impossible to make profitable full scale semiconductor business, as you will need to fight your niche vs many other producers. So ALL Arduino businesses, really use "two-legs" business model, or "many legs", where Arduino product is just one income source and exists one or more other powerful income sources. Other example, Amazon Ring. From first view, they are just digital camera business for very specific niche, not very sophisticated technically. But to defend their market from other producers, they registered somewhere about 80 patents, which tightly cover their niche and some nearest neighbors. Really exists many variants of limitations, which could defend your market from other producers, but this is too broad talk, to speak from what you already tell. So, what I still trying to say - you going wrong way, you need to talk with investors on business language, not technical language.
simne 3y ago
Other important thing, nearly all engineers don't understand - good enough service (availability) is more important than design performance. What I mean, imagine, two people created computers. First, created 0.5MIPS, but with excellent service, so people got ready money machine for business, near without outages, lets state something like 99% availability (maximum 14 hours offline per month), which you could just buy when want. Second created 5MIPS (magnitude faster), but cannot produce in quantities, with any problem people must wait 2 weeks or more to got service. Even if second producer marketing his computer with same price as first, but in reality you cannot buy/use it, this means, that second producer will lost his opportunity. This is oversimplified example. In real life appear lot of cases, like Pentium 4, which was technically nightmare, but Intel survive, because have products portfolio, in which P4 was total loss, but others keep company afloat, and because, at the time of P4, from other large CPU vendors, only survived AMD, which was incapable to fill up market, even when Intel fail, so people buy bad P4. Investor want you to prove, that your product will be not just simulation, but that you could someway keep afloat, even in case of huge failure. Second important thing, that you must be ready to scale, if market will grow above expectations. And with semiconductors, this is near impossible in 10nm business, because all Fabs have their own custom solutions to achieve this. Only Intel is legendary, rumors said, they could just copy design to ANY their Fab (not exact, but near to truth, unfortunately also have limitations), and scale near any product on demand. All other manufacturers have extreme troubles when need to "just copy" product to other Fab, they spending months to do this "just copy".

simne 3y ago

This is impossible to answer, because investors thinking totally other way. Investor want to see MARKET fit. They are reasonable people, but best you can do, give them formula with good foundations, like: "if on January 10, you invest x1 amount of cash, in x2 days will receive product, which x3 number of people will buy for x4 dollars, before end of year". For example, for Arduino-like products, number of potential customers is just about few millions persons, and it have relatively low barriers for new producers. Because of these characteristics of Arduino-like market, there near impossible to make profitable full scale semiconductor business, as you will need to fight your niche vs many other producers. So ALL Arduino businesses, really use "two-legs" business model, or "many legs", where Arduino product is just one income source and exists one or more other powerful income sources. Other example, Amazon Ring. From first view, they are just digital camera business for very specific niche, not very sophisticated technically. But to defend their market from other producers, they registered somewhere about 80 patents, which tightly cover their niche and some nearest neighbors. Really exists many variants of limitations, which could defend your market from other producers, but this is too broad talk, to speak from what you already tell. So, what I still trying to say - you going wrong way, you need to talk with investors on business language, not technical language.

simne 3y ago

Other important thing, nearly all engineers don't understand - good enough service (availability) is more important than design performance. What I mean, imagine, two people created computers. First, created 0.5MIPS, but with excellent service, so people got ready money machine for business, near without outages, lets state something like 99% availability (maximum 14 hours offline per month), which you could just buy when want. Second created 5MIPS (magnitude faster), but cannot produce in quantities, with any problem people must wait 2 weeks or more to got service. Even if second producer marketing his computer with same price as first, but in reality you cannot buy/use it, this means, that second producer will lost his opportunity. This is oversimplified example. In real life appear lot of cases, like Pentium 4, which was technically nightmare, but Intel survive, because have products portfolio, in which P4 was total loss, but others keep company afloat, and because, at the time of P4, from other large CPU vendors, only survived AMD, which was incapable to fill up market, even when Intel fail, so people buy bad P4. Investor want you to prove, that your product will be not just simulation, but that you could someway keep afloat, even in case of huge failure. Second important thing, that you must be ready to scale, if market will grow above expectations. And with semiconductors, this is near impossible in 10nm business, because all Fabs have their own custom solutions to achieve this. Only Intel is legendary, rumors said, they could just copy design to ANY their Fab (not exact, but near to truth, unfortunately also have limitations), and scale near any product on demand. All other manufacturers have extreme troubles when need to "just copy" product to other Fab, they spending months to do this "just copy".