5 ms·

> Last year (2022) Arduino took in a Series B funding round of $32 million. [link:https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-of-32-million-for-

by pierat 3y ago

> Last year (2022) Arduino took in a Series B funding round of $32 million. [link:https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-of-32-million-for-arduino/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/07/series-b-funding-round-...] > [quote from the link] “So today, we dial up our vision for universal innovation with a clear strategy to expand our portfolio for professionals, supported by a Series B funding round of $32 million led by the global deep tech investor Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), joined by Renesas, Anzu Partners, and Arm.” Remember folks, "VC's rhyme with feces". They will enshittify your business faster than every toilet being used during the Super Bowl. Arduino is the latest casualty.

MSFT_Edging 3y ago
Arduino has basically dominated every place where someone first touches a microcontroller. Schools and most early learners buy legit arduinos. Why did they need VC funding?
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Greed.
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Zero empathy then. Imagine the actual innovation we'd see with actual lawless ip laws. Everyone iterating from everyone else. It's how china caught up and in some areas surpassed. Maybe our IP model is just weights on a runner's ankles.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      iirc a recent study suggested that there is no measurable social benefit (eg, increase in rate of innovation) from patents, but I can't immediately find a source for that. But generally everyone has this idea of the scrappy inventor in their garage inventing the flux capacitor and that's not really how it works, patents are like H1-Bs, they are a thing that benefits the companies with enough scale and legal resources to lobby and work the system. And those guys are gonna be fine regardless. it's unsurprising though because in general even in the happy case, you have locked an invention to a single company for 28 years and that's an eternity in the modern era. And future slight improvements effectively refresh/evergreen the patent, because there's usually only a couple viable ways of doing something. I think of this as the "e-ink" scenario, where there's this fantastic tech that's locked to a company that wants to work out recurring-revenue licensing models for hundreds of dollars per device per year and such, and slow-walks innovation secure in the knowledge that if a competitor does appear that they not only have years of head-start but could sqush them in litigation. Then in the unhappy case you've got the places that get a patent for "updates delivered over the internet" or "e-commerce on a website" like the one that tried to shake down newegg. Most companies will just pay up rather than fight it on principle, regardless of how egregious the patent is. And such patents obviously should never be issued but the patent office don't care and the legal system allows jurisdiction-shopping that ensure that once issued, the patents will find a sympathetic venue in a red state that's happy to rake in the court fees. Imagine if it's your small LLC that gets targeted instead of a company like Newegg with enough resources to fight, this is a huge instance of that "big companies exploit the system to squash smaller upstarts" failure mode that reduces innovation. and really the existence of the system at all essentially ensures at least some friction loss of innovation due to the mere possibility of problem B occurring. Let alone in systems (like ours) where it actually does occur frequently and blatantly. even when it is not flagrantly obvious like the above-mentioned (real, issued) patents, the standard of "not obvious to a skilled practioner in the art" is not really being enforced, or an incredibly low bar of "not obvious" is being utilized (de facto it only seems to mean prior art). A shit-ton of these things are things that would be obvious to any engineer that sat down and worked whatever problem through. If it's going to exist, it ideally would be very narrowly targeted, and perhaps even the patent duration and terms should be customized to the significance and innovativeness of the invention. If you invent a cancer drug and take it through trials that should be handled differently than "3d printer but with a different kind of head inspired by a pastry machine that builds a print 10% better" or whatever. unfortunately if you remove the patent system that actually disadvantages you internationally, because you didn't patent your thing! And of course it's against the international treaties/etc (which we wrote and could change but still). Again, this actually prevents you from even toning down the abuse of the system because if a US patent is harder to get than any other, you are just disadvantaging US companies. And if you create an uneven playing field for patent lifetimes/etc then that will ultimately benefit companies who can point to the billion $ they spent in R&D and against the person who invented something in their garage (how important could it really be?) and doesn't know how to sell it in the patent application/etc. It's a race to the bottom at every level. Which is just an inherent problem with globalization (and the US federal system) in general. If you don't have a "minimum standard" then some places are gonna race to the bottom, and a rational actor is highly incentivized to find loopholes that let them eliminate those "minimum standards" and race to the bottom while everyone else is held to higher, more expensive standards. The court-shopping problem is really just a microcosm/toy problem of these globalization problems. Same problem, different scale.
      - jiminymcmoogley 3y ago
        sounds like you might be referring to this paper published by the st louis fed https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-03... - i'll be honest and admit i haven't read through it but i do see it mentioned on here a lot so it's been sitting in my bookmarks untouched for a while, just thought i'd link it for anyone curious
        paulmd 3y ago
        definitely that's the one, thanks
      - robomartin 3y ago
        Patents are not the problem. Bullshit patents that should have never been granted are. That's the problem. I have no choice but to live in the world of patents. We have to file patents and protect ourselves from them. One of the reasons for which we have to endure such bullshit is the massive numbers of patents that should have been rejected and never issued. The US Patent Office has granted so many patents that are, as they say in the trade, obvious to those skilled in the art, that almost every domain is an absolute minefield littered with these bullshit patents. What do you do if you have to play in these domains? Well, go and file bullshit patents! It's an arms race. And the ammunition takes the form of PDF files approved by the USPTO. Defending against a claim of patent infringement is very expensive, even if the patent should have never been granted. In some ways, the bottom line is that you have attorneys doing what they do best: Make a mess out of something that could have been far simpler. You have attorneys at the USPTO working with attorneys being hired to put patents through. Everybody is happy. And, if litigation happens, they are all even happier, because that's when the big bucks roll in. I am all for true-invention patents, worthy patents. These require investment, time, effort and true discovery of new things. I am just fine rewarding companies and individuals with 20 years of protection for such work. Anyone who has developed difficult technology understands that it could easily take ten to twenty years to see results. My problem is with the 75% to 95% of patents that should have never been granted.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Removing all IP protections would likely make it harder to run these sorts of businesses, but nobody has any inherent right to run a successful business
      - ilyt 3y ago
        3-5 years protection would be enough to give head start without stifling innovation much I think
- pierat 3y ago
  Lets be fair. This is where I buy arduino stuff. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004305055818.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004305055818.html And yes, the price is $.57 and $1.29 shipping. Its a total of $12.98 for 10 of 'em. And that includes USB cables and headers. And, they're also individually sealed. And on https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-nano?selectedStore=us https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-nano?selectedS... , they're only $24.90 EACH. That's $249 not including shipping for the same. Or perhaps you need an Arduino Mega for 3d printing? Only $12.88 here. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32909503032.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32909503032.html You want ESP32 with usb-c ? $34.35/quantity 10 . https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005565990528.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005565990528.html Or perhaps STM32 is more up your alley with arm? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32792513237.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32792513237.html and that includes the ST-Link hardware programmer and the board for $3.53 And, as long as you ask the dealer for the manual on Ali, they'll almost always provide that. Might be partially or all in Chinese. But again, us DIY makers can afford this. We can't afford the jokes of prices in the US or European markets.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    To be fair lots of other people just buy arduino brand boards directly or through Amazon, sparkfun, adafruit, etc.
  - joemi 3y ago
    I've had a really bad time over the years with the USB chips in the clones, to the point where if I'm using a clone these days, I won't even attempt to use its USB and I'll just use ICSP to program the arduino clone. For cases where I know I'm going to want to use the USB I'll happily buy a genuine Arduino.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Really? I’ve had no problems with the (usually CH34x) USB interfaces across high double digits of boards. I could ICSP them (and do for some of the 3D printers), but I can’t recall a single instance of Chinese-made clones needing that. There’s no way it would get me to pay 5-8x over the clones/respins.
sircastor 3y ago
I'm reminded that Maker Media was making a Magazine and a faire, and then took a pile of VC money and crashed and burned. It was a mess. The Magazine is back, the faire is back but the whole debacle is a lesson learned that none of that was necessary.
- pierat 3y ago
  No, get it right. The VC destroyed the Maker Faire and magazine because it did not make enough profit fast enough. Therefore it was more profitable for the VC to destroy the business and cash in the chunks left over. Venture capitalists are shit no matter how you look at it. And they will take sustainable businesses and dismantle them wholesale to squeeze a few extra pennies. I hope Make/Maker Faire will never again touch a cent of VC's money.
  - jeron 3y ago
    >And they will take sustainable businesses and dismantle them wholesale to squeeze a few extra pennies. wait till you hear about private equity
    - reaperman 3y ago
      There’s a LOT of overlap there. VC is one form of private equity. And increasingly, VC’s are willing to execute some of the more traditional private equity strategies which you’re likely attempting to reference.
  - sircastor 3y ago
    I don’t disagree that VCs and VC money is garbage and offered no real value here. The thing I don’t get is that Maker Media took the money at all. I understand believing in your business, but Make: subscriptions weren’t the next social network. There wasn’t that much growth to be had, and I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why Dale Dougherty thought there was.
varispeed 3y ago
One thing very much any sensible investor asks is: "How easy someone can steal your lunch?" With an open source product, it's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and leaving it unattended. Nobody is going to risk their money only to find out someone took the product, remixed it and started selling at lower price using their access to e.g. large scale manufacturing and so on. This is especially a huge danger for small business, where they don't have money for lawyers and can't use the economy of scale for their product due to limited funding. Basically, open source hardware is only viable for rich manufacturers who can use it as a PR tool. Some even cynically try to get young and inexperienced engineers to open up their inventions, just so that they can pick the best ideas and use in their own closed source products. In short it's a pipe dream.
- avmich 3y ago
  You're on an YC forum, so here people will happily tell you about benefits of having somebody taking your product in this case. You can take their improvements and use them in your product too. Here's the case of license abiding, and the whole topic is about it, but in a "good enough case" you may hope for that. That somebody else will expand the product awareness for your product. They'll try to go forward and find a good way, or get some burns trying something market doesn't approve, and many of that you can use for yourself. You may have a profitable strategy by selling to them, by selling your expertise elsewhere, by finding a niche etc. - or even, having enough resources, by going more aggressively to them. This forum traditionally thinks ideas are dime a dozen, and (lots and lots of) IP protections in hardware are weird, looking from the software point of view.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Most products aren't all that hard to reverse engineer so being open really doesn't hurt you all that much, if it is being popular it will be cloned, open hardware or not. And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them. Say you're IoT company, selling open devices that are cloned easily doesn't affect you if you make money on providing best interface for them out there.
  - 3y ago

by pierat 3y ago

MSFT_Edging 3y ago

Arduino has basically dominated every place where someone first touches a microcontroller. Schools and most early learners buy legit arduinos. Why did they need VC funding?

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Greed.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  Zero empathy then. Imagine the actual innovation we'd see with actual lawless ip laws. Everyone iterating from everyone else. It's how china caught up and in some areas surpassed. Maybe our IP model is just weights on a runner's ankles.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    iirc a recent study suggested that there is no measurable social benefit (eg, increase in rate of innovation) from patents, but I can't immediately find a source for that. But generally everyone has this idea of the scrappy inventor in their garage inventing the flux capacitor and that's not really how it works, patents are like H1-Bs, they are a thing that benefits the companies with enough scale and legal resources to lobby and work the system. And those guys are gonna be fine regardless. it's unsurprising though because in general even in the happy case, you have locked an invention to a single company for 28 years and that's an eternity in the modern era. And future slight improvements effectively refresh/evergreen the patent, because there's usually only a couple viable ways of doing something. I think of this as the "e-ink" scenario, where there's this fantastic tech that's locked to a company that wants to work out recurring-revenue licensing models for hundreds of dollars per device per year and such, and slow-walks innovation secure in the knowledge that if a competitor does appear that they not only have years of head-start but could sqush them in litigation. Then in the unhappy case you've got the places that get a patent for "updates delivered over the internet" or "e-commerce on a website" like the one that tried to shake down newegg. Most companies will just pay up rather than fight it on principle, regardless of how egregious the patent is. And such patents obviously should never be issued but the patent office don't care and the legal system allows jurisdiction-shopping that ensure that once issued, the patents will find a sympathetic venue in a red state that's happy to rake in the court fees. Imagine if it's your small LLC that gets targeted instead of a company like Newegg with enough resources to fight, this is a huge instance of that "big companies exploit the system to squash smaller upstarts" failure mode that reduces innovation. and really the existence of the system at all essentially ensures at least some friction loss of innovation due to the mere possibility of problem B occurring. Let alone in systems (like ours) where it actually does occur frequently and blatantly. even when it is not flagrantly obvious like the above-mentioned (real, issued) patents, the standard of "not obvious to a skilled practioner in the art" is not really being enforced, or an incredibly low bar of "not obvious" is being utilized (de facto it only seems to mean prior art). A shit-ton of these things are things that would be obvious to any engineer that sat down and worked whatever problem through. If it's going to exist, it ideally would be very narrowly targeted, and perhaps even the patent duration and terms should be customized to the significance and innovativeness of the invention. If you invent a cancer drug and take it through trials that should be handled differently than "3d printer but with a different kind of head inspired by a pastry machine that builds a print 10% better" or whatever. unfortunately if you remove the patent system that actually disadvantages you internationally, because you didn't patent your thing! And of course it's against the international treaties/etc (which we wrote and could change but still). Again, this actually prevents you from even toning down the abuse of the system because if a US patent is harder to get than any other, you are just disadvantaging US companies. And if you create an uneven playing field for patent lifetimes/etc then that will ultimately benefit companies who can point to the billion $ they spent in R&D and against the person who invented something in their garage (how important could it really be?) and doesn't know how to sell it in the patent application/etc. It's a race to the bottom at every level. Which is just an inherent problem with globalization (and the US federal system) in general. If you don't have a "minimum standard" then some places are gonna race to the bottom, and a rational actor is highly incentivized to find loopholes that let them eliminate those "minimum standards" and race to the bottom while everyone else is held to higher, more expensive standards. The court-shopping problem is really just a microcosm/toy problem of these globalization problems. Same problem, different scale.
    - jiminymcmoogley 3y ago
      sounds like you might be referring to this paper published by the st louis fed https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-03... - i'll be honest and admit i haven't read through it but i do see it mentioned on here a lot so it's been sitting in my bookmarks untouched for a while, just thought i'd link it for anyone curious
      - paulmd 3y ago
        definitely that's the one, thanks
    - robomartin 3y ago
      Patents are not the problem. Bullshit patents that should have never been granted are. That's the problem. I have no choice but to live in the world of patents. We have to file patents and protect ourselves from them. One of the reasons for which we have to endure such bullshit is the massive numbers of patents that should have been rejected and never issued. The US Patent Office has granted so many patents that are, as they say in the trade, obvious to those skilled in the art, that almost every domain is an absolute minefield littered with these bullshit patents. What do you do if you have to play in these domains? Well, go and file bullshit patents! It's an arms race. And the ammunition takes the form of PDF files approved by the USPTO. Defending against a claim of patent infringement is very expensive, even if the patent should have never been granted. In some ways, the bottom line is that you have attorneys doing what they do best: Make a mess out of something that could have been far simpler. You have attorneys at the USPTO working with attorneys being hired to put patents through. Everybody is happy. And, if litigation happens, they are all even happier, because that's when the big bucks roll in. I am all for true-invention patents, worthy patents. These require investment, time, effort and true discovery of new things. I am just fine rewarding companies and individuals with 20 years of protection for such work. Anyone who has developed difficult technology understands that it could easily take ten to twenty years to see results. My problem is with the 75% to 95% of patents that should have never been granted.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Removing all IP protections would likely make it harder to run these sorts of businesses, but nobody has any inherent right to run a successful business
    - ilyt 3y ago
      3-5 years protection would be enough to give head start without stifling innovation much I think
pierat 3y ago
Lets be fair. This is where I buy arduino stuff. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004305055818.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004305055818.html And yes, the price is $.57 and $1.29 shipping. Its a total of $12.98 for 10 of 'em. And that includes USB cables and headers. And, they're also individually sealed. And on https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-nano?selectedStore=us https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-nano?selectedS... , they're only $24.90 EACH. That's $249 not including shipping for the same. Or perhaps you need an Arduino Mega for 3d printing? Only $12.88 here. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32909503032.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32909503032.html You want ESP32 with usb-c ? $34.35/quantity 10 . https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005565990528.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005565990528.html Or perhaps STM32 is more up your alley with arm? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32792513237.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32792513237.html and that includes the ST-Link hardware programmer and the board for $3.53 And, as long as you ask the dealer for the manual on Ali, they'll almost always provide that. Might be partially or all in Chinese. But again, us DIY makers can afford this. We can't afford the jokes of prices in the US or European markets.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  To be fair lots of other people just buy arduino brand boards directly or through Amazon, sparkfun, adafruit, etc.
- joemi 3y ago
  I've had a really bad time over the years with the USB chips in the clones, to the point where if I'm using a clone these days, I won't even attempt to use its USB and I'll just use ICSP to program the arduino clone. For cases where I know I'm going to want to use the USB I'll happily buy a genuine Arduino.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Really? I’ve had no problems with the (usually CH34x) USB interfaces across high double digits of boards. I could ICSP them (and do for some of the 3D printers), but I can’t recall a single instance of Chinese-made clones needing that. There’s no way it would get me to pay 5-8x over the clones/respins.

sircastor 3y ago

I'm reminded that Maker Media was making a Magazine and a faire, and then took a pile of VC money and crashed and burned. It was a mess. The Magazine is back, the faire is back but the whole debacle is a lesson learned that none of that was necessary.

pierat 3y ago
No, get it right. The VC destroyed the Maker Faire and magazine because it did not make enough profit fast enough. Therefore it was more profitable for the VC to destroy the business and cash in the chunks left over. Venture capitalists are shit no matter how you look at it. And they will take sustainable businesses and dismantle them wholesale to squeeze a few extra pennies. I hope Make/Maker Faire will never again touch a cent of VC's money.
- jeron 3y ago
  >And they will take sustainable businesses and dismantle them wholesale to squeeze a few extra pennies. wait till you hear about private equity
  - reaperman 3y ago
    There’s a LOT of overlap there. VC is one form of private equity. And increasingly, VC’s are willing to execute some of the more traditional private equity strategies which you’re likely attempting to reference.
- sircastor 3y ago
  I don’t disagree that VCs and VC money is garbage and offered no real value here. The thing I don’t get is that Maker Media took the money at all. I understand believing in your business, but Make: subscriptions weren’t the next social network. There wasn’t that much growth to be had, and I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why Dale Dougherty thought there was.

varispeed 3y ago

One thing very much any sensible investor asks is: "How easy someone can steal your lunch?" With an open source product, it's like putting lunch on a table at a busy high street and leaving it unattended. Nobody is going to risk their money only to find out someone took the product, remixed it and started selling at lower price using their access to e.g. large scale manufacturing and so on. This is especially a huge danger for small business, where they don't have money for lawyers and can't use the economy of scale for their product due to limited funding. Basically, open source hardware is only viable for rich manufacturers who can use it as a PR tool. Some even cynically try to get young and inexperienced engineers to open up their inventions, just so that they can pick the best ideas and use in their own closed source products. In short it's a pipe dream.

avmich 3y ago
You're on an YC forum, so here people will happily tell you about benefits of having somebody taking your product in this case. You can take their improvements and use them in your product too. Here's the case of license abiding, and the whole topic is about it, but in a "good enough case" you may hope for that. That somebody else will expand the product awareness for your product. They'll try to go forward and find a good way, or get some burns trying something market doesn't approve, and many of that you can use for yourself. You may have a profitable strategy by selling to them, by selling your expertise elsewhere, by finding a niche etc. - or even, having enough resources, by going more aggressively to them. This forum traditionally thinks ideas are dime a dozen, and (lots and lots of) IP protections in hardware are weird, looking from the software point of view.
ilyt 3y ago
Most products aren't all that hard to reverse engineer so being open really doesn't hurt you all that much, if it is being popular it will be cloned, open hardware or not. And I think it can work if you are trying to make money on services rather than devices used to provide them. Say you're IoT company, selling open devices that are cloned easily doesn't affect you if you make money on providing best interface for them out there.
- 3y ago