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Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists. That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super
by lexicality 3y ago
Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists.
That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow
- darkstar999 3y agoHow is that a nail in the coffin?
- candiddevmike 3y agoHow do you have a 100M business selling cheap, niche microcontrollers to hobbyists? They're starting to pursue a subscription model (Arduino Cloud), I'd expect them to shutter products that won't work with the subscription model and require everything else to use it. It's your standard enshitification play.
- sgt 3y agoBy having 10M+ hobbyists that you support and inspire. That's how... easier said than done, but if they play their cards right, it is possible.
- coldpie 3y ago> but if they play their cards right, it is possible. Not with $54M in debt to service. This is a death warrant. I'm sure the execs will make out nicely, though.
- tedivm 3y agoThere isn't any debt to service. Taking funding isn't the same as taking debt (in some ways its worse, in some better), and there's no direct interest or payment they have to make every month like if it was debt. The problem is that they give up ownership (and probably ownership) to people who may have different goals and values. This can lead to enshittification, especially for a company that doesn't have a good path to extreme growth and profits. You also can't discharge ownership in bankruptcy like you can with debt.
- yard2010 3y agoIsn't "raising funds" just a euphemism for taking a loan you don't have to return in cash? Like a loan which is not regulated as a loan
- bombcar 3y agoIt's not a loan because it doesn't have to be paid back. But it operates somewhat worse than a loan because the buyer now has some say in how the company is run, and they will want to see a return on their investment eventually. A loan may be better because as long as the company can service it, the lenders have no say in how the business is run, and they get no additional profit from increased income/profit of the business.
- marcosdumay 3y agoExcept that if you sell or liquidate the company, you have to pay it all back before you can get any of the money. So... It's completely equivalent to a low preference loan.
- gbear605 3y agoTechnically a VC with less than 50% control can’t do anything to you, so as long as you keep 51% and never sell or liquidate then it’s free money. In practice, they wind up pressuring you to do those things and then they get their money back.
- yard2010 3y agoThat's my point, when taking a loan you know upfront the cost, but when raising money you can't know what it really takes
- Invictus0 3y agoAren't apples just a euphemism for oranges?
- mholm 3y agoVCs, historically, don't understand this. Arduino did, but they've likely ceded some control by doing this fundraising. Maybe these VCs are different. I'm not counting on it.
- marcosdumay 3y agoThat won't do. Your number is way too low. You need either at least an order of magnitude more (still iffy, people don't buy boards all the time), or to sell into some larger market. Are there 100M electronics hobbyists to sell to over the world? Maybe if you make it into schools...
- crote 3y ago"Supporting" and "inspiring" hobbyists isn't going to pay the bills, though. Arduino opened up an ecosystem when they started back in 2005, but the world looks a lot different in 2023. First-party Arduinos are nothing special these days, and their competitors make way better products for far less money. Even the Arduino IDE has been leapfrogged by MicroPython / CircuitPython. Hobbyists these days just aren't all that interested in Arduino anymore, and there is pretty much nothing paid which they can introduce which will change that.
- ycombinete 3y agoI guess the first nail was hobbyists buying their boards from China.
- markus_zhang 3y agoHow does the compatibility go? I guess it's trivial to setup a dev enclv using ooen source ide and toolchain so we don't have to use their ide.
- Saris 3y agoSupported fully by the Arduino framework. Working with them using PlatformIO in vscode is really nice and streamlined.
- markus_zhang 3y agoThanks, that's good to know!
- coldpie 3y agoYeahhhhh. Taking on VC debt is a great way to kill your company. Guess this will buy them a few more years before they start turning the screws.
- nylonstrung 3y agoThey didn't take debt— they sold equity in the company. In reality this makes the company MORE financially healthy, while diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold
- hotstickyballs 3y ago> sold equity in the company. > diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold That’s VC debt
- im_down_w_otp 3y agoIt isn’t. Venture debt is a whole different thing. Disclosure: is founder who has raised money through both equity financing and debt financing.
- svnt 3y agoYeah, debt is better for the founder which is why investors want priced rounds.
- nylonstrung 3y agoNeither is "better" or "worse" for the founder- this is entirely dependent on terms. This is like saying a credit card is "better" than a home equity loan As with equity there are MANY investors that only deal in debt- SVB's debt army for example. Debt is problematic as it weakens the P&L by requiring the company to make interest payments. The rates of which (in venture) are currently in excess of credit card APRs
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FredPret 3y ago> super low cost ESPs from China Just checked aliexpress.com. You were not kidding - $1-2 per item!
- microtonal 3y agoThey have been cheap for many years. There are so many great cheap options out there now with good support, ESP, ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, Pico W, WeAct Black Pill (STM32), various nRF2 boards. At this point Arduino is just extremely overpriced and probably only still relevant because it's a household name and people want pin compatibility with the Uno and V5 tolerance for reasons.
- jandrese 3y agoCheap boards aren't new, but cheap boards that have a sane development environment and decent documentation are far more novel.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoMany of the Arduino libraries have been modified to work with most of the cheap boards (already listed by another user). If the Arduino IDE becomes a pain point I'm sure an open IDE (or VS Code plugin?) will step in. (There may already be such a thing?) Edit: another comment suggests PlatformIO + VS Code allows you to avoid the Arduino IDE.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago> another comment suggests PlatformIO + VS Code allows you to avoid the Arduino IDE. s/allows you to avoid/is highly preferable to/ :-)
- zackees 3y ago[dead]
- _spduchamp 3y agoYup. I switched to ESPs for projects and won't go back to Arduino. I had to fix someone else's Arduino based art installation a couple weeks ago and it seemed weird and very retro going back to work with that Arduino form factor. That said, maybe they have a future being a standard component in industrial settings. I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.
- ourlordcaffeine 3y ago> I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure. Arduino has always come across to me as being for hobbyist/beginner/learning, and critical infra would use things more like, for example, STMicro or Texas Instruments microcontrollers
- jandrese 3y agoWasn't the whole project started because a professor was unhappy with the state of hardware for the schoolroom?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]