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I find this to be an odd take on a VC forum. It’s obviously marketing and mission branding, which is only natural in an age where we as employees flock to noble

by devjab 3y ago

I find this to be an odd take on a VC forum. It’s obviously marketing and mission branding, which is only natural in an age where we as employees flock to noble missions. I work in an investment bank as an example, but our investments go into building/running/improving green energy plants, so while our main mission is to make investors richer we do it by building a better world. I’m not sure I would’ve marketed it exactly this way. But this is because I spent almost a decade in the Danish public sector and I know how revolutionary long term storage will be for public recording. Right now we spent a very high amount of resources on the maintenance of data records that are rarely accessed but are important to public history, accountability and many social sciences. If you could sell those recording organisations a medium that didn’t need near constant maintaining it would free up a lot of resources. Still, maybe it’s a good choice for a company mission considering my earlier points as this tech will essentially sell itself. If it works as well as it’s sold in this article. In the content of hacker news, however, why wouldn’t you expect this to be meant to make its investors money?

seanhunter 3y ago
I don't expect it to make its investors money because most VC-style startups don't make money and also because it seems to me to be kind of a dumb idea for a few reasons. 1)Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think their IP has any kind of protectable moat. I really can't see that patent surviving any sort of challenge. So if tehy figure out a business model that works it will get cloned cheaper. 2)It's an actuarial fact that people overpay for insurance relative to expectation but here they are essentially selling a partial mitigation for a very high severity very low probability event[1]. So the expectation is very low and is highly subject to model calibration error. Potential customers are not going to value this well and I don't see people paying them enough to stay in business. I could easily be wrong about both of those things. I know about selling the mission "Making the world a better place with extensible mobile, social, local middleware APIs" etc as I think the TV show "Silicon Valley" parodied it. Just in this case I dont' really see either the mission or the commercial reality making much sense. It's interesting that the board of advisors has Ben "I'm gonna bring the mammoth back to life" Lamm and David "Make the statue of Liberty disappear" Copperfield on it. So they've got Barnum and Bailey going for them at least. [1] "I'm selling you a backup that would survive even if humanity gets wiped out" isn't a business proposition. Noone cares about what their backups do under those circumstances so they won't pay for it.

by devjab 3y ago

seanhunter 3y ago

I don't expect it to make its investors money because most VC-style startups don't make money and also because it seems to me to be kind of a dumb idea for a few reasons. 1)Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think their IP has any kind of protectable moat. I really can't see that patent surviving any sort of challenge. So if tehy figure out a business model that works it will get cloned cheaper. 2)It's an actuarial fact that people overpay for insurance relative to expectation but here they are essentially selling a partial mitigation for a very high severity very low probability event[1]. So the expectation is very low and is highly subject to model calibration error. Potential customers are not going to value this well and I don't see people paying them enough to stay in business. I could easily be wrong about both of those things. I know about selling the mission "Making the world a better place with extensible mobile, social, local middleware APIs" etc as I think the TV show "Silicon Valley" parodied it. Just in this case I dont' really see either the mission or the commercial reality making much sense. It's interesting that the board of advisors has Ben "I'm gonna bring the mammoth back to life" Lamm and David "Make the statue of Liberty disappear" Copperfield on it. So they've got Barnum and Bailey going for them at least. [1] "I'm selling you a backup that would survive even if humanity gets wiped out" isn't a business proposition. Noone cares about what their backups do under those circumstances so they won't pay for it.