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Which startup has everything figured out in the start? If investors are this picky, they are not investing in startup and won't be getting a deal which could gr

Which startup has everything figured out in the start? If investors are this picky, they are not investing in startup and won't be getting a deal which could grow 10x. If Tesla failed due to high cost to manufacture or OpenAI failed because it couldn't earn revenue or Uber failed because of doing illegal stuff or overpaying drivers you would have said the same thing.

bluGill 3y ago
So invest a tiny amount to figure that out before investing a lot of money. There is a reason funding goes in rounds - round one we have a few smart people who want to work together, fund us for 6 months (maybe a year) to figure out where there is a market. The output of that round is those calculations, then you get more money for round two to create tiny prototypes/models to verify the problems you identified in round one are solvable, then round three to perfect the prototypes, and round four to scale it. You can add or remove rounds as needed, the important point here is that as rounds more $$$ the risk needs to go down.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  No, my point was that tiny bit wouldn't have worked with this. Some startup get benefit of scale like Tesla or OpenAI or Uber. If they are constrained in how much money they could burn they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. They all chose to not do calculation on RoI and won(but most would lose). To make vertical farming successful we need new discoveries and inventions that requires money and has uncertain success probability. Startup investors are wary of the fact that they are more likely going to loose all of the money.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Tiny would have been enough to run the math. Some things do need a large scale to work. However you should do whatever prework is needed to run that math before investing in scale.
    - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
      I don't think you are getting my point. The math of RoI can't be run as the probability is uncertain. One example is OpenAI invested multiple billions in research and just out of pure luck found PMF for ChatGPT which even they said they didn't expected. Vertical farming is like that. You need miracle to make it better than normal and miracle requires huge chunck of money to even have non zero probability.

bluGill 3y ago

So invest a tiny amount to figure that out before investing a lot of money. There is a reason funding goes in rounds - round one we have a few smart people who want to work together, fund us for 6 months (maybe a year) to figure out where there is a market. The output of that round is those calculations, then you get more money for round two to create tiny prototypes/models to verify the problems you identified in round one are solvable, then round three to perfect the prototypes, and round four to scale it. You can add or remove rounds as needed, the important point here is that as rounds more $$$ the risk needs to go down.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago
No, my point was that tiny bit wouldn't have worked with this. Some startup get benefit of scale like Tesla or OpenAI or Uber. If they are constrained in how much money they could burn they wouldn't have gotten anywhere. They all chose to not do calculation on RoI and won(but most would lose). To make vertical farming successful we need new discoveries and inventions that requires money and has uncertain success probability. Startup investors are wary of the fact that they are more likely going to loose all of the money.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Tiny would have been enough to run the math. Some things do need a large scale to work. However you should do whatever prework is needed to run that math before investing in scale.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    I don't think you are getting my point. The math of RoI can't be run as the probability is uncertain. One example is OpenAI invested multiple billions in research and just out of pure luck found PMF for ChatGPT which even they said they didn't expected. Vertical farming is like that. You need miracle to make it better than normal and miracle requires huge chunck of money to even have non zero probability.