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There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a
by darth_avocado 1y ago
There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.
- pqtyw 1y agoAnd there are business which will never be highly profitable unless the competition implodes for no particular reason (like making your own browser).
- turnsout 1y agoI mean this with no snark: I would love to see the investor deck that explains how an AI-powered browser is going to make any multiple of $610M.
- jsk2600 1y agoI would guess by selling personal data and ads.
- immibis 1y agoMore charitably by selling the only browser that's actually usable in a few years. The AI will be used to cancel out the effect of other people's AI.
- turnsout 1y agoHa, that's a dark timeline! But sadly quite probable.
- Apocryphon 1y agoThere’s Orion, Zen, plenty of minor browser projects that aspire to better experiences than the majors’. Brave is likely much more widespread than Arc, though that one is monetized via the previous trend (crypto). Never even heard of a lot of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxhVA5NVQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrxhVA5NVQ4
- tpm 1y agoPutting the agent into your user agent.
- hinkley 1y agoThere have been a few extremely popular remastered games the last few years and the internet is full of people cranky because folks are posting replies to five year old internet threads about the game. Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.
- zenware 1y agoPerhaps they are hoping Google will pay them ~$500m/yr to be the default search engine.
- NoGravitas 1y ago0.01 is a multiple!
- anon191928 1y agoyeah and what makes them different compared to half baked fraud startups with no revenue ? most of the world would not believe that they will bring revenue in years?
- numbsafari 1y agoPedigree of the team and a believable project plan. Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit. The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.
- darth_avocado 1y agoThat’s like the point of venture capitalism and to a certain extent all entrepreneurial endeavors. You could start a T-shirt printing company (a completely viable business) and not see any revenue come in for months.
- echelon 1y agoI can't tell you how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser. It was at least a dozen. I'd never heard of the damned thing before. I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics. The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on. Not sure if Arc is that browser, but lots of teams are trying. Chrome is shitty on purpose because it is designed to sell ads. Other browsers can sell AI or other things to fund their development. It's a shame we don't have a good open source browser with decent leadership anymore. I'm sure they'd be killing it. I could swear Mozilla is led by a revolving door of paid off Google plants.
- edu 1y agoWell, I was one of Arc users but they abandoned it in favor of a new browser with an integrated AI agent that t can work on tabs, Dia. Now I’m using it, but to be honest I use almost none of the AI features beyond some summaries for pages and YouTube videos, but I see a lot of potential there (I.e. make it check the calendar to propose a time in a newly composed email) for the less technical users.
- darth_avocado 1y agoI use Arc for two reasons: Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time
- smallerize 1y agoFirefox does both of those things out of the box with no extensions.
- BikiniPrince 1y agoVimperator plugin used to do the rest, but maybe that is no longer needed or working.
- zaruvi 1y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI'm told that it can take ten years for a vineyard to start generating profit.
- johnofthesea 1y agoIt takes 5 years on average til you can harvest some grapes. 10 years for generating profit sounds about right.
- naravara 1y agoI know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.
- Nextgrid 1y agoOut of curiosity, why would a company help out their future competitor?
- naravara 1y agoYou might be good at making whisky but not that great at marketing. Either way the market has a desire for generic, unlabeled product and people go in to fill the need.
- mschuster91 1y agobecause they may sell the same product, yes, but not compete. there will always be someone starting a new vineyard, distillery or whatever. it's sort of like banks vs vc funds. both lend money to companies, but still they are not competing against each other.
- pavon 1y agoMy impression is that a large portion of the industry is already structured as distilleries that actually make the liquor, like MGP, and a bunch of labels that put their names on it (each different). Like how many name-brand items across grocery stores are all actually made by the same company.