I think you're largely right -- a lot of founders get trapped in mediocrity because they raise so much that they don't feel enough pressure to execute. And that frequent, high-resolution fundraises are much more viable than they were ten years ago.
On the other hand, I'll offer two countervailing observations to keep in mind:
* In well-understood categories (e.g. horizontal B2B SaaS), there has been so much brainpower and cash deployed in the last ten years that customers are overwhelmed by noise and expect much higher quality products before they'll meaningfully adopt and pay. My experience is that founders are spending much longer in the initial build phase getting to an MVP than they were ten years ago.
* The oversupply of venture dollars is not evenly distributed. If you're building something that needs years in the lab (chips, batteries, robots, hardware, etc), the investor herd thins out quickly and many of the folks willing to make a purely conceptual bet are much less comfortable judging whether some-progress-but-no-product is worth continued investment.
Sometimes it can be smart to raise a lot from a true believer to bridge you to the spreadsheet jockeys.
Perhaps but we’re talking about buying pre-built systems. I have a silent liquid cooled machine from a few years ago and I have not opened the case even once. So it seems possible if a little pricier.
I bought a System76 workstation last year. Everything about it is great except for one big thing that makes me hate using it: the air cooling is terrible and loud.
My room sounds like a wind tunnel even at idle. The response at the time was to futz around with fan controller firmware and I never got anywhere.
I don't understand why they don't move to liquid cooling.
It sounds like a full recap so it's not exactly the sort of fundraise you necessarily want to announce at all. Unless you made your other press release accidentally sound like you were going out of business.
Very cool, congrats guys. I am a Monkeybrains customer with a bunch of their equipment on my roof (I signed up for their enhanced "FTTH" campaign) and have wondered about replicating the service for myself and my neighbors if I were to move elsewhere.
Do you have an operating model for these small ISPs? Specifically I'm curious what the breakeven point is.
Good question. In my experience there is a danger of over-optimizing, trying to get too much sleep, and then regressing again. Some of the literature agrees with you though.
I would recommend finding some evening activities that you enjoy but are less stimulating. For example, I find it much easier to drift into sleepiness when I'm watching Netflix on the couch rather than sitting upright at my computer actively engaging in a quest for more information.
I'm not sure what part you found to be pseudoscience. This technique was prescribed to me by a healthcare professional and can be found in medical journals.
And, I fully agree -- light is important. Maybe I'll add an addendum on that.
It just really depends on whether the scale/revenue of the acquired is immediately and clearly accretive to the acquirer. WhatsApp and Waze were pretty far along that path (and their prices reflected it!). Younger companies are more vulnerable.