Adafruit interviews Siemens re SupplyFrame, the future of Hackaday, Tindie | Hacker News Reader

Adafruit interviews Siemens re SupplyFrame, the future of Hackaday, Tindie

blog.adafruit.com

97 pointsptorrone33 comments

This is a heartbreaking interview for anyone who loves Hackaday. That community is amazing and it's obvious Siemens doesn't properly appreciate it. It speaks volumes that they basically ignored every question about Hackaday. If you haven't listened to the Hackaday podcast it's truly a gem. Maybe the community could come together and pool resources to purchase itself from Siemens and spin off as a nonprofit?

I think you're over-estimating how much Hackaday is worth. Maker Media went defunct in the last two years, and Hackaday hasn't capitalized on that audience, at all. I believe the viewership has even gone down over that time. Thanks to the pandemic, we're seeing a lot of new and exciting projects, and Hackaday hasn't capitalized on that at all. Add into that hackster.io coming up in the last few years (as well as others), and there are so many lost opportunities that have passed by Hackaday.

I think you should rethink, "if this is heartbreaking for anyone who loves Hackaday". You don't love hackaday. You _loved_ hackaday. It was cool for a decade or so but the entire model of media of curated, edited content is obsolete and has been since the days of Digg, and especially now with other aggregators like reddit and HN.

If it dies, it dies. Don't make it a zombie.

I think that Hackaday's temporary obsession a few years ago with bullshit content and over-wrought artistry really hurt it with its core audience. I bet if you made a graph of Hackaday's daily pageviews and the average number of Vimeo links you'd see an inverse correlation. They chased trendiness too hard and never recovered.

What were some examples of bs content and over-wrought artistry that they posted about. I don't say this to start a flame war or to come back at you, I genuinely would like to hear your opinion in more detail.

Articles like this. Note the comments ranging from confused to annoyed.

https://hackaday.com/2014/06/12/ecstatic-computation-explori...

Hacksters looks interesting. Are there any other sites you would recommend?

The Hackaday comment section has long been one of my least favorite places on the internet, which is not exactly confidence-inspiring in terms of the site's prospects if reimagined as a community-driven aggregator. I always thought the curation was what enabled Hackaday to be so great in spite of that.

"Adafruit:

Hackaday.io hosts a variety of unusual projects. Will Siemens exert any content restrictions over independent creators there? Will Siemens provide staff to care for and manage the Hackaday community?

Siemens:

Siemens did not respond to this question."

Yikes!

Hackaday staff should register hackevery24hours.com to start a new site when Siemens eventually destroys the original.

Sounds like we should get some archivists on Hackaday, stat. There is a lot of unique and valuable content on there.

Indeed. That was the same thought I had reading that interview. Hackaday will not last in its current form.

Kinda think Adafruit screwed this one up by virtue of their timing.

If it’s still a “planned acquisition” you can bet your ass nobody is going to say anything substantial about real plans, synergies, changes or well anything really.

Of course you’re gonna get a bunch of PR bullshit and “no comments”. The other comments here interpreting this as Siemens not knowing what they’re doing / it being a warning sign misses the mark.

But you'd think that, if Siemens didn't want to comment as a blanket policy, they wouldn't have agreed to an interview at all.

I get more of a feeling that Siemens expected some fluffy, soft-ball questions from Adafruit, and got caught off guard.

Strong disagree. These things don't happen overnight and they understand and have plenty of time to prepare to answer questions while it's newsworthy. They should have answers. The fact that they don't is noteworthy.

In my experience, these things do happen overnight and with minimal time for anyone to prepare. They spend more time when interviewing for hiring a single human than when buying a company of millions.

>have plenty of time to prepare to answer questions

It's not a case of time or preparation. You don't show your hand in the middle of a negotiation. Certainly not for something as trivial as an interview

WTF does Supplyframe actually do?

Various bits from their website [1]:

> Only Supplyframe’s Design-To-Source Intelligence (DSI) solutions deliver actionable insights that drive better decisions across new product development initiatives, full product lifecycles, and strategic sourcing of direct materials.

> DSI Network: Unmatched electronics industry parts & design cycle data

> DSI Platform: Industrial-scale intelligence platform

> DSI Solutions: Transformational, AI-based solutions

Notably, they own findchips.com and componentsearchengine.com.

Is it really just "we have a bunch of websites and collect and present all sorts of information about chips"? Who pays for that? How on earth does that translate into $70 million in revenue?

[1] https://supplyframe.com/why-supplyframe/

Just guessing, but something like:

1. Network - just as you describe. Freemium/ad revenue. Low $/High volume

2. Platform - sell data derived from Network to manufacturers, eg. “Part X is increasingly popular and likely to go out of stock” or “part Y is a popular alternative to X”. Medium $/medium volume

3. Send them your BOM and pay consultancy rates and they’ll use 1 & 2 to make direct recommendations like “you’ll save 4 cents by replacing X with Y and reduce risk by sourcing Y from supplier Z”. High $/high touch/lower volume but they’re probably killing it right now in this arena during the chip shortage.

I tried signing up for FindChips Pro, but their sign-up page now just redirects me to Supplyframe's confusing landing page with no indication of where to go from there to get FindChips Pro. I contacted their sales agents and got no reply.

Too bad because FindChips is an excellent product and I was prepared to give them my money.

Probably not a good example of how to implement a freemium upsell pathway.

> Who pays for that?

A lot of people. Supply chain issues are a real problem, especially right now.

If you're a company that suddenly has orders for a very expensive product you designed 20 years ago and a handful of parts are holding up production, you'll spend a heckuva lot of money sourcing components to build inventory so you can ship orders.

No, this is not a hypothetical :-(

Just in case, one of the Ada fruit higher ups (mr lady ada?) is Phillip Torrone who founded hackaday. Although he’s not at hackaday anymore his statement at the end of the interview explains some of the interest in the takeover:

“ Adafruit: Seventeen years ago, I started Hackaday, the site, the mission, and designed the logo that is still in use today; please take good care of it – the SupplyFrame folks did a pretty good job. This is not a question – pt”

Siemens seems like it does not know what it had acquired or who they are speaking to. Basically a bunch of PR gobbledygook that answered very little.

That's Marketing Speak. They know exactly what they bought and why. Whether that adds to the bottom line remains to be decided. Big Corps go through mergers and de-mergers at one or more board's whim with some monotony.

We need to decide what that means to "us" for a given value of "us".

From my first skim read, it looks like some "with benefits" things will be lost by interested parties. The questions answered by "Siemens did not respond to this question."

My thoughts exactly. They literally didn’t even mention Hackaday or Tindie. Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence as a Tindie seller.

But they're very clear - they said so twice!

To those accusing Siemens Of not properly appreciating hackaday (which I loved in the past as well) consider this from Siemens point of view:

They are spending $700M on a digital parts intelligence company. This is 10x revenue, so there is serious growth or other significant opportunities that justify that multiple.

A hacker/maker news site and forums that the company also happens to own that generates, maybe, a few million? Which certainly doesn’t have a growth rate justifying a 10x valuation? These are minor aspects of the deal and frankly just not a high priority to the M&A team trying to plan and execute the integration of a $700M acquisition.

Should the corporate communications team or PR agency advising them have done a better job on this interview? Sure. But Seimens is focusing on exactly what they should be focusing on and that simply is not a niche hacker/maker community website.

Another example of shareholder value theory destroying a cherished community in pursuit of a higher number.

I guess? It’s not like hackaday woke up one morning, hung over, and realized it had gotten drunk-acquired by supplyframe the night before. if Hackaday wanted to preserve a cherished community, selling itself to a venture-backed for-profit company was a really stupid thing to do.

I can almost imagine an email exchange behind the scenes that included

>>> who can take the Hackaday question?

>> what’s Hackaday?

> it’s in “all other unrelated revenue”; I’d just ignore it…

I think the bigger fear is

>it's in "all other unrelated expenses"; I'd just ignore it...

I think everyone understands that, and the point is that the fact that they didn't do a better job in the interview is very telling. Yeah, sure we understand that the main part of the deal was the parts business, however when this kind of thing has happened in the past the new owners at least had a clue and talked about it.

TLDR:

>adafruit: Hackaday?

>Siemens: WTF is Hackaday?

This.

Sometimes "no comment" is secret code for "oh, we didn't really think about them yet, because they're a tiny little project within a multi-million dollar company".

Not to rose-colored-glasses it, but: "Although it’s too early to speak to many of the specifics of your question, we can tell you that our plans call for Supplyframe to remain a separate, standalone unit within Siemens Digital Industries Software under the continued leadership of Supplyframe’s CEO Steve Flagg, who will report directly to Siemens Digital Industries Software’s president and CEO Tony Hemmelgarn. And speaking more broadly, Siemens is committed to keeping the DNA of Supplyframe as an entrepreneurial entity."

Hackaday was one of the website I visited voluntarily.

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