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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Don't take this the wrong way but...

I think its hard to avoid the elephant in the room that blimp cargo has been a dream ever since the invention of the blimp, and if we put your technology claims to one side (because they are more an assistant, not an enabler) I'm not too sure what makes you any different ?

Look at what is perhaps your most recent competitor ... Flying Whales.

Going since 2012, burning through cash like there's no tomorrow ($30m Quebec, €225m France etc. etc.) , and so far maybe promising some sort of prototype by 2024 (already slipped from 2021).

What really makes you so different from prior dreamers and in particular your present competitors ?

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We're not planning to build something that's 600 feet long and costs hundreds of millions, we're building something that's 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands. Unmanned blimps of this size don't require the same amount of capital, so we can fly faster and get to market faster.

But do you escape the regulatory requirements and the practical constraints ?

We'll spend a lot of time on certification. We need two things: a type-certification of the aircraft, and operator certifications for the organizations flying them. Both require a lot of flight hours, which will be our main development activity. There's no escaping aircraft regulation, but we have a clear path

Hopefully we've responded to practical constraints in other answers, but if not let me know questions.

Very good answer. The key difference is the size it also offers you much more flexibility it would seem in terms of the role you can fill. You can always add more blimps.

Supposing you had unlimited engineering resources and development or capital costs weren't an issue, are smaller blimps fundamentally superior to larger ones in some important way? For instance, are smaller blimps inherently faster or easier to control in windy conditions?

> we're building something that's 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands.

Why still hundreds of thousands? Blimps are an incredibly simple, cheap technology, and drone hardware is completely commoditized at this point.

Entirely fair question I think. I'd add that execution can easily be the difference. Notably french startups generally have poor execution. For example, the entrepreneur in France generally has to get loan on his own person, indebting himself, "to be sure he believes in his own idea".

> indebting himself, "to be sure he believes in his own idea".

Putting the French specific comment to one side because I don't have sufficient knowledge to comment, what I would say is that having "skin in the game" is no bad thing (it focuses your mind, and demonstrates your commitment to others).

That's one of the problems with the US funding scene.

On one side its great because people will throw obscene amounts of money at you if your marketing pitch sells well enough.

One the other hand, it does lead to the situation where your commitment to the business only goes so far because you've basically always got someone else picking up the tab.

On average it has worked spectacularly well though.

Most founders aren’t taking a risk (they tend to come from wealthy families) they are executing a vision.

Depends on whether by “average” you mean “median” or “mean”!

I’d bet the median return on startups is negative.

The entire point of venture capital is to have 9 failures out of 10 and 1 that returns the entire fund

How frequently does this happen in reality? The reality is: startups are risky. Forcing the entrepreneur to take a bigger chunk of that risk than necessary leads to less innovation, playing it safe, and kills many businesses before they’ve left the ground. Would Airbnb exist? Would Coinbase exist? Would uber exist? Maybe, but probably not, because the founders here weren’t rich enough to absorb the costs given the odds.

In theory, having that much skin in the game sounds like a pro with small cons. The reality is that is kills innovation, leaves the few brave enough who fail indebted and hampered for years, and makes the successful a fraction of the scale (and disproportionately founded by those already rich).

Companies providing those services would exist anyways.

The profile of the person founding them would be different. You'd have istrionic risk takers, borderline gamblers carrying the company for the first say 5 years, then they'd be bought out and a more stable person would be brought in.

The VC model enables the economy at large to artificially skip the first step. It's artificial because Silicon Valley companies which basically start from zero and arrive in the S&P500 in 20 years or less, they have very low turnover in managment and executives.

It's like a Vietcong learning how to fly an F-35.

If only we could compare the success levels of the two funding scenes...

> If only we could compare the success levels of the two funding scenes...

As long as the US side doesn't seek to brush over the failures by attempting to focus people's attention on the successes. And also as long as we have a fair definition of "success" .... an exit strategy that comprises being able to hype up a blatantly overvalued IPO is not "success", for example.

Let's face it there have been some quite spectacular failures in the US in recent years. As well as many more less spectacular that have burnt through millions of dollars in cash before calling it quits.

All that glitters is not gold. The US has a mentality of "throwing more money at the problem", but that does leave you in an environment where larger and larger burn rates become acceptable.

The entire point of VC is a high failure rate and lots of failures with a few breakaway successes.

I'm not french but spent a fair amount of time in the EU tech ecosystem and I think that "Notably french startups generally have poor execution." is a super general statement that isn't fair to apply. I mean Bernard Arnault, one of the wealthiest people in the world, built LVMH and the government has been working hard via the la french tech initiative and Station F to make the startup ecosystem much more friendly.

I think you're thinking about Xavier Niel, which created Free, Station F and 42

I worked for a French founder for a few years and was quite involved with a lot of French people and companies (Thales, Veolia, Engie... to name a few) in tech.

I'll reserve my comments about my own personal experience but I think the characterization of poor execution is a bit sweeping.

Where I think the French and American start up communities differ is that failure is not generally accepted in France, whereas in the US it's acknowledged and somewhat accepted to have a few "duds" on the resume.

The loan approach misses the fact the the entrepreneur is going to spend several years of his life on the project. Nobody starts a company they don’t believe in. The cost is too high, even without the loans.

This is such a terrible critique, in my opinion. Just because something's never been done well doesn't mean it's impossible.

That many have tried and failed hints that there might be something there that is harder than it looks.

"Many"? How many blimp startups have here been in the modern era?

I don't understand why it took so long for them to build a prototype? 12 years?

Basically why now?

The economics on small airships only work if they're unmanned, and now is pretty much the best time ever to develop unmanned aircraft.

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