Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time.
To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
And Yahoo and SGI were both behemoths, and look at them now. If you had stake in these companies and cashed out in time, you'd consider it also a great investment.
> To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
No one cares about Helium, and even fewer people cares about LoRa. I'd guess a good chunk of the nodes are run by people trying to make money out of it (I know personally people that invested in this), not by people interested in maintaining a network or that actually have any clue about LoRa. Me, as a hobby electronics tinkerer, I do care about LoRa (so, I'm one of those fewer people), but I don't care about Helium, because it adds nothing of relevancy to it. Yes, increasing coverage is good, but not only the LoRa market is quite narrow, any other provider can do the same without too much hassle. And there is no actual real money in it(beyond the hobby space) and never will be. No company is going to build products on a super-duper-easy-to-disrupt public network, when alternatives are available.
Google was founded in August 1998 and they they hired their first sales guy in May 1999. AdWords launched in October 2000 but before that time they had revenue from backend search deals where they powered other sites search engines for a fee, like Netscape which launched in June 1999.
So it's not really the case that Google had no revenue for years. They were able to generate revenue very fast by selling their tech to other companies.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/08/what-a-1000-dollar-investmen...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505...
The contrast with Helium is glaring: statistically nobody uses it and if it shutdown overnight nobody outside of cryptocurrency speculators would notice.