That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow
That said, maybe they have a future being a standard component in industrial settings. I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.
Arduino has always come across to me as being for hobbyist/beginner/learning, and critical infra would use things more like, for example, STMicro or Texas Instruments microcontrollers
In reality this makes the company MORE financially healthy, while diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold
> diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold
That’s VC debt
Disclosure: is founder who has raised money through both equity financing and debt financing.
As with equity there are MANY investors that only deal in debt- SVB's debt army for example.
Debt is problematic as it weakens the P&L by requiring the company to make interest payments. The rates of which (in venture) are currently in excess of credit card APRs
However it is easier to wash out and leaves no cap table trace, which is why some investors do not do it very much anymore.
As I VC I talked 1000s of companies fundraising and it was not something founders ever sought out
SAFEs are almost always the alternative to priced rounds
This is an equity investment: the VCs buy an ownership stake in the company, which they share with the founders. They don't receive "profit"- they get a payout proportion to their ownership stake if the company is sold or retained earnings if the company issues dividends (not common)
Source: I'm a founder and former VC.
Just checked aliexpress.com. You were not kidding - $1-2 per item!
At this point Arduino is just extremely overpriced and probably only still relevant because it's a household name and people want pin compatibility with the Uno and V5 tolerance for reasons.
If the Arduino IDE becomes a pain point I'm sure an open IDE (or VS Code plugin?) will step in. (There may already be such a thing?)
Edit: another comment suggests PlatformIO + VS Code allows you to avoid the Arduino IDE.
s/allows you to avoid/is highly preferable to/ :-)
Not with $54M in debt to service. This is a death warrant. I'm sure the execs will make out nicely, though.
The problem is that they give up ownership (and probably ownership) to people who may have different goals and values. This can lead to enshittification, especially for a company that doesn't have a good path to extreme growth and profits. You also can't discharge ownership in bankruptcy like you can with debt.
But it operates somewhat worse than a loan because the buyer now has some say in how the company is run, and they will want to see a return on their investment eventually.
A loan may be better because as long as the company can service it, the lenders have no say in how the business is run, and they get no additional profit from increased income/profit of the business.
So... It's completely equivalent to a low preference loan.
You need either at least an order of magnitude more (still iffy, people don't buy boards all the time), or to sell into some larger market. Are there 100M electronics hobbyists to sell to over the world? Maybe if you make it into schools...
Arduino opened up an ecosystem when they started back in 2005, but the world looks a lot different in 2023. First-party Arduinos are nothing special these days, and their competitors make way better products for far less money. Even the Arduino IDE has been leapfrogged by MicroPython / CircuitPython.
Hobbyists these days just aren't all that interested in Arduino anymore, and there is pretty much nothing paid which they can introduce which will change that.