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tikkun

For hardware devices that raised >$100mm before launch, how have they gone?

Successes:

* Tesla

Non-successes:

* Magic Leap

* Juicero

* Nuro

* Segway

What else am I missing? I suspect there are other successes that raised >$100mm pre-launch that I'm not thinking of.

I wonder why they wouldn't start smaller. That said, I still expect they'll succeed, and I hope they succeed. I don't believe in any rules of thumb, great startups always defy the odds.

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According to public sources Tesla has raised 'only' 60.5m before delivering the first roadsters in February 2008. Though that total increased to 100.5m by the summer of that year. But I get your point.

[0]: https://www.startupranking.com/startup/tesla/funding-rounds

The original roadster was a Lotus Elise with laptop batteries. It was essentially a prototype, albeit a production prototype.

and it kicked ass

Indeed. But partially because the Lotus Elise kicked ass :P

A bunch of VTOL/eVTOL and space startups also probably raised >100$ pre-launch I guess?

Skydio raised way more than 100 million and I'd call them success, although I'm not sure if they raised that much pre-launch.

We raised ~$60m before R1 launched in 2018. And we were still under 100 total when S2 launched at the end of 2019.

I'm not sure how things would have played out if we had 100m+ before we launched anything. We may have delayed launch even further and missed out on valuable market feedback and brand awareness.

Oh man Juicero. Still remember watching someone tear one of those down. Absolutely incredible amounts of wasted work, materials, ludicrous overengineering to squeeze a damn bag.

That was AvE of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ

If you had invested $1B in each of those 5 companies, you would probably still have made a great return, now that Tesla is at $770B.

> What else am I missing?

Now filter for SoftBank.

I don't think it makes sense to include Juicero in the list. There is no way that whatever Ive and Altman are cooking up is going to be as obviously stupid as Juicero.

I dunno, I'd take a glass of juice over cryptocurrency from a retina-scanning orb.

At least the creepy orb is trying to solve a problem that actually exists. Namely how do you know the guy you are talking to is a real person? And especially, how do you know the guy you are donating money to is a real person?

A glass of juice solves the problem of wanting a glass of juice... Both products solve a problem in a worse way than existing solutions.

I’ll know he’s a real person if he gives me a glass of juice.

> There is no way that whatever Ive and Altman are cooking up is going to be as obviously stupid as Juicero.

Worldcoin is easily 10x more stupid than Juicero. A glass of overpriced juice is much more benign and far more useful than retina scams and cryptocurrency.

"There is no way" famous last words...

21 Inc, $ 116m: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-startup-21-inc-reveal...

What I wonder is, how do you raise 100M before launch? Like, they can’t possibly have a 100M valuation. So do they just dilute like crazy or what?

(I guess Tesla was largely funded by Musk kn the beginning, but I doubt that’s the standard)

Firefly Space

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