This is pretty much an advertisement and the article hardly has any original content. What is this article doing on HN? Raspberry Pi is a well funded start up and the false modesty is really transparent.
I mean, I suppose that could technically be considered a thing, but I don't think it is really in the spirit of most startups considered in HN. It's not like they are a profit driven enterprise.
They've benefitted from some extremely skilled people donating a lot of their time and Broadcom selling their SoC to the project at cost for some free publicity/goodwill. There's nothing mysterious about it.
from booking factory time to purchasing the chips — fell to the relatively modest resources of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charitable body initially funded by loans from Upton and five other trustees.
"That would have been fine at 10,000 boards [...]"
So right in the article he admits that they were funded for 10,000 boards yet they are surprised they sold 1,000? Considering how Raspberry Pi has been plastered all over HN from day one, it's not a surprise at all.
"The first inkling of the fervour the credit card-sized board would create came in May 2011, when the first public outing of the Pi in a BBC video generated some 600,000 views on YouTube.
Upton and his colleagues revised their initial run of boards up to 10,000, thinking that would be more than enough to meet demand."
There initial plans were to produce far less than 10k. They were surprised when they had to adjust their plans up to 10k, and surprised again to learn that their estimations were grossly inaccurate.
Also, the earliest story here about the Raspberry Pi was from 2 years ago. "Day one" for them was 5+ years ago.
I really have no idea what in the world you think you are getting at.
edit: Ah, nice comment history. Not all there in the head I take it.
I already stated my point. That his article is an advertisement and offers no new information and doesn't belong on HN, and that Raspberry Pi is being falsely modest about their success because they have a lot of resources.
Your comment history looks like the comment history of a troll. I'm probably wasting my time here.
Nice strawman. You are obviously the troll here.