| I used to work in an LED startup for 1 year as my first real job in Canada, then it went under. Also in a fancy phosphor niche, with some "smart software" sugar on top. $7m capital - eaten like a candy. Any conventional high tech startup in the West is crazy expensive outright from the beginning, unlike internet and software companies. Close to a million went outright to high profile C-levels even before they did anything. The biggest sum I've seen paid to anybody to just to hang around. A million, to "a real deal" science team of photonics PhDs and engineers with 20+ years experience. Few millions for all kinds of super exotic engineering services, like doing thermal simulation of an LED package, making a custom process metrology tool for patterned LED chips, custom process control tools. When I asked one of engineers about the price, they told me that they used 10 years old, few times resold tools to save money, and that by standards of the industry this is something that people don't even blink about. The rest went into initial batch, and then the biggest financial backer backed away, and that was it, despite the first batch being more or less sold. I still can't fathom the mind of people who can wrap up a $7m enterprise on a whim while being 5 minutes away from the finish line. And it still feels surreal to me how I was in the middle of it for a year while basically being just an office errands boy. |
And when you started to look like you were actually going to deliver something that would generate positive returns, they had to kill it?
So, kind of like a real-life "Brewster's Millions"?