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by dnautics
2010 days ago
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Do you understand how this second post you have made, which is more substantive, has absolutely nothing in common, and in many ways is diametrically opposite to your initial advice of "follow apples strategy for marketing", since apple has done literally all the things you say not to do, "all software must be rewritten" (sometimes in alien languages to boot), "don't require another OS" oh I seem to remember apple having a different operating system from what everyone else does... |
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My specific advice was originally towards the marketing strategy. So "all software must be rewritten" is not a marketing strategy. That is a go to market strategy. Additionally note that I'm specifically providing my thoughts on the go to market strategy a new entrant (i.e. startup) might use. I don't know why you think I would be saying that the go to market strategy for a startup would be the same as Apple. It's not. Apple has the scale and bankroll that they can operate & innovate on multiple fronts simultaneously. That is not an avenue available to a smaller competitor.
I'm talking about general trends & general advice. I'm saying if you're starting a new chip company, you do not start by boiling the ocean. If you're Google you already make ~40 billion dollars of (relatively high margin) revenue each quarter (Apple makes ~100 billion). The kinds of investments you make with that cash flow is very different from if you're a chip company with a few hundred million in the bank from VCs to bankroll development & no revenues to speak of initially (Nuvia, Cerebras). It's also immediately apparent from this general framework that something like Mills is DOA & will never get anywhere. The company either doesn't have the focus OR they're extremely underfunded to land what actually needs to be done. Likely the latter. They're trying to innovate too much on too many different parts from reading their forums while simultaneously trying to build a company on principle free of VCs & generally alien from how SV works.
If you want advice on how to a completely new chip is brought to market & the extreme hyper-focus that kind of start up needs, I think you can use my advice on that to help you be more successful (or, if you're an investor, evaluate whether such a company is worth investing in or trying to do too much). None of these are necessarily hard & fast rules of course. The specifics of the situation can matter (although usually not as much as you think) but I use this as a first principles starting point before adjusting for the specifics of the situation. For example, if an asynchronous chip + a matching novel language can reduce asynchronous program costs by 20% & provide performance 1000x greater per watt but you also need a paired custom OS, I'd probably say "go & build your own language & operating system" but pair it with "what's the developer story? Do we build something like Rosetta? Is there a non-trivial amount of code we'd need ported to make our solution attractive? etc". I'd of course first evaluate what amount of money that company is looking to raise & whether they're banking on their own abilities to be able to actually generate novel industry-leading inventions or if they're just taking existing tech/concepts that aren't popular yet & polishing it. Building world-class teams on multiple fronts, especially in both chip design & compilers, operating systems, & language design is extraordinarily hard. No one does it all at the beginning. Like it took Facebook a while to get to a point where they built their own PHP compiler for their needs. The cost of it didn't make sense when FB had smaller revenues & needed more of that revenue to focus on other ares of the business.