[huytersd]

If “healing” is the ultra wealthy holding on to their money or investing it in financial instruments instead of tech startups then god save us all. I don’t understand the animosity towards VCs that take risks on entrepreneurs like us.

Open source collaborative groups are not going to do shit in this space piddling away in their garages or community workspaces. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to build a fab that can make competitive chips and beer money donations are not going to get us there.

[sentinalien]

You would need several billion to build a fab, a few hundred million might get you a 5nm chip or two

[meltedcapacitor]

SiFive is a fabless prop chip designer, they build no fabs. Yes building fabs is heavy industrial investment, and thus less amenable to open models. Drawing the masks is not.

Lot of VC work is regulatory arbitrage: how to steal the flowers from the public park without going to prison. That's why they are so proud of all these local sectoral monopolies they established while the lawmakers were asleep at the wheel, or bought, so the normal limits on profit in a market economy, through competition, are suspended.

Bulk of VC compensation is management fees, wisely based on the "head I win tail you lose" model and losses are often outsourced to ordinary folks via institutions like the Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund.

Money is just the scoring system of the economic game. If the rich play zero sum games with the points with each other it's harmless, and much better than malinvestment in Yachts or Web3 platforms where actual steel and engineering capacity is taken away from better use cases.