csmajorfive

I find it especially baffling considering he has Russian citizenship.

I think you're largely right -- a lot of founders get trapped in mediocrity because they raise so much that they don't feel enough pressure to execute. And that frequent, high-resolution fundraises are much more viable than they were ten years ago.

On the other hand, I'll offer two countervailing observations to keep in mind:

* In well-understood categories (e.g. horizontal B2B SaaS), there has been so much brainpower and cash deployed in the last ten years that customers are overwhelmed by noise and expect much higher quality products before they'll meaningfully adopt and pay. My experience is that founders are spending much longer in the initial build phase getting to an MVP than they were ten years ago.

* The oversupply of venture dollars is not evenly distributed. If you're building something that needs years in the lab (chips, batteries, robots, hardware, etc), the investor herd thins out quickly and many of the folks willing to make a purely conceptual bet are much less comfortable judging whether some-progress-but-no-product is worth continued investment.

Sometimes it can be smart to raise a lot from a true believer to bridge you to the spreadsheet jockeys.

Perhaps but we’re talking about buying pre-built systems. I have a silent liquid cooled machine from a few years ago and I have not opened the case even once. So it seems possible if a little pricier.

I bought a System76 workstation last year. Everything about it is great except for one big thing that makes me hate using it: the air cooling is terrible and loud.

My room sounds like a wind tunnel even at idle. The response at the time was to futz around with fan controller firmware and I never got anywhere.

I don't understand why they don't move to liquid cooling.

It sounds like a full recap so it's not exactly the sort of fundraise you necessarily want to announce at all. Unless you made your other press release accidentally sound like you were going out of business.