Picks and Pans

"The day the music died..."

What hath venture capital wrought?

dateline 2000: Way too much money chasing to many bad deals. Way too
much money put into marginal or even bad ideas. Insane valuations.
Insane investments.

dateline 2002: many, many, many failed startups. everyone is running
scared. M&A has slowed or stopped. IPO's have gone away. Companies
are running out of money and can't sell anything.

We end up in the "last money in wins" scenario. Greed rules.
Fairness and ethical behavior are left for sissies. Money is put
into companies with terms which would have been denounced as ridiculous
in the "good old days".

If I see another company "refinanced" with a last round liquidation
multiplier of 4x and all of the previous shareholders crammed down
into worthless common, I'll puke. Or go postal. It's hard to say.

Certainly all of the angel investors are going to run for cover
because this strategy leaves them with no return after taking
significant risk.

Hey big company CEO's - where do you think those juicy little start ups
come *from*? They come from angel investors, that's where. And later,
the VC's come in. But in the beginning there are only angels. If you
screw the angel investors by buying companies and giving the original
common shareholders nothing, guess what they will do? They will stop
investing. And guess what will happen to your stream of juicy little
start ups? it will go away.

There, I said it.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

System-on-chip cpu's are coming like a train. The first one I spent time
with with Motorola's 8xx line, the
860, 850 and 823. These chips had
all the peripherals on the chip on one big melange. Static memory interface
for flash, SDRAM interface for memory, an MMU, serial ports and built in ethernet.

Needless to say it ran linux well, thanks to people like href="http://www.embeddededge.com">Dan Malek. About the same
time two chip SOC sets like the Intel
SA1110/SA1111 came about and
helped in the low-power area. More about ARM and low-power later.
Why can't MOT ever make a low-power cpu?

The 850/823's are great but I wish MOT would allow people to write
microcode for the serial engine inside it. It's certainly running some
sort of microcode and it would be nice to be able to fix bugs and do
custom work with it.

I can't much too many really flattering things about Intel and it'a ARM
work except, "how many times can you EOL the SA1110 before no one will
believe you?". Sure seems like the marketing people keep trying to kill
it when at the last second the sales people say "but hey, we're selling a
*lot* of these". Maybe it's just me :-)

I next ran into the Alchemy (now AMD)
Au1100 line. Nice SOC. Everything but
the kitchen sink and all the ants (bugs) too. Still, they seem to have a nice
road map and do seem to be fixing some of the bugs. Seems that all too
often large companies by IP and slap it into their chips without bothering
to test it in a rational way. Sure it passes someones vectors or testbench
but the tests don't reflect what normal mortals do... I keep finding the
same USB host and function bugs. Some day I'll meet the guy who wrote that
verilog :-)

The AU1100 line is very fast (400Mhz) but also rather power hungry.
And not very incline to sleep. On the other hand the ARM SOC's can't
get past 200Mhz but have many low power features.

I'm looking forward to next year, with even more SOC's and more power
conscious SOC's.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)