How do you have a 100M business selling cheap, niche microcontrollers to hobbyists? They're starting to pursue a subscription model (Arduino Cloud), I'd expect them to shutter products that won't work with the subscription model and require everything else to use it. It's your standard enshitification play.
"Supporting" and "inspiring" hobbyists isn't going to pay the bills, though.
Arduino opened up an ecosystem when they started back in 2005, but the world looks a lot different in 2023. First-party Arduinos are nothing special these days, and their competitors make way better products for far less money. Even the Arduino IDE has been leapfrogged by MicroPython / CircuitPython.
Hobbyists these days just aren't all that interested in Arduino anymore, and there is pretty much nothing paid which they can introduce which will change that.
There isn't any debt to service. Taking funding isn't the same as taking debt (in some ways its worse, in some better), and there's no direct interest or payment they have to make every month like if it was debt.
The problem is that they give up ownership (and probably ownership) to people who may have different goals and values. This can lead to enshittification, especially for a company that doesn't have a good path to extreme growth and profits. You also can't discharge ownership in bankruptcy like you can with debt.
It is not debt, but on other hand anyone investing this pay probably have expectation of return that is higher than a loan would be. And that money must come from somewhere at somepoint...
It's not a loan because it doesn't have to be paid back.
But it operates somewhat worse than a loan because the buyer now has some say in how the company is run, and they will want to see a return on their investment eventually.
A loan may be better because as long as the company can service it, the lenders have no say in how the business is run, and they get no additional profit from increased income/profit of the business.
Technically a VC with less than 50% control can’t do anything to you, so as long as you keep 51% and never sell or liquidate then it’s free money. In practice, they wind up pressuring you to do those things and then they get their money back.
VCs, historically, don't understand this. Arduino did, but they've likely ceded some control by doing this fundraising. Maybe these VCs are different. I'm not counting on it.
You need either at least an order of magnitude more (still iffy, people don't buy boards all the time), or to sell into some larger market. Are there 100M electronics hobbyists to sell to over the world? Maybe if you make it into schools...
I recently installed self-hosted FreshRSS, an rss reader which can _create_ rss feeds from sites that don't provide them using techniques like xpath selectors.
I tried this a while back but was put off by the fake "css".
They say "The dialect of CSS used in Textual is greatly simplified over web based CSS and much easier to learn." But I immediately ran into issues trying to use css that I'm familiar with (and it wasn’t even fancy). They should have called it something else and used different syntax.
