I can only speak for myself, but their offer was underwhelming and I was easily one of the first five people they called. I’ve founded and exited companies myself, so when I walked them through why the founding SW engineer offer wasn’t worth my time giving the risk profile, and laid out there size and type of SW engineers they were going to need. They understood, but they also trotted out the “but we really have to make sure we hire the right chip guys.”
Fair enough. I’m old so these conversations are never personal. I tried to help them by steering younger, less experienced but very high potential engineers toward them, but in the end they failed utterly to put together a viable SW team.
I don’t know any of their investors in terms that would let me ask, but I do know a bunch who passed, and most of them had concluded that it would end up just being more silicon on a crowded market. Being 10-20x better than nvidia isn’t the point if the market is about to be flooded with a dozen other chips against whom you are maybe 1.5-3x better. Without nailing the go to market needs, which means “make the stuff people have work, don’t make the customer learn new” etc. you have nothing. That’s all a Sw problem.
It’s actually worse, because the engineers in the space are actually pretty bad. A lot of what they have actually barely works to begin with, being a bunch of cobbled together python frameworks of dubious engineering quality and all of the hassle of the ecosystem. So the amount of mental space for “different” is almost zero even if you ignore that they’ve been burned (AMD) before, which you can’t.