Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York • Hacker News Board

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#31

Post by schappim » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

esskay wrote: post #14

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?

The non-profit arm is a tiny insignificant part of their business now. They stopped being education and charity focused during covid and are only really interested in their B2B customers these days.

You've got it the wrong way around.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a shareholder in Raspberry Pi Ltd, not vice versa. It benefits from the profits generated by the commercial arm.

The commercial arm was established on 10 September 2012 [1].

[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#32

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #25

jacquesm wrote: post #4

On the one hand I'm happy they're doing well. On the other I'm very much worried that floating the stock will make it plaything of people who couldn't care less about what the Raspberry Pi and the people behind it stand for, they're just going to use the stock to make money, or, alternatively, to make trouble. Being a listed company is a source of all kinds of distractions.

What, you aren't looking forward to your Raspberry Pi Cloud Pro Offering subscription? How else are you going to manage your Pis, Jacques?

No, and no idea, respectively ;)

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#33

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:15 AM UTC

esskay wrote: post #19

badcppdev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just add some links rather than suggesting people spam a user forum

I'm not really suggesting people do that, just pointing out what happens. It's slightly difficult to post links to threads that they delete...

I for one and willing to live with the egg on my face if you actually prove this. I am extremely, extremely skeptical that you are truthfully and wholly representing whatever situation you are referring to.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#34

Post by phpisthebest » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:16 AM UTC

esskay wrote: post #13

Ah, this may explain their abandonment of the 'hacker' community and weird hostility towards them over the last few years. They've gone from a fun project and education focused company who was mostly operating under their non-profit arm to better education, to a B2B enterprise supplier with a heavy handed and sometimes outright hatred to their original user base. For a proof of concept, pop onto their forums, create…

That is the story of just about every technology.... or even community

Sad but it remains true, Thing is created > Small but devoted group discovers and popularized thing > Thing raises to mass popularity > The masses what to change the thing to be what they think it "should be" diverging from what the small but devoted group desired or signed on for > Thing becomes unrecognizable to the original group > New thing is created > Small but devoted group.... and the cycle continues

So the question is what will replace the Pi for the hacker community, I personally stopped buying Pi's for my personal projects a long time ago, rPI3 was the last one for me. Soo many other manufactures of SBC's out there making better, cheaper boards.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#35

Post by nsteel » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:17 AM UTC

esskay wrote: post #14

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?

The non-profit arm is a tiny insignificant part of their business now. They stopped being education and charity focused during covid and are only really interested in their B2B customers these days.

Do you have any evidence of a focus change during covid? Other than the obvious temporary changes all education outlets made during the pandemic?

The charity still exists and still does all the same stuff: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#36

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:19 AM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #8

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?

from memory there are three parts of what we think as Pi 1) the foundation, that does all the outreach, education and magazines 2) The commercial part (the actually makes the pis) 3) R&D but it might be only two. Either way I assume only the commercial part will float, leaving the foundation as the majority shareholder. It has the advantage of giving the foundation a couple of hundred million, which should allow it t…

Don't forget the Micro:bit and I'm not convinced "Arduino has kinda dropped the ball", they are doing just fine in the marketplace and the gear has come down in price to where $4 gets you a working microcontroller (and $5 for the Raspi 2040 pico).

What you can get under $10 these days is mindblowing and if all Arduino ever did was make their IDE which ties 100's of different boards together under a common development experience then that would be enough for me.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#37

Post by thinkingemote » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:20 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #26

jt2190 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an example of the long-term effects on mission, you can study Kellogg’s (the cereal company) which has been a for-profit public company (Kellogg Company), with a trust as the majority shareholder (W.K Kellogg Foundation Trust), and sending profits to to a non-profit charitable organization (W.K. Kellogg Foundation) since 1934.

And for the results of this, I didn't even realize Kellogg's had a charitable arm until now.

A few (many?) breakfast cereals were started by religious charities in America. Quaker being most obvious via the name. Kellogg's origin was seventh day Adventist I think.

I think there was a religious component to health foods at the time. But not sure why. One popular and possibly inaccurate reason was that bland vegetarian foods decreased the bodys animal nature.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#38

Post by nsteel » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:21 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #25

jacquesm wrote: post #4

On the one hand I'm happy they're doing well. On the other I'm very much worried that floating the stock will make it plaything of people who couldn't care less about what the Raspberry Pi and the people behind it stand for, they're just going to use the stock to make money, or, alternatively, to make trouble. Being a listed company is a source of all kinds of distractions.

What, you aren't looking forward to your Raspberry Pi Cloud Pro Offering subscription? How else are you going to manage your Pis, Jacques?

Putting them in the cloud removes the wasted drawer space. I'm all for a cloud offering.

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#39

Post by ben_w » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:21 AM UTC

esskay wrote: post #13

Ah, this may explain their abandonment of the 'hacker' community and weird hostility towards them over the last few years. They've gone from a fun project and education focused company who was mostly operating under their non-profit arm to better education, to a B2B enterprise supplier with a heavy handed and sometimes outright hatred to their original user base. For a proof of concept, pop onto their forums, create…

> For a proof of concept, pop onto their forums, create an account and make a post asking how to do something fairly basic, see how quickly you get yelled at and banned for life.

This doesn't need the moderators to be secretly part of some plan to make money.

I stopped posting questions on physics stack exchange years ago because what I was curious about vastly exceeded my ability to phrase those questions in a way that didn't sound like a crank, let alone be coherent, precise, and meaningful within the language of physics. Basically, I was writing like ChatGPT years before it existed.

In one case, I even managed to get a "no", "yes" (in a comment) and "closed: duplicate" all on the same question.

(IIRC, this particular comment was subsequently re-opened because one of the stack exchange moderators is also a HN commenter and noticed last time I said this; I don't blame the moderators for me being an enthusiastic fool).

Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York

#40

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 10:23 AM UTC

srmarm wrote: post #28

So who gets the $500m or so they're suggesting the IP will raise? Is that going to be injected into the foundation in which case they could do a lot with it (presumably with some guardrails to prevent them clashing with the PLC)

That depends on the kind of float, you can float in three different ways: emit new stock, sell existing stock, a combination of those two. Any new stock emitted will have the bulk of the funds (minus fees and all that) deposited in the company, selling existing stock will have the bulk of the funds deposited with the existing share holders.

It isn't rare for there to be a lock-up period before existing stock holders are able to sell their shares on the market to avoid people dumping stock they know is worth less than the float price. This is because there is a fair chance that those closely involved with the company have a better long term view on what the company will do than the market so it takes a while to get any post float surprises to be priced in. That's one reason why IPOs tend to be tricky to price: overprice and the stock will drop after the float and those that bought the IPO will feel burned, underprice and you're leaving money on the table.