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Purism is seeking investment from individuals
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#42Why does it sound so much like a scam ?
Given I've had a number of non-spammy emails from them wind up in gmail's spam that I've had to mark as not so, I was surprised when I got an email about this several days ago and it wasn't marked spam. I was really tempted to mark it as such...
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#43What the hell. You need to have assets exceeding 1M to invest $1000? I don’t need that to buy any other stock, why would I need it here? Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
Because they need you to sit back and go "damn what a bummer" when your investment nets you a $1000 loss, instead of it being something that would want you to sue.
No this is not arbitrary, accredited investors have a specific set of requirements they need to meet in the US: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#44They require that you're an accredited investor, but later note "This is a good faith requirement, since there is no way for Purism to validate your accredited investor status". Yikes. This had to go through legal right? I'm gobsmacked that either they or the SEC think that not checking is fine. What happens if Joe Sixpack buys in?
if you have zero people that admitted to being unaccredited investors, then you don't have to verify accredited status and can rely on "self-certification"
this is the legal term for the good kind of lying
but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#45What the hell. You need to have assets exceeding 1M to invest $1000? I don’t need that to buy any other stock, why would I need it here? Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
if you have zero people that admitted to being unaccredited investors, then you don't have to verify accredited status and can rely on "self-certification"
this is the legal term for the good kind of lying
but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multi decade angel investor here: accredited investor requirements are completely normal, including the good faith clause.
You gave it away there: "angel investor .. accredited investor requirements" You're in a different ballgame. The other responders here are wondering if someone can get into that ballgame without all the safeguards you went through.
Also an angel investor. Nobody actually checks accredited investor status [1], but early stage investments are so risky you'll have to invest $X x Y investments at an amount so large it's difficult for most people to do safely.
[1] Angellist did actually check for this, though it only required screenshots of account balances.
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#47There are already Socially Responsible Mutual Funds with none of this "accredited investor" stuff. Why would you throw your money away on this? You have no idea whatsoever about what they're going to do with it, except some vague high-sounding words. More to the point, you don't know what % of the ultimate profits, if there are any, will flow to the backers and not to you.
I mean this is a terrible investment no matter what. 3% interest that, let's be honest, there's serious doubt as to whether you'll actually see? From an investment standpoint it's the lowest of junk bonds without a particularly high interest rate either. There's a million things with both better upside and safety.
Nobody invests in convertible notes for the interest. YC's SAFE is basically a note sans interest. Investors looking for high interest rates on notes should be a red flag to startups as well.
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#48I'm still waiting for my Librem phone that I pre-ordered and paid for, over four years ago. So, no, I think I'll pass.
And you haven't received refund?
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#49In light of some of the questions here, why does every for-profit company that tries to make money out of open source, and build a substantial brand out of it, turn shady? Some implode over it- CyanogenMod, CopperheadOS, or the bigger ones lose credibility or become a mess of cancelled projects- Canonical, Mozilla.
Because the opportunities to profit from open source are limited, and mostly already taken. Any new company is likely to be either a fraudster, or a zealot and an amateur. Neither of those categories is likely to produce something good. (And the open source field specifically is full of zealots and amateurs that don't exist in other fields. And also fraudsters preying on the zealots and amateurs.)
Furthermore, a lot of business models require convincing other people to support you, either through investment, or through getting a larger share of your company's budget. This filters out many incompetent businesses, but since open source is free, the filter is poorer It's like asking why the average book in a bookstore is better than the average book on Amazon Kindle--if you don't need to convince a publisher to spend their limited resources on your book, there's one less filter for bad books.
Re: Purism is seeking investment from individuals
#50In light of some of the questions here, why does every for-profit company that tries to make money out of open source, and build a substantial brand out of it, turn shady? Some implode over it- CyanogenMod, CopperheadOS, or the bigger ones lose credibility or become a mess of cancelled projects- Canonical, Mozilla.
Because open source is about contributing to a commons, and profit is about having some value that your business can provide that nobody else can. Those are at odds with one another. Either you're contributing that value back to the commons and killing your own profits, or you're hoarding the value and have drifted from your mission.
The least unreasonable for-profit open-source companies (e.g., Red Hat) use the labor of skilled developers as the unique value, i.e., anyone can run Red Hat just fine but if you want the world's most qualified people to work on your specific problems you have to pay them. But even this produces a vague incentive not to write public documentation and not to write understandable and easy-to-maintain products.
The other way to do things (e.g., Google, Facebook) is to have some business entirely unrelated to the value of your open source and open-source infrastructure things (e.g., Go and React) that make your business better if they're open-source but don't meaningfully make it easier to compete with you.
Then there are the companies that realized they didn't actually want to contribute their core product to a commons (e.g., Elastic) or companies that couldn't meaningfully monetize their open-source core product (e.g., Sun, Netscape).