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Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

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Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#81

Post by ricochet11 »

arcticbull wrote: post #50
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web3 is going to thrive whether you like it or not. Primarily because of three reasons: - Greed. Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. As long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system. - Gambling. The global gambling industry is half a trillion every year. Even if you think crypto has no fundamentals and is akin to gambling, it still represents a massive market. Opening a 50…

> If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. Honestly nobody cares about these things. This is just a narrative that was grafted onto Web3 after the fact.

I care about these things and i've been in crypto since before gavin coined web3.

In fact most of the devs I know that started pre-2017 deeply care about these things. Many were around in the OWS groups back in the day, they transformed via bitcoin and now mostly work on eth projects. The cool thing is most of those people who were in it for political reason (rather than the newer investors looking to make quick money, and new devs looking for decent paid job) have made enough money to spend the rest of their lives working on this stuff regardless of it making them any richer.

I think we can outwork and outlast the cynics and keep building the things we think are cool. they hype will come and go, the fraudsters will sweep in during mania and con people regardless of our warnings, the authoritarians will try get the state to make it illegal, the google employees will keep complaining that its not innovative. we'll keep on working towards what we think is right.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#82

Post by threeseed »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #26
pg_bot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of these web3 companies is going bust. They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to. There are only two things propping up the entire crypto economy, VC funding and fraud. Once the VC money leaves the ecosystem the dominoes will fall.

The older protocols that were built in the depth of 2018-19 bear markets will survive. Many of them are also doing wonderfully well in terms of revenue. COMP, MKR, AAVE, CRV all make a ton in revenue and have a well-defined product-market fit. Crypto projects are tough to value. Their sheer global scale means that they can ramp up revenue and even profits extremely fast. StepN, a move-to-earn app reportedly made $120…

> StepN, a move-to-earn app reportedly made $120M in profit in its first year of operation

Not bad. But nothing compared to the $1T in threeseed dollars I earned last year.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#83

Post by csdvrx »

RL_Quine wrote: post #33
csdvrx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates yet. FTFY. Personally, I'd love to relay my home weather station readings over LoRa - then many other things too, if it's cheap enough! (say my TPMS - why not? Then I can retroactively track my car to cross correlate where I went shopping) Helium business model that's paying for the deployment of a worldwide network…

That makes no sense. LORAWAN is very, very limited by airtime, which is why the data rates are so abysmally low. You're never going to see a huge amount of traffic on it.

> That makes no sense

To you maybe. But it does to me, and apparently also to a16z :)

> You're never going to see a huge amount of traffic on it.

And I don't need lots of traffic!

If we talk about say the TPMS information for 4 tires once per hour, that's not a lot of bytes.

The value is in being able to send 24/7 with a very wide coverage, and no per-network setup (like asking for Wifi passwords- I pay for LTE just to avoid the hassle)

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#84

Post by tarunmuvvala »

In an era where movement of money is getting fast, the rich are getting richer by holder higher equity.

I find the concept of tokenization as a better way to redistribute equity.

I think about the tokens as money with superpowers which can act like equity , API keys and loyalty card too.

Think of tokens as a 100x version of managing equity table in a company.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#85

Post by threeseed »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #30
pg_bot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done my due diligence, there is no future in web3. I don't disparage early VCs who invested in blockchain startups because it is their job to put money into companies that could be revolutionary. However, the revolution has failed to materialize. While it may not be obvious to all it should become clearer in the coming months. When I say 'fraud' I don't mean juicing the numbers or asking forgiveness instead or p…

web3 is going to thrive whether you like it or not. Primarily because of three reasons: - Greed. Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. As long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system. - Gambling. The global gambling industry is half a trillion every year. Even if you think crypto has no fundamentals and is akin to gambling, it still represents a massive market. Opening a 50…

> Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto

At least right now mainly be doing something illegal e.g. scamming, rug pulling, insider trading.

SEC and other regulators may be late to the party but are starting to put people in jail for this fast and easy money.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#86

Post by thematrixturtle »

jacquesm wrote: post #72
pembrook wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait...what? You’re complaining about VCs pushing vapor while simultaneously admitting you participated in pumping “ponzi-like” schemes on regular people? You do realize those 7 figure returns you made were a direct wealth transfer from later-stage victims of the ponzi to you? I’m astonished you’re claiming moral superiority over VCs while sitting on wealth you took from thousands of poor people in places like Vietna…

Not sure about Ether, but there are plenty of people that 'bought in' to the Bitcoin idea and mined some coins early on without 'taking wealth from others'. VCs are in there for entirely different reasons, and 'later stage investors' are always at risk of having their hair cut if what they invest in isn't worth what they paid for it, after all, they too were trying to take money from later day suckers. I never paid a…

Crypto is a closed economy. The only way to get USD out is by taking that USD ("wealth") from somebody else who is buying in.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#87

Post by thematrixturtle »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #47
lordnacho wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moelis advise on M&A though. They get fees from companies doing steps with each other, which they do in both good times and bad (aka restructuring). I didn't think it meant Moelis was investing in those companies. It's like a lawyer getting into crypto, they do contracts for the companies, they're not buying tokens for themselves.

The ones who made fortunes during the American gold rush were the people selling shovels, not the ones panning for gold.

Unfortunately in the crypto winter, crypto shovel sellers like Coinbase are doing quite badly as well.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#88

Post by aforwardslash »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #41

Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time. To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.

> Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time.

And Yahoo and SGI were both behemoths, and look at them now. If you had stake in these companies and cashed out in time, you'd consider it also a great investment.

> To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.

No one cares about Helium, and even fewer people cares about LoRa. I'd guess a good chunk of the nodes are run by people trying to make money out of it (I know personally people that invested in this), not by people interested in maintaining a network or that actually have any clue about LoRa. Me, as a hobby electronics tinkerer, I do care about LoRa (so, I'm one of those fewer people), but I don't care about Helium, because it adds nothing of relevancy to it. Yes, increasing coverage is good, but not only the LoRa market is quite narrow, any other provider can do the same without too much hassle. And there is no actual real money in it(beyond the hobby space) and never will be. No company is going to build products on a super-duper-easy-to-disrupt public network, when alternatives are available.

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#89

Post by fuzzfactor »

rob74 wrote: post #40

And here I was thinking that A16Z has started investing in the chemical industry...

Regardless of the crypto-ness or VC-ness of the plan, from a business standpoint, in the graph of Traditional Network Effect vs. Token Network Effect, his problem is obvious.

Where the y-axis = Utility To User, the Traditional Network Effect can track all the way to the upper end of the scale, and tracks perfectly with the Overall Utility, as an ideal outcome of course.

But with the Token Network Effect, no matter how much of a boost there can be at the beginning, the ultimate Overall Utility is about halfway as high by comparison.

By design you're building for mediocrity.

One of the "secrets" when I was implementing exponential growth strategies was to "prosper better overall, by persuasively giving the customers more of their money's worth".

Interesting how that tradition compares to "persuasively give the customers more of our money than it's worth, since our current product isn't really worth money to begin with".

Re: Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

#90

Post by bobnamob »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #87
mr_gibbins wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones who made fortunes during the American gold rush were the people selling shovels, not the ones panning for gold.

Unfortunately in the crypto winter, crypto shovel sellers like Coinbase are doing quite badly as well.

I think you need to go a layer or two deeper to find the shovel vendors, maybe those selling compute?
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