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How is that a nail in the coffin?

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.
By having 10M+ hobbyists that you support and inspire. That's how... easier said than done, but if they play their cards right, it is possible.
"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.

> but if they play their cards right, it is possible.

Not with $54M in debt to service. This is a death warrant. I'm sure the execs will make out nicely, though.

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...
Isn't "raising funds" just a euphemism for taking a loan you don't have to return in cash? Like a loan which is not regulated as a loan
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.
That won't do. Your number is way too low.

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...

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