Yes. With 10 estimated employees, 4-5 million dollars in costs towards development through subcontractors, I call it money problems.
10 employees at around 25-30k if they are not so well paid, makes for another 360.000. Lets say they burnt the first batches of chips, blew a lot of cases.... blew lots of chips, have to pay health insurance. Another 300.000.
I have calculated an ASICs business, since I have no idea what to do there. I called up contractors and specialists for everything, since I thought if BFL makes millionaires, why not become one myself?
As it turned out, some of the more prestigious development companies asked between 1.5 and 2 million EURO in advance for initial development and estimated a timeframe of one to two years until serial production could start.
Of course you wouldn't have a clue. This is utter BS. you don't know about investors or revenue from their FPGA sales or nothing about them, it's just a really obvious smear attempt.
Most of the pre-orders were placed
after the the wafers and design were done, which kind of blows your revenue wild guesses.
I hope this has been done through investor money. If their investors have goven them enough money, no worries. The margins on FPGAs was not very high. That is easily said since you can source all parts on digikey, even the FPGA chips.
I dont know shit about their operation, but I know the costs. I don't earn anything from a smear campaign, actually. I'd love them to have been more professional. But since I found a COO calling customers stupid cunts, I have refunded a lucrative order.
The last time I heard a CEO call someone asshole and cunts was with a pretty big other company: ENRON
Also, according to the laws of the state BFL is incorporated in, they would have to disclose non-private venture capital funds. As a corporation, the only thing they have to disclose is who owns shares, in a limited manner.
So, from information policy and what I could dig up, the only way they could pull off what they have been saying is by having someone private signing a private loan to the corporation. Thats the only thing that does not leave a papertrail to follow. Or a bank loan. But sorry, never ever.
But, since you said most orders were done after the wafers were done: Interesting, that means they would have had such an amount invested at that point. Or not. Depending on what game they were actually playing.
I don't care either way, a COO calling people cunts on a public forum who argues that an engineer can tell a customer and his superior that "the project is done when it is done" is enough for me to pull my personal plug.
But, we will see. This is an interesting game of competition coming.