so people are validating their own feelings on blockchain based on an incoherent ignorant executive trying to shoehorn blockchain into something to stay relevant? fascinating

addendum: its funny that the investors were trying to use this ignorance to shove Celo EVM down their throat, but even funnier that there are waaay more EVMs now, with another one launching every week

Sounds like a great fit for crypto!

I have some visibility into this space through the lens of "high-end" boardgaming (big boxes, frequently lots of minis, very high production value, and usually high time commitment to learn and play).

Crowdfunding's first use case was speculative investment in projects that might not ever succeed. I think this space has a big inherent trust deficit and Kickstarter can never solve it because Kickstarter will always have strong local incentives to not kick sketchy founders off of the platform, but Kickstarter is absorbing some of the loss of trust there because it's their platform.

There is another use case for crowdfunding - coordinating preorders of products that need enough orders to be worth a production run, but that are otherwise low-risk. This model works pretty well but Kickstarter also has competition from Backerkit in the space. I think Backerkit is also more focused on the safer use case of preorder coordination and less on the "speculative product" case.

I don't think ZPM was an intentional scam, but the founders got in way over their heads, and when the popularity of the product exploded, they then had to figure out all these volume manufacturing problems as opposed to just building some prototypes for a small number of backers (there is a cautionary tale about startups taking too much VC money in here somewhere...) Anyway, ZPM crashed and burned, and as far as I know none of the backers got their money back. Again, I don't think it was really a scam, all that money was just spent on things for the project. I don't think anyone got their machine, but maybe a few folks did, not sure.

Anyway, another company, Decent Espresso, came along and bought out ZPM's patents (note, backers still received nothing afaik), but now the Decent machine is an absolute marvel, with temperature and pressure profiling capabilities that are nuts. The machine is also not cheap (the original promise of ZPM), but it's still cool that in the world of so much BS where scammers produce nothing of value (cough Theranos cough), that at least in this case something really cool came of it.

(It's _really_ weird that they gave up on attempting to compete with Patreon in a likely larger market, tho.)

But for the past 6 months or so, they've been slowly moving to backerkit. Including a $4mil funding of one of them: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/mcdm-productions/mcdm-r...

If you're a bit choosier about the things you back you can get pretty good results from the site.

Part of this seems to be due to the reality of creative work: you need to be willing to fund failures as much as successes, or you'll end up getting more-of-the-same rather than something new. E.g. existing creators with well-established patron bases can feel pressured to make more-of-the-same, rather than experimenting, leading to their burnout.

The other part of it seems to honestly be gullibility (on the part of backers) and lack of focus on realistic, achievable goals ("go small, then incrementally bigger") from those seeking funding. The normalization/glorification of advertising culture (e.g. "fake it till you make it") is a non-trivial contributor to this issue, ultimately making it difficult to distinguish between grifters and people who drank the kool-aid.

It's one thing to offer your product to "friend" companies for dogfood feedback. But pressuring stablemates to use the product creates a fake product market for that distracts from building good product, and invites the investor to sacrifice your company to help a different one. But you don't have stock in that other company, do you? If you want the companies to share fate, merge companies.

What's wrong with that? I've backed more than two games. Some were good, some were bad, some failed completely. But I knew that from the beginning. And I just prepaid for the games at a discount, I didn't buy $5000 packages or anything like that.

I might do that again, but every game I picked was mentioned in the gaming press, so was promising enough to get their attention. I haven't seen that lately. No mention of kickstarter, indiegogo, gofundme or whatever else is out there.

Is it because game makers don't crowdfund any more, or because the press only covers AAAs now?

If it was done in real life too I'm actually at the point where I think that guy is a prophet ;)

They only need to win once. When you’re the chip leader, you can afford to throw down some big bets and lose.

In any event, I'm not sure that I'd call this successful, precisely. Might be in the future, who knows, can't on a cursory look find anything concrete about usership. But isn't now.

(Also, personally I would not have named a social network thingy over a fake transport system run by evil computers, but that's just me.)

Ie Lockitron raised $2.2m in presales with it. Tile raised $2.6m in presales with it. And so on.

Unlike Kickstarter it did not take a 8-10% fee of funds raised. It was not a primary business for us. Just something we casually maintained because we coincidentally had a bunch of payment processors in our YC batch that year so spinning it up was less than a weekend’s worth of work given our connections.

I am pretty indifferent now but at the time I was infuriated that Kickstarter drew an arbitrary line between a creative and a founder. It simultaneously marketed itself as the democratic fundraising platform for artists and was perfectly opaque (and self-contradictory) on which projects they would gatekeep from their platform once they started getting heat from places like NPR.

At the time I took a hardline approach that the way to do good was to give people access to tools not restrict them from a platform. Enough time has passed that I see that’s a bit reductive.

But as this is all ancient history why did Kickstarter walk back their anti-tech / anti-hardware position? At the time it felt like they really wanted to double down on artistic creators.