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0 pointspaulgerhardt2y ago0 comments

Twine! You guys single handedly snowballed the Kickstarter revolution! Huge inspiration for us and Pebble in 2012 directly.

Your campaign felt like a “butterfly flapping its wings causing a hurricane” kind of moment. You inspired so many entrepreneurs of that time to take a risk and crowd fund which then inspired another generation. Some of whom ended up huge and going public like Peloton.

Regarding choke points - I don’t think they’re all bad. Sometimes certainly, but others it’s a defensible moat that forces an industry to specialize into various key players that serve integral roles. I’m thinking specifically of semiconductors with companies like Western Digital locking up storage, Qualcomm with radios, ARM with compute, Samsung/Hynix with memory, etc This creates a stable enough ecosystem to build various software abstractions on top.

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jkestner2y ago

The stability is nice, agreed, but it's inevitable that monopoly/monopsony gets abused. Samsung/Hynix were part of a price fixing cabal, Qualcomm's IP has been a boot on the neck of innovation, Western Digital has suffered multiple disasters that caused global storage shortages, and ARM is currently flipping the table with its licensing changes. We can have stability with open standards, too.

That's cool to hear—I didn't consider we had that influence, though should've realized it after chatting with y'all, Ring/Doorbot, Particle/Spark, Pebble, etc.

Guess it took two generations to shake out the hardware startup mistakes. We were early and naïve, but we did ship, and the Twine servers remain up. You learned to focus the use case, and I still haven't. Go figure, I think there's still a space for a general-purpose physical computer, so we're doing it again: https://supermechanical.com/pickup

Funny that Kickstarter's history since is a hindrance, and we might go the Selfstarter route to produce the experience we want next time.

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