SalisburySam wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 11:04 am
Dooglas wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 10:56 am
The difference between taking deposits for a product you will never deliver, and taking deposits for a product you later find you can not deliver is mostly a question of how well grounded you were in reality from the start. The result is the same.
Disagree. The former is fraud, the latter is either inadequate planning or unforeseen issues (coronovirus anyone?).
One thing I've learned in my 30+ years in tech is that there there are several types of people who tend to start companies. Two of the types are visionaries and creators. A creator tends to build something, and then start a company around that creation. These companies tend to start small and grow organically. A visionary tends to have an idea, and then start a company to make that idea reality. These companies tend to start with a big bang (investor cash). Important to making the company a success is for the visionary to hire people who actually know how to create something, otherwise you just get noise.
I've worked for companies started by both types of people. The current place I work at is a tech company nearing 40 years old, and was started by a creator (who eventually became a visionary as the company matured). He still runs the company (and it's still intentionally private). Other successful companies started by creators are places like Cisco. Apple's two founders were one of each.
I worked for a telecom maker that was founded by a visionary who knew to hire the right creators to make the initial product. They eventually sold the company to Cisco for $1B. I worked for another telecom maker that was founded by a creator. Based upon a very good early prototype they got some initial market traction, but had more work to do. The founder decided early on to turn into a visionary. He had lots of ideas, raised almost $300M from investors, started a dozen new products and hired some 400 people. No one knew what they were doing, and the initial product never really became production ready. In the span of 12 months they redesigned the company logo and colors twice, however.
Fenix looks like a company started by a visionary who had no idea how to turn the vision into product. There's been no evidence that they ever hired people who could actually fulfill that vision. Was it a fraud? I don't think so. Was it likely to succeed based upon how they initially proceeded? I don't think so.
But they have a cool new company color scheme: Vermilion!
https://fenix.systems/news/2020/03/19/w ... -vermilion