A few questions regarding the community investment RUV:
1. What was the valuation at your last round, and what is it for this one (approximately)?
2. Are the shares illiquid or will it be possible to sell your stake to another accredited investor prior to the next round of funding?
3. Your application mentions "the RUV will sign a proxy voting agreement with ... Nirav Patel that will allow him to determine how to vote the RUV's shares for most matters". Is there a draft available of that agreement, or alternatively can you share some examples of matters where community investors would be entitled to vote? (e.g. leadership confidence, tender offer)
4. Will these investors have a right & opportunity to inspect your corporate books and records, and attend shareholder meetings?
5. Is a copy of the NDA available for review at this time? (completed the application and haven't received one yet)
I gather the basic intent is community investors are 'along for the ride' - deposit your money here, maybe one day if we go public you'll have a nice little payoff - but want to understand what knobs and levers might be available in the interim.
Thanks!
Ps. Step 5 in the application process has an asterisk at the end of the paragraph, as if referencing fine print elsewhere. But there is no fine print (https://i.imgur.com/P0DHZhl.png)
Reached out, but Support couldn't help, and not sure what other contact point there is (the communityround@frame.work address which the invitation came from bounces).
@nrp if you're out there, any chance on chiming in on any of these? Thanks!
I love framework.
Have been using as my main device during the last years of my PhD. However now that I got a company mac book I was using it less and less, so I decided to buy the Cooler Master mainboard case and now I'm using it as a home server. Wouldn't have been able to do that with any other laptop.
I'm curious why they would go through the hassle of raising a relatively small amount this way instead of just asking a bit more from the VC's. Probably this?
> the RUV will sign a proxy voting agreement with Framework’s Founder and CEO, Nirav Patel that will allow him to determine how to vote the RUV's shares for most matters submitted to stockholders for approval.
We had traditional investors who were interested in taking that last $1M. The voting rights were also not a major factor. It really actually is that we want to enable folks in the community to have a stake in the company. This is something I wanted to do in earlier rounds but needed to avoid signaling risk around. We now have enough history of "real investors want to put money in Framework" that we can open up to community funding.
I know asking about this on Hacker News is a long shot, but will any of this funding go toward accelerating Framework's entry into new countries? The rate at which new countries are added is very slow and Framework seems to be the most hostile laptop manufacturer toward anyone who isn't in a supported country buying its product. I know so many people who want to own a Framework and support the mission (myself included) but don't because of this.
I think it is a nice way to engage the community, and there are plenty of people that would invest $10,000 (me included). When I did my startup we had some community investment and it made the shareholder meetings far more interesting and engaging. And I made some great friends along the way.
In a relevant story, yes. Linus mentions his investment in Framework in each video it comes up. If they had already said it in this thread they'd I'd give it a pass.
Have you considered that the guy might be a bit rushed today what with, you know, completing a funding round and all that, and that it might have slipped his mind?
Good thing you gave him a pass though. Everyone's heart stopped for a second there
The previous comment talks about founder and ceo Nirav Patel. Comment you're replying to says "I wanted to do this", and is posted by a user named nrp. It's not rocket science.
It _is_ disclosed in their comment based on how it is worded. It is also in their bio. It is true that someone might write a comment this way even though they weren't affiliated with Framework, but then they could just as easily flat out state they were and lie.
Isn't it a bit of small round for a hardware startup? It's basically the amount of money put in a single 10000 units batch of the latest framework 16. Multiply that by ~3 to account for lower effective BOM, and I still find this low for a capital-intensive business, that still needs to pay its employees.
We're generating substantial revenue on our product sales, and we sell our products with positive unit economics. Basically, we don't need new funding to operate the business, we need it to scale into new areas of business that we aren't in today.
Folks that have Framework laptops, how is the latest generation hardware as a daily driver? I've not been following as closely as I could, but am very interested in the mission and ideas.
I have a 13 " AMD, and I've been pretty happy with it. Windows basically just worked*, Linux needed a couple of tweaks to get the Wi-Fi and touchpad behaving better, but I think they might both be fixed upstream at this point.
The touchpad is a let-down coming from a macbook, but everything else has been great.
*Edit: I forgot, Windows didn't include drivers for the Wi-Fi chip, so I had to put it on a USB drive on another computer to get the framework online.
Quite disappointing to see. I respected Framework a lot as an upstart in the hardware space. What's wrong with responsibly building a sustainable business model? Why the "growth at any cost" mindset? The moment you accept VC funds, they'll expect a return on their investment, giving way to inevitable enshittification of products.
What? The 2nd paragraph explains that they already raised VC a couple of years ago, and how are you expecting a hardware startup to get off the ground without VC funding?
Page hijacks scrolling on Safari iOS. Browsers have been able to scroll content for decades, you don't need to reinvent scrolling but worse in JavaScript.
Could you share which iOS version/device you're seeing this on? Safari on iOS is one of our main QA paths (and also what I personally use), and we haven't spotted this occurring.
1. What was the valuation at your last round, and what is it for this one (approximately)?
2. Are the shares illiquid or will it be possible to sell your stake to another accredited investor prior to the next round of funding?
3. Your application mentions "the RUV will sign a proxy voting agreement with ... Nirav Patel that will allow him to determine how to vote the RUV's shares for most matters". Is there a draft available of that agreement, or alternatively can you share some examples of matters where community investors would be entitled to vote? (e.g. leadership confidence, tender offer)
4. Will these investors have a right & opportunity to inspect your corporate books and records, and attend shareholder meetings?
5. Is a copy of the NDA available for review at this time? (completed the application and haven't received one yet)
I gather the basic intent is community investors are 'along for the ride' - deposit your money here, maybe one day if we go public you'll have a nice little payoff - but want to understand what knobs and levers might be available in the interim.
Thanks!
Ps. Step 5 in the application process has an asterisk at the end of the paragraph, as if referencing fine print elsewhere. But there is no fine print (https://i.imgur.com/P0DHZhl.png)
@nrp if you're out there, any chance on chiming in on any of these? Thanks!
> the RUV will sign a proxy voting agreement with Framework’s Founder and CEO, Nirav Patel that will allow him to determine how to vote the RUV's shares for most matters submitted to stockholders for approval.
Good thing you gave him a pass though. Everyone's heart stopped for a second there
In their words: https://frame.work/about
I can't help but think about this thread on printers from Framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133070
The touchpad is a let-down coming from a macbook, but everything else has been great.
*Edit: I forgot, Windows didn't include drivers for the Wi-Fi chip, so I had to put it on a USB drive on another computer to get the framework online.
The big problem with them is unsupported firmware—they are all still vulnerable to logofail to my knowledge.
They need to get their pricing down. What costs $3k for them, is below $1.5k from say lenovo or dell.
The founder has also just chimed in to mention that they don't need the funding, which is ideal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132713