Want to buy your own piece of the Pi? No 'urgency' says Upton of the listing rumours Industry talk is continuing to circulate regarding a possible public listing of the UK makers of the diminutive Raspberry Pi computer. Over the weekend, The Telegraph reported that a spring listing could be in the offing, with a valuation of more than £370m. Pi boss, Eben Upton, described the newspaper's article as " …
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The end of the beginning.
Whichever it is, it will not end well. The VC's will move in (if Broadcom does not get there first) and rape and pillage everything of worth from the biz before exiting and leaving a load of debt.
We've all seen it before. A promising business based here, lists and then is fair game for the pirates.
Sad fact of life and the Gubbermint don't even bother to give out fake biz advice. Other governments would stop this sort of thing in its tracks but ours seems to be too busy stuffing fat brown envelopes of cash in tax havens all over the world.
A cynical view of things? Yep but probably not too far from the truth in the end.
"The VC's will move in [...] and rape and pillage everything of worth from the biz before exiting and leaving a load of debt.
We've all seen it before. A promising business based here, lists and then is fair game for the pirates."
What else do you expect when the spivs and wide boys in the City's casino banks and similar financial institutions are the ones actually in charge of UK plc and its future? What do they care about anything succeeding or not, as long as they get their cut on the transaction?
A pox on all their houses.
While the injection of funds would certainly be welcome to the Foundation in the short term, there's no doubt in my mind it would be the end of RasPi as we have known it.
Unless the Foundation is reserved a guarantee-of-control., it would take all of five seconds for someone overseas with access to dark money and zero-interest loans to snap up the Trading arm for their IP/Brand, do away with their UK infrastructure and ship manufacturing to the far east, while the ghouls in government cheer it on from their own bolt holes in BVI and the Canaries.
I could never see the upside to selling your business to a load of random strangers as a way to grow your company, which is effectively what "going public" is.
You'd have a ton of money, but you'd have to put up with a load of greedy halfwits trying to asset strip what you spent time, money and love to build.
I've really enjoyed joining in the whole Pi story since the anticipation and waiting in 2011, up to today's evolved Pis, it's been amazing. Getting free Zeros on the magazine cover, going to 4 cores etc. I'm realistic, I know this is the natural lifecycle that businesses go through but I'm sad that it might be lost to corporatism. There is no precedent for anything like this ending well for us end users. That natural lifecycle usually ends in burnout.
IF this happens, I keep my fingers crossed for a breakaway spin-off company to keep the true spirit of Pi alive.
I'm guessing a lot of people are sharing the same disappointment I'm feeling reading this, that what was once was promoted as entirely a means of getting cheap computers into the hands of kids and hobbyist tinkerers has apparently morphed into a multimillion pound business concerning itself with growing into markets, that will be flogged off to make the founders super rich, and probably in the next couple of years find itself absorbed in a takeover bid into being just another product line in some existing big company's catalogue.
If they raise the money on Crowdcube or Seedrs or somewhere, they could pretty much guarantee a massive diversification of shareholders.
Either way, secondary or IPO or whatever, I’m In.
Just so’s I can vote against the slimy financiers who want to sell it off to a private investment fund who can do a quick asset strip.
I won’t win but it’s worth the effort.
I thought the PI production company has or at least had charitable status which gave it a price advantage over the tax paying competition. Broadcom made a good decision gifting technical support. Lots of chip sales. There were / are other "better" ARM processors in the same price range.
Knew it was dodgy when they did the True VNC product placement.
Fortunately there are several PI like boards.
Like IBM and the PC, they may have greated the market, but it is unclear they can hold the market.
If they raise prices to maximise profits ...
Ubuntu on Pi class ARM processor is now supported directly by Ubuntu. There is very little secret sauce to give them an IP edge.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/21/raspberry_pis_trading_arm_snags
"The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has received a £33m investment - putting paid to rumours that the company was looking to float on the stock exchange as a means of funding growth."
Apparently not :)
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