Yes agreed. And so does David as he has said in the past. Plus its not even possible to create more MAID even if they wanted to.
Not exactly as I think some others have shares. David gave his to the Maidsafe foundation (a UK or Scotland registered charity).
Doesn’t dilute your point though. And I am confident that if Maidsafe needed more funding that another share sale would be one of the options considered.
That is true, also worth noting @andyypants that any investment dilutes investors, it is how it all works really. We cannot create more Maid and we don’t have 94% left to sell it does not work like this.
So if you have a company/investment it already has stakeholders (let’s cover any kind of stakeholder, equity, token etc. they are all the same, where tokens are more like shares in a PLC and equity is harder to sell as it is a private company and private companies by definition are not publically listed).
So stakeholders all added together to hold a % of that stake, let’s say somebodies % is worth $5 (so coins or equity).
If the project needs to raise more funds, then the new investors need something in return, so it is a % of the total.
This is what new money is, it dilutes but should increase the value of the project.
All holders of the original % want to see new money but not a reduction in their %, this confuses many as the feeling of loss kicks in, OMG I am losing a %. This feeling is invalid actually.
As a project matures investment can happen, look at seed, series A, … series C, many VC’s screw original folks, but let’s ignore that here.
So you hold 1% and it is worth say $100
The project gets investment and you hold 0.5%, but it is now worth $120 (as the company value went up as it has more share capital (you can equate to tokens))
TL;DR Normally dilution is not a problem, the key metric is the value of holdings. The key decisions also must include new money required, higher valuation or do nothing and everyone holds their % undiluted in a shutdown project, this is again the same story, the % matters little, the value of the holdings is really what folk should concentrate on.
Caveat, if equity then in an Ltd company 10% is right to be informed of any major decision up front
25% is right of vito, >50% carries a vote that is not a major change (does not change articles or number of shares on offer etc.) to the project and 75% is the right to do almost anything.
I can offer a brief insight into our funding. When we made the 24 month prediction MAID was $0.26 and BTC was $6917 so the industry wide decline in crypto prices has reduced our runway by about 4 months and this has accelerated our plans to seek investment, which we’ll need to secure by the end of this year.
We are looking at several options; we have identified some UK government funding and are working in partnership with a Scottish University (the funding application requires collaboration between industry and an academic institution) to secure this significant amount of funding. We’ll provide more details when it is possible to do so, although I’m sure you’ll appreciation why we need to show discretion at this stage.
We are also approaching venture capitalists for funding, specifically those that invest in decentralised technologies, and have previously made investments in our stage of company, and we would not rule out some form of crowd-funding if we found an avenue that we felt would be successful.
We’ll keep you updated on our position, as we progress.
I think we always have to be mindful of where funding is coming from. We have found in the past and I’ve read many stories on VCs who will try and reshape a companies vision to suit their needs, so money often/always has strings attached.
Putting aside your concerns for the moment, this particular funding would enable us to forge a partnership with a well regarded University and also enable us to continue to build out the Network without diluting existing shareholders, or require us to provide a board seat or control (as we would with a VC) so keeps us as more masters of our own destiny. But as mentioned, this is just one of several options.
Thanks for the update @nicklambert. I hope that Flemming will be out of the door before then, as tangible progress will surely help to sure funding.
I want to suggest to use a wide perspective when/if looking for additional funds. There where a recent thread about partnerships which this comment was intentionally for, but I write it here instead.
When looking for future funding I would like to suggest from my marketing and business knowlege to use a wide perspective. There are probably alot of large companies, for example BMW, Siemens, Samsung and others, who spends alot of money trying to secure data from corporate/government espionage and also to keep important communications secure. For example a construction enginer who visits a supplier abroad and need to communicate and send files between him and the office. The next example would be corporations who want to secure data about their innovations and technology. A third example could be secure IOT communication, if in some way there could be a promise of trying to develop a secure IOT communication layer then there could maybe be potential interest for that. The benefit of seeking funding from example BMW or other large tech companies would be that their interest is in securing vital data, communications and their interest is not to control how a new internet is being built. I don’t know which convention the CEO’s of large tech companies meet at, but if opportunity arrives it might be good to be around.
This approach maybe known allready but as I don’t know that it has been mentioned before, I just leave this here. I see a positive future for new funds, same as Traktion, when alpha 3 will show the progress of this awesome technology.
Most big companies have funding arms and operate in most cases as separate entities from the main business, but work in areas that would help the core - this is BMWs for example: https://www.bmwiventures.com/. So like a specialist VC in many ways. Getting the right introductions into investment companies is key (needing to cold call is not ideal) and how you can approach with a reasonable chance of success is dictated to a large extent by the collective contacts within the company.
And I agree with what you are saying, you need to frame how your technology can be used within specific industry if you are to seeking investment from them. Remove as much guess work as possible and make the opportunity as clear as possible.
Providing a board seat to a funding party does not mean that they suddenly have control of the company. It is a good thing to have a seasoned operator come on board to provide a different perspective. Might push the team out of their comfort zone, but that’s often required to achieve the ends we seek.
This is akin to David’s explanation above that having a smaller percentage of a big pie is actually better than having a larger percentage of a tiny pie.
I wouldn’t worry - the consequenses are all in formal agreements & wouldn’t be anything that would compromise MaidSafe’s mission.
The UK government just wants to make sure the funds are used to benefit the UK economy, so there may be some commitment to spending funds (or collaboration) with the UK, but nothing scary.
I’m sure MaidSafe would run a mile if the UK government attached strange strings to funding that could compromise them, but that’s unlikely to be the case… as Nick said, the strings would likely be fewer than if taking private investment from a VC who wants influence on what the company does going forward. The UK government just wants jobs etc.
Talking of big European companies, Tim is speaking about Solid at Bosch ConnectedWorld mid May. Events like this can be a good place to make those contacts, especially if you have a connection with a keynote speaker who happened to invent the www 
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It isn’t always this simple. I don’t know about the UK, but in the US, taking federal funding means certain things. For instance, your IP can be invoked and taken by the gov to prevent damage to or further the national interest. Most aren’t aware of these edge cases because they rarely happen and the agencies focus on economic growth. But they are covered in the agreements if you read closely.
Addition: To be clear, this doesn’t mean that one should shun such source of funding. It’s actually an excellent funding source (outside of tedious reporting). It all depends on what you want to do and whether you see any clause in that agreement that could limit you in the future.
I recently noticed that HiveMQ also works together with BMW: HiveMQ Goes Open Source, Brings MQTT and Kafka Together
Sure, it depends on the specific deal, percentage of company held, voting rights…etc. My point that I was making is that the funders objectives and vision does not always track with the company’s. I remember a few years ago a US investor who could see us only as a Mozy (backup) Killer, despite our best efforts they struggled to see the big picture, a new Internet. I agree that with the right investor this oversight and input can be a positive thing.
The university driven funding without diluting existing shareholders/token holders would certainly be a home run, obviously ideal scenario would have been reaching mvp like your assessment hoped for last year but that is life. I don’t think a community funding at this stage would yield results seen in the past so I would suggest avoiding that if possible(but don’t sell out ideals and power to a VC either 
) .
Regardless I do appreciate your transparency around it, thanks for the update!
Another consideration to keep in mind re:gov funding, I don’t know the details of the one you’re seeking, but these often stipulate that you can’t pay foreigners and work has to be done on the national soil. Were that to be the case here too, how would that affect the distributed team (i.e., those outside of UK)?
Nice one, that exactly highlights such opportunities I was aiming for in my latest comment.
@nicklambert Very interesting, how to contact and where to apply and such things is something they don’t teach alot in economics classes, thanks for sharing. That seems logical that collective contacts play an very important role. When looking at for example the bmwiventures page, it kind of shows what you mentioned, the problem to apply or contact them B2B, no email, no phone, only team members and an address.
Thanks @nicklambert for your update on financial position and also @dirvine for sharing your thoughts on funding strategy.
@nicklambert , it sounds like MaidSafe’s capital base is entirely or predominantly in Bitcoin and MaidSafeCoin. The MaidSafeCoin component would explain some of the ongoing downward price pressure on the market at least! The bitcoin component would seem like a very high risk approach to funding the project which has fiat based capex and opex. Right now it’s probably good to hold Bitcoin as appears to have far more upside than downside risk. When you projected 24 months of runway to becoming self sustaining in revenue, I didn’t release that hinged on crypto market prices. If this is the case MaidSafe is Bitcoin bet, an FX play more than a tech investment. It is also a play on your CFO’s financial asset management skills and luck of market timing. I know coin holders have no rights but it seems since the firm is a major coin holder, the coin community are holding your funding in their collective hands. Please would you consider the prudent benefits of more regular and active disclosure of positions and financial strategies?
@dirvine May I ask you for your thoughts on my earlier points in this thread about focussing all resources on only core MVP development? The examples I gave were hole punching being non-essential and mobile being non-essential. Of course they are part of the vision, I see the immense value, but port-forwarding, UPnP and Linux-CLI would get you over the line just as well. With over a decade in development and still no functional decentralisation of course stakeholders are itchy and nervous. The open source community has little interest in supporting a decentralised web protocol that hasn’t yet published a working mechanism for its core value proposition. The SAFENetwork is an astonishing vision and far too valuable to be at the mercy of the crypto markets and the ambitious drive for engineering perfection. Such projects thrive when the community takes ownership and battle testing begins. If you can give the world a core software stack which can autonomously store and serve redundant encrypted files and support a cryptocurrency then you’ve won and the world has won. You won’t need browsers, GUIs, crust, streaming, VoIP, etc to do that. I am a huge supporter of you and the project and have been a long term advocate but I’m also a realist, engineer and investor. Thank you for any detailed response you can make.
You’re very welcome Oscar.
Just a quick response as I’m trying to finish something off, but weighed against ‘more regular and active disclosure of positions and financial strategies’ is that in publishing such strategies we may well weaken our negotiating position with funders and/or competitors. Always tough to get the balance right though.
I agree with that. It’s like building a house, not having finished the roof yet, but start to pose wallpapers. You can add as much decoration, painting, tiles as you want; a house without a roof is useless. We know that foundation are essential, but now the core components looks to be advanced enough.
Early dev adopters will not mind to access and play with the network only using CLI. I remember few years ago when I started to play with Ethereum smart-contracts, I was doing everything using command lines.
Then little by little, a whole ecosystem start to grew around Ethereum. Metamask, Myetherwallet, Truffle suite, etherscan, external wallets, etc. All this tools are developed by external teams (which are not part of the core team).
What I try to explain is that you don’t have to develop everything by yourself.
If we have a fully running and open MVP, early dev adopters will start to build amazing tools around it.There is amazing developers waiting to work on exciting technologies like Safenetwork. But they WON’T invest time in a project which looks “experimental” and which didn’t proof that it can actually work.
This is what we are doing just now, no hole punch and routing ready. There are other parts but very soon we will all see exactly the parts to beta and beyond. There is a team working on the details there right now. I think it will show all the unessential parts not there. Front end has some slack to do more, but backend is flat out so it is there we trim any fat in terms of features. So the vision will be met, but with the minimum backend we can get away with, which still means a load of things have to happen, such as secure messages, secure data, persistent data, safecoin, farming etc. It will all be laid out though very soon.
Cheers @opacey we are on the same page