As Cheech & Chong said once, "YYYYYYerrrrrrr Busteeeeed!". :-). It seems I forgot that nCipher is, after all, a manufacturing company. They needed capital to manufacture stuff with, and they went out and got great gory piles of venture capital to do it with, several rounds, in fact, in the millions of dollars. While nCipher seems to be the exception which proves my "venture capitalism is quaintly industrial" assertion, and that, Microsoft, C2NET, and most first-mover software / net firms, can do just fine without venture capital as long as they provide things their customers want, the best "venture capital" to be found in their customers' pocket, and all that, I do plead guilty yer honor, yet again, to working without a net. Oh, well. On the internet, the cost of error is bandwidth, same as it ever was. Sometimes "ready, fire, aim" means losing a toe or two... Of course, it's easy to see how, like machinery eventually became to land in agriculture, the most valuable component in manufacturing won't be the machines themselves, but the software and wetware required to run those machines, someday, but that's a rant of a different color, if not a whole 'nother generation. Cheers, Bob Hettinga At 10:05 AM -0500 on 10/28/98, Hal Lockhart wrote:
I've been waiting for somebody to mention that (according to www.ncipher.com) one of the primary investors in Ncipher, which is the company Bob touted in the rant that started this thread, is none other than SDTI.
They also list investments by Newbridge and no less than three V.C. companies. Seems at odds with Bob's claim that they "used little, if any, venture capital money". However, I have not information about the history or extent of investment in this company, so I bow to Bob's insider knowledge. (Bob, I thought you were going to stop posting insider knowledge to this list. Or was it that you were going to stop NOT posting ...)
As an aside about Ncipher, while I am sure they are smart guys and will do well, isn't a hardware crypto engine pretty much a commodity product? How can a company like this resist an onslaught from an IBM or an Intel if they decided this niche was large enough to go after?
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'