Every company doing hard tech should be considering federal funding for early stage R&D. The US gov't has been consistently providing more early stage capital than VC for several decades through the SBIR program. (About $2.5B each year). Capital through the program is NON-DILUTIVE, Phase 1 grants can be $225K, Phase 2 grants to $1.5MM, and you likely have government and private sector customers at the end of Phase 2.
Steve Blank's Innovation Corp initiative is now working with the NIH, NSF and Defense to help companies development product-market-fit once basic funding has been achieved as well.
Disclaimer: My company GrantIQ.com helps companies find federal funding opportunities & helps large companies identify breakthrough technologies being developed through these programs.
Every company doing hard tech should be considering federal funding for early stage R&D. The US gov't has been consistently providing more early stage capital than VC for several decades through the SBIR program.
This is generally good advice, but I'm a grant writer (see http://www.seliger.com if you're curious) and have worked on many SBIRs and STTRs. I'll add that there are downsides as well. One is simple timing: if the appropriate SBIR or STTR funding cycle just concluded for that year, you may have to wait another year to apply. Then another 1 – 3 months for a decision. Then longer for final authorization of the budget. The other day I talked to a guy whose best potential SBIR source had had a deadline the month prior.
Second, Phase 1 grants can just be too small for the amount of effort that goes into them.
Third, they don't come with the advice / community / expertise of good VCs.
Fourth, they take a lot of effort to prepare, and for first-time grant writers they can be quite hard. The alternative is to hire someone like my firm. While I'm biased towards doing that for obvious reasons, we also cost money.
While I don't want to talk anyone out of applying, I do want to note that the downsides are considerable too.
As a side note, I used to submit some SBIR and STTR RFPs to Hacker News (search for "seliger" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nsf.gov), but I stopped after a while because no one upvotes the submissions.
The last time I looked into these types of grants was admittedly years ago, but from what I recall, there's extensive reporting and research requirements that you have to fulfill. It seemed like an overly onerous burden compared to the resources available to an early stage startup. Is that accurate? Have things changed?
I attended the SBIR conference about twenty years ago with a genuine interest in getting involved. I left the conference with an image embedded in my head:
"SBIR = The PhD Club of America".
Perhaps things have changed. My impression leaving the conference was that it was a complete waste of time if you did not have a PhD in your team who had some connection with the PhD at SBIR in charge of reviewing applications.
In other words: Not a single Silicon Valley college dropout or "college-interruptus" need apply as the process seemed to exhibit favoritism towards members of the aforementioned club.
I worked in industrial automation for a few years and most of the software there is terribly outdated. It's definitely ripe for disruption. There are "firm tech" business ideas that involve building better sensing and control software for hard tech industries. Given the low cost of sensors and networking these days it's not prohibitively expensive.
I think making a hard tech product for consumers is still very hard, and those who succeed should be commended. People wanting to dip their toes in the water might consider things like building a factory management portal like Splunk that aggregates sensor data, or something that involves sensing and reporting rather than actuation. Actuation can be dangerous and therefore legally risky.
I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge. People tend to attack areas and industries that they know a lot about. This is why college hackathons have tons of dating, what to do, and delivery apps. It's their world.
If you don't have people coming out of the industrial automation space with a good understanding, it's hard to walk back in with a useful product.
I've actually wanted to do this for a while. I worked in large-scale analytics (Crittercism) and have a friend who does robotics work in Chicago.
I see two big problems here.
The first is, what's the business case for the buyer? What tangible improvement in their business is possible with all this new technology? Maybe less downtime? Predictive failure models? I feel like the tech is so disruptive, you'd be better off building a completely new factory from scratch rather than convincing an existing one to adopt such a radical process/ops change.
Second, there is a profound skepticism for large-scale software projects in true "industry". My father worked for a long time at Andrew, a maker of coaxial cable in Illinois, which was later acquired by Commscope; their view of software projects was a lot like war in 1984: a constant, ongoing struggle, with no end in sight, of huge promises and lack of good delivery. I'm not sure whether that means the barrier to entry is huge, or once you make great software you'll have a massive differentiated advantage -- probably both -- but just understand, these guys have spent their career dealing with vendors selling overpriced junk from Oracle, SAP, etc. and just expect things will fail from the getgo.
the problem with those industries is that the software is closed because of the hardware. while on one hand it is ready for disruption, on the other it is locked down by ever changing hardware interfaces outside of your control.
You would also have a hard time convincing the buyers to not use the manufacturer software and instead use yours.
>> building a factory management portal like Splunk that aggregates sensor data, or something that involves sensing and reporting rather than actuation
Haven't ThingWorx solved this problem very well already ?
Yes. Industrial automation is very ready to be disrupted.
I'd like to see better support for actuation in terms of being able to audit things and feed that back to design decisions, which ties very much back to aggregation.
I'm biased to think there may not be much difference between the two domains. And it should be pretty clear that machine learning is going to be increasingly important.
This being said, the customers may not be all that ready for it.
Well written and mostly agreeable but I've got a lowbrow dismissal incoming: I disagree that Cruise could be considered hard tech. The hard tech in that space was done by universities competing for DARPA awards, and Google after that. Cruise took inaccessible hard tech and made it more accessible.
And that isn't an insult to Cruise. The problem space is still difficult, and they created more value tackling that than the vast majority of startups do on much easier problems. I happen to think that the opportunities for making the cutting edge more accessible vastly outweigh the opportunities for cutting new edges, and nobody should be discouraged from doing it because it isn't as glamorous as the research on the ground floor.
"Cruise took inaccessible hard tech and made it more accessible."
This seems to be a standard path for businesses in the tech space. The value many of these companies bring is not the tech itself but the ability to get that tech to the masses (which is no small feat).
It's why the classic techie response to a tech product is "who cares I can already do that with {insert X inaccessible technologies glued together with shell scripts}." The original dropbox thread on HN is a great example of this.
Interestingly, Kyle (founder of Cruise) was intimately involved with the DARPA Grand Challenge at MIT when the goal was to engineer a self-driving car.
In his book Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard makes a distinction between invention and innovation. Innovation is the application of an invention to solve a problem and create a marketable product.
Chouinard is one of the most innovative folks in the history of the climbing industry, having introduced a lot of now-standard technologies like curved ice axe picks, polyester long underwear, and polyester fleece for warmth. I highly recommend the book.
I don't think you're being dismissive at all - if anything I think you've added some much relevant context to the discussion. I appreciate you mentioning this relationship between development and monetization.
As a mechanical engineer, I am excited to see more of a focus on hard tech content here! Unfortunately, there isn't really a HackerNews for EE's or ME's (though if someone wants to build it, I'd be grateful). So it can be tough to find startups working on these sorts of hard problems that are looking for all flavors of engineer (except civil, they stink and nothing they make moves /s). Personally, I work in ocean robotics and defense, which is I think is very cool, but mostly handled by large defense contractors and military research departments.
As a CE/EE myself, I feel your pain. This area of engineering seems to have such a high barrier to entry. I imagine that is mostly because of the production cost and most necessary software tools still being heavily license based with their physical counterparts being prohibitively expensive as well.
It's just easier to play around with software until you find something novel.
So, was the Cruise acquisition for the talent or the tech? How many other "Hard Tech" startups have had successful exits, when compared to how many have failed? How does this ratio compare to software startups?
It's both. They still have a long way to go for autonomous driving, but they have a young ambitious team and their leadership seems very strong.
Relative to a company like Google, their weakness may be on the hardware side, but GM likely has access to very strong mechanical engineers, and they certainly now have the funds to go out and hire more folks.
Cruise Kyle Vogt's third acquired company. It's still ambiguous as to whether your first startup should be "hard tech" or not. I think in the case of self-driving cars it makes sense because automobiles are a trillion dollar market and the anxiety to stay competitive with the rapidly changing landscape is intense.
Plenty of room in this market yet. What is the biggest competitive advantage and who has it? Data & Tesla. Tesla is the only company with the appropriate data to make self-driving a reality faster than anyone else (tell me when Google starts collecting data in Norway). Data collection equipment is relatively inexpensive. Maybe figure out how to get people to attach sonar or lidar or tap into their car's computer to access that data. What else is a problem, even for Tesla? How about predicting pedestrian behavior and making eye contact -- or identifying if a pedestrian is disabled and sending a signal to those pedestrians that it is OK to walk.
At the end of the day the market being targeted has huge weight to the likelihood of a successful outcome.
I'm all for taking Medium thought pieces on the fundraising environment down a peg, but the problem with Hard Tech is that it requires a nontrivial amount of venture capital. You can't be ramen-profitable when your startup requires purchasing cars for testing or renting giant computing clusters for training AI models.
In relative contrast, it is trivial and risk-free to make a lean MVP for a generic Uber-for-X and send in a YC application.
I'm all for taking Medium thought pieces on the fundraising environment down a peg, but the problem with Hard Tech is that it requires a nontrivial amount of venture capital.
I don't begrudge the fact profitability isn't tied to how much work went into building something, how novel the product is, or whatever. Those bloggers are great because they point out startups like to use the cachet of "solving hard problems" to try and impress me with their less-impressive products.
This blog post makes me laugh because why does it matter to a venture fund if they're "hard tech" or not? It shouldn't, should it? It's about business potential, right? If "hard tech" does that, wouldn't you just invest in it without bragging on it and hope the competition doesn't notice? Maybe Sam is making this post because kids are starting to wise up to the fact "hacker" isn't anything more than something they let you call yourself to feel cool when don't go home after 40 hours. Now the tech is "hard," so nobody asks "why am I wasting my life on this piece of shit?"
One problem is finding VC capital: majority of VCs in SV don't know that hard-tech so they don't want to invest into something they are not familiar with.
On the other hand, the problem might be also that founders which base their startup on technology gave up too easily when looking for funding. So they gave up and get cozy and well paid job at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
And YC application process does not help here: if something is "hard tech", then YC is probably not going to fund it. Why? There are so many application and people who are very very good at hard tech are not type of founders YC would like to invest in since they do not have great communication skills. So their YC application is probably confusing, there is no clear pitch, etc. They cannot explain their start up as "Uber for X" - since it is.... complicated.
In other words, if we get few founders who got rich and get into VC business because they did some hard-tech then we will have more hard tech companies. As of now, majority VCs did some social network / uber-for-X and that is how they got into VC business.
Exactly. I've worked on autonomous vehicles by myself to the point of acquiring a vehicle for development. But the vehicle's conditions were less than ideal and it became too expensive to repair. I am using parts from it to mock up some prototypes. Acquiring a reliable vehicle for development is too expensive. Mind you, I'm an individual working on this as a hobby project. A startup will have a harder time due to overhead costs.
If anyone wants to talk autonomous vehicles feel free to email me. I enjoy it. :)
I catch your drift, but I don't think it's necessarily true for all "hard tech" problems.
For example, putting together a proof of concept or even an MVP for a robotics product (maybe not drivable cars) is totally feasible, but taking that kind of product to market absolutely does require a huge amount of capital. The latter part of that equation is where something like YC is going to provide an immense amount of value.
There's a company in my e.f. cohort who do most of their work on a box with 48GB of video memory. Another regularly spins up clusters to do machine learning on large video datasets to identify theft.
Most accelerators have partners that can get this stuff for cheap or free - including physical boxes.
At the University of Waterloo Waterloo, the Velocity Venture Fund (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/funding/velocity-fund/) awards an additional $10k prize to a hardware team every term to help offset the additional cost, so they could end up walking away with $35k (as opposed to $25k for a software company).
Hard Problem: Current internet discussion technology does not allow millions of users to participate in a discussion without loosing overview. In other words: Current discussion protocols do not scale.
A technology providing that could help make our politics more democratic. It could also lower the need for communication hierarchies like in big companies.
I'm doing research in this area and built several prototypes. I strongly believe we can achieve the goal, but doing it with only one teammate researcher makes the process very slow. We are two master degree computer scientists and need a bigger team.
Building hard core technology products is very risky and challenging for entrepreneurs. Complicating matters further, recent financial market volatility and sentiments being expressed in "Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash" are amping up the fear and uncertainty faced by newcomers.
It is therefore extremely encouraging and important to hear this message clearly and directly from Sam, that this is indeed a lucrative area worth pursuing and that there are investors who have the risk appetite to continue to fund such ventures.
But is it compatible with YC? "Hard tech" usually means years of work and millions of dollars up front. YC is oriented towards sub-$100K fundings and a few months to "demo day".
> " popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”."
Not really. Read the other top comments on this thread. Quite a few of them are basically along the lines of "Sam, don't kid yourself, Silicon Valley mostly works on trivial apps."
Seriously. Sam Altman has an interesting view of the world, which goes exactly as far as the boundaries of the SV bubble (bubble as in insularity as well as market inflation). He seems to be increasingly against anyone not exactly like him.
It was always kind of frustrating to see the amount of brain power and tech going into the place I worked in Italy, www.CenterVue.com compared with typical 'web' startups. Those guys have computer vision, mechanical and electriconic engineering, and lots of software of various kinds. They're doing pretty well, but not nearly as well as plenty of way more "trivial" startups. I put trivial in quotes because it's never easy, but... you'd like to hope there's some correlation between effort and reward.
There is a correlation, but effort is a vector more than a magnitude. Lots of effort in the wrong direction gets you nowhere. Meanwhile small effort surfing on a trend can work quite well.
This is the rationale of EF (said as someone who was in it). They've recognised that IP is VERY valuable again and are capitalising on it in a massive way.
Here's a several billion dollar hard tech idea that would benefit many, many, many people: cheap/fast/efficient water desalination and purification. It's a hard problem. Current solutions aren't cutting it.
Unlock water from the oceans, and a lot of people can be helped. I'm ready to start this company, just need a few dozen engineers/chemists and a boatload of funding.
This acquisition fits exactly with GM's plans outlined by investing $500 million in Lyft to create self-driving car infrastructure [0].
It seems like companies who build products that have clear and significant business value with excellent market timing are successful. Perhaps you can extrapolate to saying hard tech is now a hot field but this is the first successful exit that comes to mind recently, rather than private investors putting more money on the table.
> Leave the Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash and the effect it’s going to have on the fundraising environment to other people—it’s boring, and history will forget those people anyway.
Good post. Congrats to Cruise for the acquisition and to YC for generating a return on their investment. There are definitely opportunities in AI-narrow applications using machine learning-and biotechnology right now.
[+] [-] dlrush|10 years ago|reply
Steve Blank's Innovation Corp initiative is now working with the NIH, NSF and Defense to help companies development product-market-fit once basic funding has been achieved as well.
Disclaimer: My company GrantIQ.com helps companies find federal funding opportunities & helps large companies identify breakthrough technologies being developed through these programs.
[+] [-] jseliger|10 years ago|reply
This is generally good advice, but I'm a grant writer (see http://www.seliger.com if you're curious) and have worked on many SBIRs and STTRs. I'll add that there are downsides as well. One is simple timing: if the appropriate SBIR or STTR funding cycle just concluded for that year, you may have to wait another year to apply. Then another 1 – 3 months for a decision. Then longer for final authorization of the budget. The other day I talked to a guy whose best potential SBIR source had had a deadline the month prior.
Second, Phase 1 grants can just be too small for the amount of effort that goes into them.
Third, they don't come with the advice / community / expertise of good VCs.
Fourth, they take a lot of effort to prepare, and for first-time grant writers they can be quite hard. The alternative is to hire someone like my firm. While I'm biased towards doing that for obvious reasons, we also cost money.
While I don't want to talk anyone out of applying, I do want to note that the downsides are considerable too.
As a side note, I used to submit some SBIR and STTR RFPs to Hacker News (search for "seliger" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nsf.gov), but I stopped after a while because no one upvotes the submissions.
[+] [-] mattzito|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rebootthesystem|10 years ago|reply
"SBIR = The PhD Club of America".
Perhaps things have changed. My impression leaving the conference was that it was a complete waste of time if you did not have a PhD in your team who had some connection with the PhD at SBIR in charge of reviewing applications.
In other words: Not a single Silicon Valley college dropout or "college-interruptus" need apply as the process seemed to exhibit favoritism towards members of the aforementioned club.
[+] [-] bliti|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlrush|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|10 years ago|reply
I think making a hard tech product for consumers is still very hard, and those who succeed should be commended. People wanting to dip their toes in the water might consider things like building a factory management portal like Splunk that aggregates sensor data, or something that involves sensing and reporting rather than actuation. Actuation can be dangerous and therefore legally risky.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|10 years ago|reply
If you don't have people coming out of the industrial automation space with a good understanding, it's hard to walk back in with a useful product.
[+] [-] eldavido|10 years ago|reply
I see two big problems here.
The first is, what's the business case for the buyer? What tangible improvement in their business is possible with all this new technology? Maybe less downtime? Predictive failure models? I feel like the tech is so disruptive, you'd be better off building a completely new factory from scratch rather than convincing an existing one to adopt such a radical process/ops change.
Second, there is a profound skepticism for large-scale software projects in true "industry". My father worked for a long time at Andrew, a maker of coaxial cable in Illinois, which was later acquired by Commscope; their view of software projects was a lot like war in 1984: a constant, ongoing struggle, with no end in sight, of huge promises and lack of good delivery. I'm not sure whether that means the barrier to entry is huge, or once you make great software you'll have a massive differentiated advantage -- probably both -- but just understand, these guys have spent their career dealing with vendors selling overpriced junk from Oracle, SAP, etc. and just expect things will fail from the getgo.
[+] [-] profeta|10 years ago|reply
You would also have a hard time convincing the buyers to not use the manufacturer software and instead use yours.
[+] [-] petra|10 years ago|reply
Haven't ThingWorx solved this problem very well already ?
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to see better support for actuation in terms of being able to audit things and feed that back to design decisions, which ties very much back to aggregation.
I'm biased to think there may not be much difference between the two domains. And it should be pretty clear that machine learning is going to be increasingly important.
This being said, the customers may not be all that ready for it.
[+] [-] saosebastiao|10 years ago|reply
And that isn't an insult to Cruise. The problem space is still difficult, and they created more value tackling that than the vast majority of startups do on much easier problems. I happen to think that the opportunities for making the cutting edge more accessible vastly outweigh the opportunities for cutting new edges, and nobody should be discouraged from doing it because it isn't as glamorous as the research on the ground floor.
[+] [-] billmalarky|10 years ago|reply
This seems to be a standard path for businesses in the tech space. The value many of these companies bring is not the tech itself but the ability to get that tech to the masses (which is no small feat).
It's why the classic techie response to a tech product is "who cares I can already do that with {insert X inaccessible technologies glued together with shell scripts}." The original dropbox thread on HN is a great example of this.
[+] [-] jmcannon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|10 years ago|reply
Chouinard is one of the most innovative folks in the history of the climbing industry, having introduced a lot of now-standard technologies like curved ice axe picks, polyester long underwear, and polyester fleece for warmth. I highly recommend the book.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb_eng|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobiemcfoob|10 years ago|reply
It's just easier to play around with software until you find something novel.
[+] [-] lemiant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|10 years ago|reply
It has to be the tech or tech + talent. Are there enough people worth $1 billion or more to do only a talent acquisition?
[+] [-] emcq|10 years ago|reply
Relative to a company like Google, their weakness may be on the hardware side, but GM likely has access to very strong mechanical engineers, and they certainly now have the funds to go out and hire more folks.
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilingual|10 years ago|reply
Cruise Kyle Vogt's third acquired company. It's still ambiguous as to whether your first startup should be "hard tech" or not. I think in the case of self-driving cars it makes sense because automobiles are a trillion dollar market and the anxiety to stay competitive with the rapidly changing landscape is intense.
Plenty of room in this market yet. What is the biggest competitive advantage and who has it? Data & Tesla. Tesla is the only company with the appropriate data to make self-driving a reality faster than anyone else (tell me when Google starts collecting data in Norway). Data collection equipment is relatively inexpensive. Maybe figure out how to get people to attach sonar or lidar or tap into their car's computer to access that data. What else is a problem, even for Tesla? How about predicting pedestrian behavior and making eye contact -- or identifying if a pedestrian is disabled and sending a signal to those pedestrians that it is OK to walk.
At the end of the day the market being targeted has huge weight to the likelihood of a successful outcome.
Incidentally, if you want to get into YC: https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/708304772055441408
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
In relative contrast, it is trivial and risk-free to make a lean MVP for a generic Uber-for-X and send in a YC application.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|10 years ago|reply
I don't begrudge the fact profitability isn't tied to how much work went into building something, how novel the product is, or whatever. Those bloggers are great because they point out startups like to use the cachet of "solving hard problems" to try and impress me with their less-impressive products.
This blog post makes me laugh because why does it matter to a venture fund if they're "hard tech" or not? It shouldn't, should it? It's about business potential, right? If "hard tech" does that, wouldn't you just invest in it without bragging on it and hope the competition doesn't notice? Maybe Sam is making this post because kids are starting to wise up to the fact "hacker" isn't anything more than something they let you call yourself to feel cool when don't go home after 40 hours. Now the tech is "hard," so nobody asks "why am I wasting my life on this piece of shit?"
[+] [-] tlogan|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, the problem might be also that founders which base their startup on technology gave up too easily when looking for funding. So they gave up and get cozy and well paid job at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
And YC application process does not help here: if something is "hard tech", then YC is probably not going to fund it. Why? There are so many application and people who are very very good at hard tech are not type of founders YC would like to invest in since they do not have great communication skills. So their YC application is probably confusing, there is no clear pitch, etc. They cannot explain their start up as "Uber for X" - since it is.... complicated.
In other words, if we get few founders who got rich and get into VC business because they did some hard-tech then we will have more hard tech companies. As of now, majority VCs did some social network / uber-for-X and that is how they got into VC business.
[+] [-] bliti|10 years ago|reply
If anyone wants to talk autonomous vehicles feel free to email me. I enjoy it. :)
[+] [-] mmcclure|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|10 years ago|reply
10's of Teraflops is cheap.
[+] [-] nailer|10 years ago|reply
Most accelerators have partners that can get this stuff for cheap or free - including physical boxes.
[+] [-] cbhl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argonaut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tclmeelmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manx|10 years ago|reply
A technology providing that could help make our politics more democratic. It could also lower the need for communication hierarchies like in big companies.
I'm doing research in this area and built several prototypes. I strongly believe we can achieve the goal, but doing it with only one teammate researcher makes the process very slow. We are two master degree computer scientists and need a bigger team.
Contact me if you are interested.
[+] [-] n00b101|10 years ago|reply
It is therefore extremely encouraging and important to hear this message clearly and directly from Sam, that this is indeed a lucrative area worth pursuing and that there are investors who have the risk appetite to continue to fund such ventures.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] p4wnc6|10 years ago|reply
Wow. Passive aggressive much?
[+] [-] argonaut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliotec|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw129381|10 years ago|reply
IMO OSS licences should exclude Silicon Valley parasites until they show a modicum of gratitude.
[+] [-] davidw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidivadavid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|10 years ago|reply
Unlock water from the oceans, and a lot of people can be helped. I'm ready to start this company, just need a few dozen engineers/chemists and a boatload of funding.
[+] [-] emcq|10 years ago|reply
It seems like companies who build products that have clear and significant business value with excellent market timing are successful. Perhaps you can extrapolate to saying hard tech is now a hot field but this is the first successful exit that comes to mind recently, rather than private investors putting more money on the table.
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-lyft-investment-idUSKBN...
[+] [-] kposehn|10 years ago|reply
Blunt. True, but blunt.
Hats off to Sam.
[+] [-] tgb29|10 years ago|reply