Purism is seeking investment from individuals
puri.smI'm still waiting for my Librem phone that I pre-ordered and paid for, over four years ago.
So, no, I think I'll pass.
And you haven't received refund?
I ordered and paid right at the beginning, and asked for refund about 6 months ago. Still haven't got refund. I consider it a post-tax donation at this point.
seriously? 4 years? I was going to order one. Forget it.
Four years ago it did not exist at all - the crowdfunding campaign to develop it started Aug 2017.
The final revision only started shipping in December 2020 (the first early batches in Nov 2019), but not all orders have been fulfilled yet because of supply chain issues. Shipping is supposed to resume soon though: https://puri.sm/posts/the-ball-and-supply-chain/
Silly him. It wasn't 4 years ago, it was 3 years and 11 months ago!
"the crowdfunding campaign to develop it" is the important part.
It's worth the wait. A full Linux phone that plugs in as a computer with USBC. A bit buggy right now without camera+gps and too many apps, but when software is ready this should be the future of mobile!
There are already Socially Responsible Mutual Funds with none of this "accredited investor" stuff. Why would you throw your money away on this? You have no idea whatsoever about what they're going to do with it, except some vague high-sounding words. More to the point, you don't know what % of the ultimate profits, if there are any, will flow to the backers and not to you.
Multi decade angel investor here: accredited investor requirements are completely normal, including the good faith clause.
You gave it away there: "angel investor .. accredited investor requirements" You're in a different ballgame.
The other responders here are wondering if someone can get into that ballgame without all the safeguards you went through.
Also an angel investor. Nobody actually checks accredited investor status [1], but early stage investments are so risky you'll have to invest $X x Y investments at an amount so large it's difficult for most people to do safely.
[1] Angellist did actually check for this, though it only required screenshots of account balances.
I mean this is a terrible investment no matter what. 3% interest that, let's be honest, there's serious doubt as to whether you'll actually see? From an investment standpoint it's the lowest of junk bonds without a particularly high interest rate either.
There's a million things with both better upside and safety.
Nobody invests in convertible notes for the interest. YC's SAFE is basically a note sans interest. Investors looking for high interest rates on notes should be a red flag to startups as well.
There's no valuation cap on this note (until a >50M round happens). It is a variation of the standard YC deal, but on some of the worst terms for an investor.(there's no pro rata, preferred liquidation either).
The only benefit for this early investment is the 8% discount. It doesn't feel like a fair trade for the added risk of investing earlier.
All that said, it's nice to be able to have the outside possibility of future return for a donation that supports their mission.
They require that you're an accredited investor, but later note "This is a good faith requirement, since there is no way for Purism to validate your accredited investor status". Yikes. This had to go through legal right? I'm gobsmacked that either they or the SEC think that not checking is fine. What happens if Joe Sixpack buys in?
https://teddit.net/r/Purism/comments/om9za4/email_purism_inv...
My guess, though, is that they might be trying to fall under Rule 504 ... where the disclosure and verification rules are more lax. However you can't fall under Rule 504 if the offer is public ... and I think that having the offer on a publicly accessible website is a violation.
That explains the "this is not a public offering" language. Going to be interesting to see how this turns out.
Many crowdfunding sites also have similar language, as most claims of accredited investor status do not actually require you to prove that status. If Joe Sixpack buys in, and made a false claim, that would be on him/her.
Some of the previous requirements around accreditor investor status have changed though
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/09/18/sec-expands-defin...
"If Joe Sixpack buys in, and made a false claim, that would be on him/her."
You would think that would be the way that it is, but is most assuredly is not.
Yeah, the SEC seems to almost always treat the investor as the victim regardless of intent.
> If Joe Sixpack buys in, and made a false claim, that would be on him/her
I doubt the SEC sees it that way. The core purpose of accredited investor requirements is to protect Joe Sixpack from opening themselves up to a bunch of liability.
Self-certification is normal for 506(b) activities (private offerings), but some level of verification is needed for 506(c) ("crowdfunding"). It smells like a 506(c) but they're claiming it's a "friends and family" offering. If it is, then they can do self-certification. I'll presume they have some good reason to believe they can do it this way.
Seems normal. I remember signing up for some crowdfunding site about 10 years back, and just checking a box to confirm my accredited status. (I didn't qualify as accredited back then.)
So can I get in trouble for investing anyway?
if you have zero people that admitted to being unaccredited investors, then you don't have to verify accredited status and can rely on "self-certification"
this is the legal term for the good kind of lying
but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
In light of some of the questions here, why does every for-profit company that tries to make money out of open source, and build a substantial brand out of it, turn shady? Some implode over it- CyanogenMod, CopperheadOS, or the bigger ones lose credibility or become a mess of cancelled projects- Canonical, Mozilla.
Because the opportunities to profit from open source are limited, and mostly already taken. Any new company is likely to be either a fraudster, or a zealot and an amateur. Neither of those categories is likely to produce something good. (And the open source field specifically is full of zealots and amateurs that don't exist in other fields. And also fraudsters preying on the zealots and amateurs.)
Furthermore, a lot of business models require convincing other people to support you, either through investment, or through getting a larger share of your company's budget. This filters out many incompetent businesses, but since open source is free, the filter is poorer It's like asking why the average book in a bookstore is better than the average book on Amazon Kindle--if you don't need to convince a publisher to spend their limited resources on your book, there's one less filter for bad books.
Because open source is about contributing to a commons, and profit is about having some value that your business can provide that nobody else can. Those are at odds with one another. Either you're contributing that value back to the commons and killing your own profits, or you're hoarding the value and have drifted from your mission.
The least unreasonable for-profit open-source companies (e.g., Red Hat) use the labor of skilled developers as the unique value, i.e., anyone can run Red Hat just fine but if you want the world's most qualified people to work on your specific problems you have to pay them. But even this produces a vague incentive not to write public documentation and not to write understandable and easy-to-maintain products.
The other way to do things (e.g., Google, Facebook) is to have some business entirely unrelated to the value of your open source and open-source infrastructure things (e.g., Go and React) that make your business better if they're open-source but don't meaningfully make it easier to compete with you.
Then there are the companies that realized they didn't actually want to contribute their core product to a commons (e.g., Elastic) or companies that couldn't meaningfully monetize their open-source core product (e.g., Sun, Netscape).
Why does it sound so much like a scam ?
Before anyone considers putting money there, they should read this interview by their former CTO. Sounds like a train wreck to me:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...
Reading that, I wonder whether a start up would have a better time offering OS/firmware support for already shipping, mass produced devices. i.e. Buy the latest XPS 15 and get to work making an installer that disables all the things they want to disable (intel ME off the top of mind). Doing similar with phone models, etc. I wonder whether this could be done for Windows drivers, for that matter.
Tuxedo Computers does this.
That’s what Purism does already, they are selling bog standard OEM laptops and now “NUCs” with Coreboot at a pretty high premium.
Unlike System76 they aren’t even maintaining a swanky Linux distro like PopOS.
Um, they are maintaining a distro. It’s called PureOS [0].
Just to clarify, it’s possible to focus solely on providing drivers for known hardware configurations and across a variety of OSes. Deciding to fork Debian and maintaining a distribution on top of those drivers seems massively unnecessary.
This is very outdated, with predictions not turned out to be correct. For instance, the most freedom-respecting smartphone on the market has been built.
Not sure about the scam, but my bayesian bullshit filter is triggered by the "unlike all the evil for-profit corporations, we're a white'n'fluffy company aiming for the greater good".
They have proven this by numerous contributions to FLOSS [0], releasing laptops with kill switches [1] and neutralized Intel ME [2], FSF-approved OS [3], FSF-endorsed phone [4] and so on.
[0] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-and-linux-5-13/
[2] https://puri.sm/projects/coreboot/
[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed...
Well, in this case good for them and shame on my bayesian filter.
I wish I were an "accredited investor according to Rule 501 under the Securities Act of 1933", because from your links it looks like a kind of good I'd be willing to invest in.
So what? You're investing to make money. For those purposes, it's much better for you if they are actually as bad or worse than any other company. Nobody makes big money actually respecting the principles they claim
If Purism was a scam VCs would be begging to invest. They're not evil enough to scam anyone (on purpose at least).
Because when you start digging behind the marketing at Purism a lot of what they say and do are often two different things.
Any particular examples?
Given I've had a number of non-spammy emails from them wind up in gmail's spam that I've had to mark as not so, I was surprised when I got an email about this several days ago and it wasn't marked spam. I was really tempted to mark it as such...
What the hell. You need to have assets exceeding 1M to invest $1000?
I don’t need that to buy any other stock, why would I need it here?
Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
Those other stocks are the result of a multi-year process of disclosure and regulation with the SEC, including quarterly audited financial disclosures, due diligence reviews, and a gigantic mess of filings. Companies pay tens of millions of dollars to get themselves into a position where ordinary retail investors can buy their stock.
These people, on the other hand, are just a bunch of people with a web page. You can solicit investments on a web page, but only from sophisticated buyers, who the law assumes should know better than to invest.
> You can solicit investments on a web page, but only from sophisticated buyers
Unless you are selling cryptocurrency or a variety of non-materialized products (crowdfunding).
It seems eminently more reasonable to me to be able to invest in an existing company with an actual product.
There is a huge difference between speculatively giving money to a company that may or may not provide you with a product and a company promising investment returns. The amount you'll give to the product company is capped by some plausible valuation you give the product itself, which is virtually always very low relative to your net worth. The same isn't at all true of an investment opportunity; people can and do lose their life's savings chasing sketchy investment returns.
If your point is that cryptocurrency speculation should be heavily regulated and even restricted to accredited investors, you won't get any disagreement from me!
>I don’t need that to buy any other stock, why would I need it here?
Those have much stricter legal and regulatory oversights which would be financially infeasible for a smaller entity to deal with. The law is to prevent people from losing all their limited life savings in scams.
>Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
Because it's a US company governed by US laws around hosting an investment vehicle. Feel free to invest in a company in a different country if you wish to be governed by different laws.
> Because it's a US company governed by US laws around hosting an investment vehicle.
Yeah, I understand that. It was mostly a thought experiment. Say I invest in this company, sitting in my house in Japan. What are they going to do? Extradite me to the US because I gave some US company money in an unapproved way?
I'm not a lawyer and this is random guesses. If the SEC goes after the company due to this then you may be liable for civil penalties as you lied on a contract. This could mean that any of your other US investments could be taken if you lose the case. It may also make the initial contract around the investment void in which case you may lose out on any increase in valuation. I suspect the SEC would be much in favor of the last one happening to discourage such actions in the future.
Because they need you to sit back and go "damn what a bummer" when your investment nets you a $1000 loss, instead of it being something that would want you to sue.
That happens to me all the time in the stock market and I don't have close to 1MM
You take 100% losses "all the time"? That's the risk being discussed, not taking a $1000 loss on a $50,000 investment.
No this is not arbitrary, accredited investors have a specific set of requirements they need to meet in the US: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
Is that attitude limited to millionaires? I know a lot of people who have $1000 to invest who are nowhere near having a million dollars in assets.
Multi decade angel investor here: accredited investor requirements are completely normal, including the good faith clause.
So I don't make a billion bucks a year, but I'd be completely comfortable throwing a few grand at Purism.
If I check the "yeah I'm cool" box even though the SEC wouldn't think I'm cool, am I just forfeiting some sort of recourse if Purism flops and I lose my money? Or am I opening myself up to getting in serious trouble?
(Likewise, I want to invest in Aptera but I don't know anything about this. I feel like the main thing it'll accomplish is making my taxes more complicated, which at my level is a huge step in complexity and cost for a minuscule step in returns.)
I'm not sure HN is an appropriate place to ask for advice on committing crimes.
It hardly seems a crime to give a company money, regardless of whether you get anything in return.
if you have zero people that admitted to being unaccredited investors, then you don't have to verify accredited status and can rely on "self-certification"
this is the legal term for the good kind of lying
but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
Did this campaign actually raise 4 million from individuals? Wow!
The campaign started at 2.5 million from day one which was raised back in 2019 in a separate fundraiser, probably to appear successful.
The rest I don't know. Seems like a very bad investment to make, perhaps people understand it as a form of donation/support (Purism does not look financially healthy).
But as the other commenter noted, these numbers aren't verified in any way.
Unless we can look at their books, it's just a claim.