I know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.

It takes 5 years on average til you can harvest some grapes. 10 years for generating profit sounds about right.

Pedigree of the team and a believable project plan.

Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.

The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.

That’s like the point of venture capitalism and to a certain extent all entrepreneurial endeavors. You could start a T-shirt printing company (a completely viable business) and not see any revenue come in for months.

Perhaps they are hoping Google will pay them ~$500m/yr to be the default search engine.

0.01 is a multiple!

More charitably by selling the only browser that's actually usable in a few years. The AI will be used to cancel out the effect of other people's AI.

I would guess by selling personal data and ads.

> how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser

Looking at their frontpage the design is outright horrible if you have a > 7-8 inch screen. I guess in a way its good to have an example of what not to do.

> I'm sure they'd be killing it

Why, though? I mean the niche is pretty small, most people don't care much about open source or even what browser they are using at all.

Considering the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's funding is coming from Google and in no way could it survive without it being run by Google's plants is not that surprising.

Well, I was one of Arc users but they abandoned it in favor of a new browser with an integrated AI agent that t can work on tabs, Dia. Now I’m using it, but to be honest I use almost none of the AI features beyond some summaries for pages and YouTube videos, but I see a lot of potential there (I.e. make it check the calendar to propose a time in a newly composed email) for the less technical users.

I use Arc for two reasons:

Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time