Notes for Part 2 of the Substrate Writeup
I'll be drafting this in the open that way, if there's anything interesting here, someone can find something that I could miss.
Another weird business
I have no idea what Folsom St Labs is or does but it is seemingly related to both James Proud and his brother, the founders of Substrate. Apparently they were inventing biotechnology and nanotechnology while solving nuclear fusion and inventing a better-than-ASML-scanner lithography method
Plausibly intended to, or did, make misleading claims to people about approach to lithography
The same infrastructure was used to acquire substrate.xyz and acquire x-rayholographiclithography.com, which were also acquired a week apart. The same infrastructure now also manages their primary domain, substrate.com. (h/t: anonymous tipster)
It is exceedingly unlikely that this is a coincidence.
X-ray holographic lithography is:
Barely a thing
Not easy to turn into an actual in the sense of ASML’s tooling: it would easily cost a lot to get it close to what ASML does in throughput, and even more to turn it into a fab business.
Guaranteed to be more expensive at scale compared to scanning/stepping approaches
Not something they appeared to be capable of developing in their clean room (nor is anything else that they’ve claimed to be developing for that matter)
Hard to invent while inventing biotechnology, nanotechnology, and nuclear fusion simultaneously, as the Prouds appeared to have been doing
Especially when your highest relevant level of education is, seemingly, “highschool computer science”?
It is unclear why they would register such a domain, as the amount of R&D that would be required to make the claims made by Substrate would entail considerably more time and money (particularly at Substrate’s claimed staffing levels) than has been spent.
Expert opinion
Is quite harsh toward the company. I want to aggregate statements from professionals.
“four years of intensive research by its founders”
Possibly told Texas they had a $10 billion project, y?
The company has since raised a total of $100M.
I’ll let this speak for itself
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2017/01/03/james-proud-hello-sense-sleep-apple-amazon/
Insane investors?
This isn’t really that important but oh my god lol https://archive.ph/c38BC https://archive.ph/JRCic