https://oldenlabs.com/ once again someone is trying to do smart cages for animal research. I want somebody to win here.
Animal research is so, so, so low-quality, especially when it’s not IND-enabling. It costs less to mistreat your mice. And to have too few mice, so your studies are underpowered. And to cut corners on experimental method & disease-model validation in every way. Without the FDA breathing down their necks as tightly as they do for human clinical trials, scientists and their funders do not shell out the cash or spend the time to do animal experiments right.
Animal welfare and scientific integrity are extremely aligned here. And if you can get the cost of high-quality animal husbandry down (with automation or any other means), we might start to get “we cured cancer [IN MICE]” to be less bullshit.
he says “the founder is a known con artist” and describes his former sleep tracker startup Hello as a “scam”. This is a giant abuse of language. Hello, it seems, built a product that was poorly reviewed in the tech-skeptical press, took a long time and a lot of VC funding to ship hardware, and ultimately fizzled. That is what we call a “failed startup.” Not a crime.
Hello was also incorrectly described as James Proud’s “last project.” In fact, in 2020 he founded Config, a hardware design software company. This is substantially more relevant to his transition into the semiconductor industry.
The author claims that Substrate’s images are suggestive that they’re using maskless lithography, which indeed allows for smaller feature sizes, but is not used at scale for semiconductor fabrication because it’s too slow. The argument is essentially that Substrate only gets their small feature sizes by using a method that the semiconductor industry has already rejected for good reason.
BUT:
actually maskless lithography is used in the industry, for things like rapid prototyping and making masks. it would be classic “disruptive innovation” for a company to specialize in a new (x-ray-based, in this case) maskless method for these “minor” applications, and then figure out a way to transition to the “major” application of mass production of leading-edge semiconductor chips.
“you say you compete with the juggernaut monopoly, but today you only outperform them on this narrow use case” is the story of SO MANY SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES that left the monopoly in the dust.
links 11/4/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-04-2025
https://thenewfrontier.substack.com/p/unintuitive-things-about-impact-philanthropy This is exactly what it’s like.
https://oldenlabs.com/ once again someone is trying to do smart cages for animal research. I want somebody to win here.
Animal research is so, so, so low-quality, especially when it’s not IND-enabling. It costs less to mistreat your mice. And to have too few mice, so your studies are underpowered. And to cut corners on experimental method & disease-model validation in every way. Without the FDA breathing down their necks as tightly as they do for human clinical trials, scientists and their funders do not shell out the cash or spend the time to do animal experiments right.
Animal welfare and scientific integrity are extremely aligned here. And if you can get the cost of high-quality animal husbandry down (with automation or any other means), we might start to get “we cured cancer [IN MICE]” to be less bullshit.
https://substack.com/@foxchapelresearch/p-177604037 skeptical post criticizing Substrate. I’m skeptical of the skepticism.
he says “the founder is a known con artist” and describes his former sleep tracker startup Hello as a “scam”. This is a giant abuse of language. Hello, it seems, built a product that was poorly reviewed in the tech-skeptical press, took a long time and a lot of VC funding to ship hardware, and ultimately fizzled. That is what we call a “failed startup.” Not a crime.
Hello was also incorrectly described as James Proud’s “last project.” In fact, in 2020 he founded Config, a hardware design software company. This is substantially more relevant to his transition into the semiconductor industry.
The author claims that Substrate’s images are suggestive that they’re using maskless lithography, which indeed allows for smaller feature sizes, but is not used at scale for semiconductor fabrication because it’s too slow. The argument is essentially that Substrate only gets their small feature sizes by using a method that the semiconductor industry has already rejected for good reason.
BUT:
actually maskless lithography is used in the industry, for things like rapid prototyping and making masks. it would be classic “disruptive innovation” for a company to specialize in a new (x-ray-based, in this case) maskless method for these “minor” applications, and then figure out a way to transition to the “major” application of mass production of leading-edge semiconductor chips.
“you say you compete with the juggernaut monopoly, but today you only outperform them on this narrow use case” is the story of SO MANY SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES that left the monopoly in the dust.