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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

100% this. The CEO at my last company squandered hundreds of millions of investor funds, and now he's the CEO at another company taking on hundreds of millions in debt.

Another example: current CEO of Cerebras, is an SEC felon from a prior company (for cooking the books), and now he's CEO of a public company.

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Feldman "failing up" is being the CEO of a public company he _founded_.

"failed up" is currently defined as founding a company that goes public and being its CEO. I'd love to know what success is.

In my eyes, success is a profitable company.

Guy who thinks a kid's lemonade stand is a greater success than creating a new product category and technology in the hardware space.

lemonade stands are staffed by 11 year olds and there can be one on every corner.

these stands do better than cerebras, which is an 11 year old deeply unprofitable company building a technology that no other company has bothered to try to even get close to replicating.

Cerebras got lucky with the ban on NVIDIA chips due to "security reasons" in the middle east, securing a massive deal with the UAE's sovereign fund. Of course, the leaders made a nice donation to the Trump crypto fund and coincidentally the ban on NVIDIA was lifted. That presented a danger for Cerebras, but they also pivoted almost entirely to an inference as a service company, maximizing tokens/sec metrics on a variety of open weight models. Then they landed the contract with OpenAI which has bought them another lifeline, and helped paper over the trail of fraud that delayed the S1 and IPO for a few years. Fascinating story indeed!

The problem with the pivot is that with only 44GB of memory, you can't run models unless you nerf them or you scale the hardware out horizontally, which takes up a lot of space, power and even more cost.

This is why their API has dumb limits on it. I'd estimate their $/tok cost around $4-5000/mtok based on hardware alone, which is insane. Sure, it is fast, but if it is heavily quanted, expensive, and can't scale, you're going to be in a world of pain.

yea this isn't "and another example just off the top of my head" - this guy co-founded seamicro then cerebras both pretty badass companies, he was a vp of marketing not ceo when the sec sued not just him but the entire executive team. trudging up 20 year old nonsense to try and punch a guy who legit deserves his success is bullshit

Cerebras is an 11 year old unprofitable company with a stock that is down 30% since the IPO, in the hottest market ever.

They've pivoted many times over the years trying to make "wafer scale" work in a variety of use cases, and they still haven't gotten it right.

By the way, the CTO is dumping stock left and right and the stock is down nearly 5% today alone...

https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/insider-cerebras-s...

that's an automatic, prenegotiated sell off - calling that dumping is worse than calling the ceo a felon (at least one is technically true). are any of the big ai companies actually profitable? how has cerebras not gotten their chip right? they're the only company shipping wafer scale inference hardware, and they're shipping to the largest labs in the world. and it works - I use cerebras.ai the token rate is amazing

Sell offs don't have to happen, and $25m isn't some small amount of money.

> how has cerebras not gotten their chip right?

It doesn't scale, and won't ever be profitable. They pivoted to inference, which has the unfortunate (for them) side effect of also requiring a boat load of memory. This is why they just partnered with AMD to offload onto their chips.

> I use cerebras.ai the token rate is amazing

Ah, investor. Explains your responses.

Not supporting GPs argument, but one can appreciate the t/s on cerebras.ai without being an investor.

...if you can get access.

> $25m isn't some small amount of money

it kind of is, relatively - sean might just be having a galaxy blackhole supercluster installed at home for all we know

> It doesn't scale .. They pivoted to inference

they have more options than non-wafer-scale solutions, the chips are going 3d and meanwhile they benefit from the same interconnect progress as the wholly memory-bound alternatives

> Ah, investor. Explains your responses.

physician heal thyself like your not out here tryna manifest your short

> they have more options than non-wafer-scale solutions, the chips are going 3d and meanwhile they benefit from the same interconnect progress as the wholly memory-bound alternatives

I hear that CS-420 will be amazing.

down 30% since IPO, up 1000% since 2 years ago. Okay ...

They were public 2 years ago?

private markets, available on equityzen, hiive, forge, etc.

tae kim @firstadopter:

If I was a Cerebras shareholder, I would be LIVID right now. Seriously, what the hell. Insiders dumping stock: CFO, COO, accounting officer. AND NO INFO about losing GPT-6.1 Ultrafast.

https://x.com/firstadopter/status/2105860963132129358

Makes sense really.

Only needs to work once for him to get a passive payoff. Sitting in your lane usually doesn't buy you that.

Lol! Wat? Got more details?(On cerebras)

https://www.nhbr.com/ex-riverstone-execs-face-criminal-charg...

https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

Thanks! Always amazing that people don't know this stuff. Oh and the current CFO of Cerebras was the CFO of Bird, another giant failure.

Can you name the CFO? I could not find any such person.

This is what I put into google: "cfo of cerebras bird"

It came back with Bob Komin.

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