Good for you and your brass nuts, man. However, I think what you risked underscores the reason why small miners will never be profitable - small risk, small reward. Big risk big reward. Those with capital to invest will leverage, those with modest investments should not be expecting huge returns.
We do, again, this is a seed investment rather than a major capital investment. The immediate plan is to fund the rest of the development to get the platform to beta. The initial cost is fairly small (<$10,000) since a good portion of the work is done by me on the tools, and our launch deadline is "the sooner, the better."
I'll come back with details and probably a follow-up question in a couple weeks after our discussion about the long-term opportunity. I haven't had any offer yet, only an invitation to consider joining them since they have secured funding.
Thank you, I should note that these are preliminary talks and there are some missing bits of info on my end - they have approached me to do this, but we haven't talked details yet, so a follow up with probably come out of the discussion we have in a couple weeks.