Interested to know if the new stuff will still be labelled “Made in Sweden”.
Ah yeah no worries Open-Mike, all just interesting discussion. I didn’t really mean it in a negative way and like I said it’s none of our business how Elektron is structured.
It was more an observation of the smaller cut-down boxes that have come out since (although they will have been a long time in development). And also just wondering about the future direction when a company with no personal interest in synth design has nearly a 50% share (or may do this year).
All good 
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Are they public, though? Stocks, yes. But public? Not sure.
Ownership doesn’t imply influence over development. The relationship between owning and having a say, isn’t one on one.
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They’re not a public company and they have no stocks (which would mean they had been floated and were a public company). they have just taken investment from an investment group.
They do not have any influence over the design of our products.
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End thread.
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Have you actually ever met one of these animals in the wild? Outside of a university lecture, what you describe could not be further from reality.
Cross reference with “Vulture”
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Hm, I was talking mainly in relation to this type of investment, relatively small private equity investment in startups / SMEs, where the whole point is to grow the company and thereby grow the value of your holding. I also didn’t say they weren’t going to be aggressive & greedy in how they try to achieve the growth - who knows - just that ongoing growth in net sales is likely to be the focus in the short to medium term, not squeezing maximum profitability out of their existing operations. “Sustainable” was the wrong word, probably. I think I meant “sustained growth”.
I worked for a while in corporate comms & reporting for various legal and financial firms, including a large London-based asset management firm. I know what they’re like.
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I think the way forward for elektron is updates. I’m not talking about bug fixes (and I think you would see less of them). It’s a big investment to pay wages for programmers for years after product release. For additional functionality I don’t mind paying a little at a time. Then they could make their profit and keep their brand identity which many of their customers look for. Of course a third party taking a stake are going to look for a payout, why wouldn’t they?
Paid updates. Sorry, important word missing in first sentence! Fucking jet lag.
So according to the Arctos website (in Swedish), they still own 28% of Elektron. Jonas Hillman from my reading elsewhere is an owner too. Are there others now as well ?
28% is not a controlling share, but enough to swing control between other minority holders.
To the topic of this thread — impact — sometimes when investors decide they want to get out of an investment, particularly when the asset has been underperforming, the controlling owners bring in management (turnaround professionals) with the purpose of optimizing conditions, to maximize value, so that the company can either go public, or be sold on to other investors at a higher value. These changes can seem counter-intuitive to customers and employees of that company, cutting costs, delaying new developments, shutting down or transferring parts of the company, cutting staff, selling off assets, etc.
I’m not saying any of that is happening, and I’m not saying Arctos has any role. I don’t know. It’s just that this sort of thing can occur in a similar situation.
My purely speculative take on what’s happened:
The OG Elektron got itself into a boondoggle with OB1. Arctos offered to bail them out for a cut. They brought in big guns to stabilize it. They did so successfully. The big guns used the success as a way to convince the majority that they should get into this SaaS business everyone is printing money with. Hell: the sound code is already written.
But, as always, correlation is not causation.
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Ultimately we’ll see the fruits with the next product. Will the sound pack hustle subsidize a new Octatrack engine on new hardware? Will SaaS require copy protection for new synth/algorithm machines?
“Unlocking” features already present in the firmware?
I can’t imagine how they’d justify the sample/loop shilling as a value add on its own, especially for their users who eschew being fed the source material for tracks.
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The soundpack bit was said by the old CEO, no? I’m not sure that’s their model anymore. And if their focus is on SaaS for the future, I think that market is more than happy to not have to make their own samples.
Right, I’m wondering where the value-add starts.
Access their servers to “activate” locked-up feature sets on hardware product?
Digitone engine as a VST ala Roland System-1?
There are too many alternatives for me to be dooming yet, but I’m quite curious to see how they’re going to fuse business models.
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I agree for the most part. On one hand, there is a lot of potential for a software/hardware box a la Nord Modular.
On the other, why would Ess and Cenk leave if the plan was some killer hardware?
But yeah: one thing we know for sure is that we don’t know exactly yet what the plan is.
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Quite.
Speculation
If you look at the financial accounts (found by googling, I won’t post them) of the past few years it does seem to look like OB was a bit of a money pit, hate to say I told you so, but sadly seems my gut feeling was right.
Hopefully now things might settle, but at the cost of some really good employees it seems. I believe that some of the lead designers/key people are still there, without them there would be no Elektron I think.
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