If you follow Qubes / ITL, you would know that they are hardly a "startup" as a decade-old company, and they have been experimenting with enterprise-level support. If they can find a home in the enterprise market, it will at least give them enough cashflow to continue developing Qubes for the foreseeable future.
Besides, I imagine Joanna Rutkowska's opinion on the ICO scene isn't a very positive one, and I don't think she wants to complicate her company by pivoting to a blockchain model that has absolutely no relevance to developing secure operating sytems.
All I said is that their product would be great in the hands of a startup that focuses on a single hardware platform and does more marketing, and/or does an ico because I see a great incentive to run nodes of the cloud (because qubes utself provides all the building block for trust).
> If you follow Qubes I do, since 2010, when I was doing very similar research on trusted cloud computing.
> If they can find a home in the enterprise market I wish it to them, but this doesn’t mean someone else can try a more aggressive consumer route, or an alternative for their cloud model.
I respect a ton their work, and as I said in my very first comment I think they should focus on the research part, and someone else could provide capital and grow the consumer product.
All I said is that their product would be great in the hands of a startup that focuses on a single hardware platform and does more marketing
That's strange, because the first sentence in your OP is:
Qubes would make for a great startup and, given the time, prob a very successful ICO.
In my mind I was thinking to Qubes as the product(s), that could benefit from a startup. Similarly to as Kafka has Confluent, or Druid has Imply.
And I fully agree that Qubes the company should continue to be focus on research.
And I see the confusion now: Qubes isn't a company, the company is Invisible Things Lab.
Of course they'd also have to pick their launch during a bull market, because nobody cares about ICOs in a bear market. If there's one innovation the "blockchain" has brought, is extreme liquidity and high funding potential for any type of startup, including open source projects that wouldn't even be considered by VCs ever, or they'd have to beg for individual donations otherwise.
The blockchain is a P2P Silicon Valley (you heard it hear first).
And don't list "extreme liquidity" as a reason.
I was positively and at the same time negatively surprised reading about the 30k users. All issues/obstacles reported don’t seem so unachievable if one can imagine to focus on one specific hardware platform and with a good marketing team. I understand this is beyond a research project, but it would make for a great startup.