So, I had a chance to visit the HF office in SF today where I met Amy, John and a couple of other folks including an ASIC engineer.
HF recently moved from their San Jose office (with Uniquify) to SF. Currently they are working at a co-working space called NextSpace near Potrero Hill. But this is only temporary as they will be moving to a dedicated HF office near Market St. & Bush St. I asked about the size of the company and If I understand correctly there are now ~14 HF employees covering everything from ASIC design (Mainly done in Australia) to Marketing, Sales and Support.
After a quick tour of the area we moved to the conference room where I chatted with John, and were later joined by the ASIC engineer (not Simon), Amy and another friendly lady whose name I forgot (sorry). Cara had warned me ahead of time that I would have to sign an NDA before even getting into the office, but luckily that was not necessary.
I had collected a number of questions the days before, mainly around how to deal with MPP. HF is acutely aware of the issues a delay is causing and they were certainly interested in exploring what can be done with MPP to help customers succeed as that is the original intent of the program in the first place. I suggested approaches such as starting the timer on Nov 1st and/or accelerating the release of new MPP modules to compensate for delays. etc. They have to operate under an number of constraints so there is no clear solution they could share with me at this point but I'm confident they will work something out.
Another topic was the possibility of refunds and John was pretty specific that if refunds do happen they will be full refunds in the currency the order was paid in (BTC in BTC, USD in USD). Please note that I have not requested a refund and have no plans to do so at this point.
John was also asking if miners might be interested in cloud hosting provided by HF (at industrial energy rates). As a residential miner that will probably end up with at least 5 modules after MPP and pushing the limits of my fuses at home I would probably make use of this if the terms are good. I don't think they have a concrete plan yet but if there is enough interest this is something they will likely pursue in the future.
Another thing we discussed is hardware, however since they are in a temporary co-working space at the moment with most of the engineering & manufacturing done off site (Australia for ASIC design, TSMC for the semiconductors, Ciara for the cases, etc.) they did not have physical hardware on site. John mentioned they are not allowed to take pictures in the factory, but it should be possible to get some pictures of the PCB. So I expect they will have something to show soon. Amy also had some older video of running FPGA simulations (from June) that she could probably share here if there is interest. (it was just a 7s video of a running FPGA board, so not very representative of the current stage of development imho)
As to the duration of the delays, I was unable to get concrete shipping dates. However, Amy did mention they did make significant progress on the substrate issue in the last 48 hours. But I don't have specifics.
Overall this visit exceeded my expectations. I was planning to stop by for only 20 minutes or so and chat with Cara, but I ended up talking with the entire crew for about an hour. My impression is that HF has a capable & professional team, and they do listen to their customers. Amy is also a frequent visitor at the Sillicon Valley Bitcoin Meetup every Tuesday at the plug and play tech center in Sunnyvale so that is another good opportunity to chat with HF if you live in the area.
Note: As I mentioned earlier, I did not sign an NDA but I also want to avoid spreading misinformation due to possible misinterpretation on my side. So HF if you are reading this and find anything to be incorrect, please let me know I'd be happy to fix it.
Thanks for coming in!
-Erin
