Or, with the actual pricing compared to the competition, think of it this way:
The price model is competitive enough for the price to sink in hundred dollar decrements, although a 32GB flash memory chip is only $50. Maybe that's something you only can do if you expect to sell millions of them?
Thanks for the empathy with the situation. It is very good advice to make it perfectly clear what the intents of our VC is going forward. I sure will take the experiences from this process with me in future ventures.
Niels Bohr said that "An expert is a person that have made all the possible mistakes in a narrow field". Sometimes I feel like I'm getting there...
Thank you for very valuable advice all over. It aligns very much with my thoughts but lays it out with perfect clarity. Your advice also focuses on process rather than ends, which I appreciate as a complement to all the (also very valuable) alternatives proposed by other commenters.
Yes, I believe it will be very hard for us to raise another round. The VC's story is that they changed their strategy since investing in us. True or not, it is a high liability since it is easy for prospective financers to read something else into the fact.
I believe the net price wasn't that heavy, but it stung, because it broke the all-in-it-together logic that otherwise had ruled.
It was already a good result for the investor – the last-minute extras demanded weren't a part of any prior negotiated preference, they were just new things extracted in return for not vetoing a deal everyone else wanted.
The biggest lesson I've learned from various startups is that "all-in-it-together" is an awful lot like asking "How are you?" (The correct answer is "Fine!", even if your arm just got torn off, your cat died, and your spouse left you for a monkey): It's conversation, and nothing more.
In the end, everybody is unpredictable. If you don't protect your rights from the start, you'll have problems. Even (especially?) if you're BFFs, everything should be spelled out in advance, including metrics for conceptual terms such as "success", etc.
Thank you for great advice. The takeaway for me is that I should get a more thourough feel for what the rest of the team thinks. There is a lot of leverage to be applied this way.
Thank you for the analysis, I appreciate the clarity with which you describe his confusing behavior. It might be that he has such plans.
As for taking the conflict public, I don't have it in me. It is not something that aligns with my world view because I know that I too can be wrong sometimes and not see the whole story. I prefer that people know they can trust me rather than applying that kind of leverage.
The price model is competitive enough for the price to sink in hundred dollar decrements, although a 32GB flash memory chip is only $50. Maybe that's something you only can do if you expect to sell millions of them?