The anecdote at the start of the article seems to me to suggest the investor talked about "being at the edge of science" or technology - i.e. doing something disruptive and new.
But the rest of the article talks about the location of data and servers and it's relationship with the word "edge".
Am I missing something? Why is the anecdote unrelated to the article?
(Author here) sorry about the confusion, I can see where you are coming from. But yes, the investor was very much enquiring about whether it is on "the edge" in a cloud computing sense.
Having said that, it's important to stress that many - in fact, most - of the VCs I've talked to were amongst the most impressive, accomplished, knowledgeable and intelligent people I ever had the pleasure to work with.
There is, however, a (growing?) number of VCs with a purely financial background that approach investment decisions by establishing a framework of future trends/ developments (Crypto, Blockchain, Edge, Sharing Economy, E-Mobility and so on) and then vet potential investments based to how well companies align with these trends as well as basic suitability criteria (founding team, execution, traction etc.)
This isn't a bad thing per se as it might add a less biased view to investment decisions than the one made by the tech-founder-funds-tech-founder echo chamber, but it can lead to the level of detachment with the fundamentals of what one's talking about displayed in this article.
Thank you for the clarification. "On the edge" seems so strange to me when talking about edge computing/caching but I suppose I'm not in that industry.
I work in cloud computing and also find it strange. At most, I have referred to CDN "edge nodes", but I would've never said "on the edge", but "on the edge node". In other contexts, I simply would've referred to "the closest datacenter".
I believe the author intentionally wanted us to believe it was "the edge" based on your definition, but then wanted to make a point that "the edge" is now "the physical edge".
Another explanation would also be that a couple years ago the stereotypical technically-limited VC would ask if this app would be in "the cloud". The author used the same stereotype and adapted it to "the edge".
> I believe the author intentionally wanted us to believe it was "the edge" based on your definition, but then wanted to make a point that "the edge" is now "the physical edge".
Personally, I immediately knew it's about cloud!edge, even when I saw the title. If you pay attention to current trending buzzwords (as I unfortunately do, skimming the things some people I work with post on company Slack), you'll learn that "edge computing" is the most recent buzzword in the cloud space.
I also got completely lost on what was the point. I thought the investor was talking about is it "sexy/new" rather than a technical definition of an edge in a datacenter..
But the rest of the article talks about the location of data and servers and it's relationship with the word "edge". Am I missing something? Why is the anecdote unrelated to the article?