1) The article that I linked to was of a Japanese government organization that did finance Spiber, so were keeping tabs on them to ensure that their money was being well spent. The image was taken while the factory was under construction from June until November 2013. I personally also started to look into Spiber in late 2014 and became aware of the factory producing 100 Kg a month of proteins at max capacity at that time.
If you want articles from independent news sources, here is one from a Japanese Financial Newspaper dated February 2013, before they even started construction of their first factory, that lays out Spiber’s plans stating that they will build a 100 kg/month facility by October 2013 (was actually completed November 2013) and construct a second one that can produce one ton a month in 2015 (which was actually completed in September 2014): http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFB2005B_Q3A220C1L01000/
2) I am not 100% fluent in Japanese and much of the Kanji on the presentation goes over my head and takes a really long time for me to sit and decipher each one without an app to at least break it down to hiragana, but on the top of Slide 4 (page 3), it has those numbers that I stated as their commercialization goal and the text itself can be copied and pasted into a translation service. This presentation was created by Spiber to show to ImPACT in order to acquire funding from them (which they did receive). If you believe that they lied and that the government organization did not do any sufficient fact checking prior to giving them the funding, or that since it is a forward looking statement it is not applicable, then you can simply disregard the values.
3) In his post Post 95956, he agreed that a sample existed, he just questioned the properties of it. Also, yes, I did link to a VC that invested in Bolt Threads. I figured that reading their train of thought on the subject and events that led to it shows how they came to the conclusion that Bolt Threads was worth the millions of dollars of investment into them and shined a lot of light on what they have. Sure, they did utilize Sue Levin when doing their DD on Bolt Threads. I don’t blame them. I utilized Ben Hansel when doing my DD on KBLB. That is to be expected.
In addition to this, I have also personally been in contact in the past with a few students on the 2015 UCLA iGEM team that were working with Bolt Threads as part of the project, but not working for them. I got a lot of good info from them about why yeast is better than E. coli (despite the fact that they used E. coli in the iGEM) and how they felt that Bolt Threads is a good, viable company. They unfortunately did not go into too many details about the specifics on them, but they were very confident that Bolt will do very well when they reach commercialization.
Either way, in the next couple years, it will start to become very obvious what the properties and applications are for each company’s product and how viable they are. I still believe that all three companies will do very well initially as there is a very large market out there for these fibers. I feel that KBLB will do better initially over the first few years since they can presumably scale up very inexpensively, but as the price of the “goo” production comes down, I think that will be a better long term solution and hopefully Kim will pick it up then. Time will tell if I am right.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
