I feel for the employees. One of my friends in the dot com bust showed up for work to find the doors locked and a line of other employees outside. A security guard was there who would escort the employee inside, they were given a box and supervised while the put their stuff in the box (and it was inventoried by the guard) and then they were allowed to leave and the next person was let in. No linkedin or big social media at the time so they didn't know that the 3 founders were all now at Apple, that Monday had been the founder's first day in their new jobs. The dissonance was huge, it was if the startup had never even existed. It took 3 months but his final paycheck arrived, written out by a legal firm representing an insurance company.
Default dead, or default alive. That is a really important question right now.
Skully just couldn't hit their targets for the 2nd round. Especially with the founder getting dramatically booted out and Intel Capital Partners is quoted in this article as still being actively involved until the very end - they clearly had greater problems than access to capital.
So I'm not sure this story backs up your narrative very well.
http://variety.com/2016/biz/asia/chinas-le-sports-raises-1-2...
I hope they have made contingency plans, or have pursued robustness in their skills.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/20/facebook-...
My read on this is that the downturn is limited to funded startups with no clear revenue model or who can't scale large enough to secure future funding. This in turn could lead to a feeding frenzy by the big established players who see talent they can scoop up from people looking for stability.
I'd also love it if you or anyone has numbers on the percentage of people employed by such startups compared against those employed by the large tech companies. My gut says the % employed by the funded, pre-revenue startups is pretty minimal compared to the overall employee count of the large tech giants that are doing just fine.
Plus, given that this fallout would be largely limited to the private markets, I wonder if the outcome will really be that disastrous.
There are some legal reasons for this if it's a down round. If the initial investment is in one fund, and there's a down round in another, they need someone else to drive pricing so that it doesn't look like they're favoring one fund at the expense of the other. (I'm not sure why this isn't an issue during an up round)
Sometimes firms can't follow-on from a different fund even if they're following, up-round or down-round. That's why funds usually reserve money for follow-on investments.
Firms often have to go back to their LPs if they want to invest in the same company across funds.
Or is it simply that with wars, elections, terrorism and Brexit, everyone is scared?
What's the use of pointing to negative interest rates - if you can't make money with the business you'd always lose even more. Same reason why pointing to tax rates is disingenuous except for special cases - either a business makes sense or it doesn't. If you don't show a profit tax levels there's no need to worry about tax levels. Same goes for your example, if the business does not seem viable what use is it to point to an overall difficult situation, should you continue investing into what you think is a bad business just because of that?
I'm still quite happy with my helmet. The battery life seems to not be as good as I hoped (maybe 2-3 hours) but not a big deal as my commute is under 15 minutes.
The software is definitely beta level, but not too surprising, and software is relatively easy to improve. I had very early on figured out a vector to load my own firmware onto the helmet (it's basically request with a response that points to a tarball of an android system that the helmet will download and install). I hadn't actually tried it yet, but I suppose now that's the only way to get improvements.
If any other hackers would like to collaborate on improving the software, or other owners would like to commiserate, I created a face book group Skully Owners:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/skully-ar-1-the-world-s-s...
1,940 backers for $2.44 million, and only 24 comments? For a project with this many backers with this much skin in the game, comments usually number in the hundreds (if not thousands), especially as it becomes apparent that the campaign will miss its estimated delivery dates. Even though Skully seems to have its own website and support forum, the campaign landing page is still where you have "noisy" backers (i.e. people who frequently back products enough that the site becomes a social network for them).
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/SKULLY-Reviews-E1046917.ht...
As for the fake reviews… People across the org may have wildly divergent experiences working at a company. Even a fairly small company. Often the person who someone reports directly to has an outsized impact on said person's experience. In an early stage company the individuals doing people management tend to be, at best, very new to that specific part of the job. At worst the company grows large-ish before any official "reports-to" structure is put in place.
I've worked at places where my advice to leadership would be "keep doing what you're doing" while other Glassdoor reviews seemed to have had one of the worst experiences of their lives. That doesn't mean that I planted a review. Maybe I had a particularly good manager? I could have worked in the only good part of the org or a negative review may have come from someone who worked in the only bad part of the org.
It's pretty easy to openly communicate with management (all the way up to c-level) in my experience, no need to put it on some website when you could discuss it with them directly.
Challenging challenges? Sign me up!
Can't comment on whether this is true in this case but I've seen it before and I always wonder how, and where are the investors, and aren't they paying attention, and ....?
For example, let's say I wanted to take an expensive vacation. I would fly to Europe (1st class, of course), stay in nice hotels, and basically live it up. I would mark this down as a "recruiting expense", or "customer acquisition cost". If the investor cared to drill down to this level, all they would see is a $75,000 trip to Europe for recruiting. They wouldn't know how many people went, or how successful it was. $75k is nothing next to an engineer's salary, and a recruiter would take a fee on the same order of magnitude, so I doubt they would bat an eye, but a 20-something founder could take a pretty sweet vacay for $75k.
Want a new motorcycle? Its for product testing, of course. New $80k Tesla? We're exploring how our tech could be expanded to used in cars, not just with motorcycles. Hookers and blow? Team building.
"management is abusing investments on private benefits."
"management is throwing away investors' money on hot cars, bikes, parties and travels etc (only for themselves of course)"
Adding to that, we’ve been told the board thought Weller has been so difficult to deal with since leaving, they now don’t see the point in salvaging the company he started.
We’re told by a source inside the company that as of Monday, investors ... determined it was better to just shut the whole company down instead."
In what world is shutting down, a superior alternative to selling the company to LeSports for some cold hard cash?
In a world with lots of cash where a companny like Skully is just pocket change and they'd rather not deal with as they have bigger fish to fry.
So you are in the business of buying and selling houses and you do $1M transactions every month. This is like finding a lawn mower in a garage, and yeah you could sell it for $200 on Cragslist, but in the big scheme of things it is not worth your time.
However, after spending a week there it was pretty clear to me that they were in a bad place managerially, so I ran away as fast as I could. I highly doubt that the issue is the bubble bursting in this case, it's the investors having no confidence in the leadership.
It's a shame for the employees, I met some really awesome and talented people, although I'm sure they'll have no trouble finding something else; one of them I saw is at Tesla now.
Anyway, my experience was pretty terrible, they dropped the ball in every way possible in terms of my experience being recruited, and left me with the strong impression that they did not have their act togethe at all, from failing to buy my ticket until the absolute last minute to not giving the manager I would be working under any heads up about my arrival, to Mitch repeatedly making inappropriate remarks about women, Maxim magazines in the office bathroom, etc. On top of that the product has some major design flaws that they were punting on, not even trying to address them and instead scrambling to get things ready for the CEO to go on a world tour showing off the helmet and apologizing for it being late.
I understand that consumer electronics is always kind of a shit show and there's usually lots of last minute scrambling and crises, but their situation seemed insane even given that. They were already thinking about version 2, deciding to use a crappier display than was originally planned and then the better display could be a huge reason for people to upgrade to the next version. Meanwhile, the non-replacable helmet battery could only last a few minutes per charge, and didn't even have deep discharge protection in place yet. The night before the world tour kickoff, all the employees pulled an all nighter to get things ready and then someone forgot to plug a few of the helmets in, or plugged them into the wrong charger so the helmets were worthless after that, cutting the number of helmets they had for the tour in half...
After that experience with them I was pretty sure they would not be successful, but then I saw a few months ago that BMW was working on basically the same thing and I knew they were doomed for sure.
- get my speed (for a traffic cam for instance)
- have an almost 180 degrees view of what's behind me: no blind spot
- get directions (I usually do it from memory, I don't use a GPS on my bike just because of the distraction reason)
Keep in mind we ride between traffic lanes here so the more I can look ahead, the better.
When skiing anything resembling challenging terrain, the stuff is bouncing around and my ability to focus universally across on the then 2nd gen recon displays was simply not possible. I'm a decent skier, but not that crazy and I ended up returning the smith io/x using the recon screen.
On a motorbike it'd be pretty intolerable, way more bumps and stuff, I'd think. Then you layer on the safety concerns... the very real question of what happens when someone crashes wearing one of these helmets (Will the display impact your eye? Will it stay far enough away to not do so? Will the battery cause any problems when wet or exposed to impact/air etc..) probably made insuring the company difficult, too.
I bet the other helmet makers are cutting/have cut deals with recon to repackage their stuff anyhow, so those that want this kind of crap in their FOV can get it.
That said there are flip down visors in plenty of helmets that do just fine, and built in bluetooth headphones in others. So I guess it's a question of how miniaturised and well designed it is.
A true HUD doesn't need you to look away, or refocus your eyes. The Recon screen's position (near the bottom of the goggles) means you have to almost go cross-eyed to read it, and focus on short-distance…absolutely not what you want when you're skiing!
Their handbook says it should only be looked at when stationary.
BMW's HUD looks like the way forward : a sunken dash-mounted display, which projects the data onto the windscreen. In other words a true HUD: directly in your line of sight, no need to refocus your eyes.
I'd be interested to understand if there's some technical limitation preventing this approach with goggles/helmets.
It would be nice to have a HUD for driving directions, but relying on just the voice prompts is usually sufficient.
The Skully design is neat, but I don't see a big enough market for it.
How much of a market could there possibly be for a $1500 helmet? I shudder at the thought of a $700 Shuberth hitting the ground. I consider a helmet to be disposable as well. How disposable is a $1500 helmet? And are you a Shoei head or an Arai? IOW, will this helmet even fit my style of head, or is it going to leave hotspots after a few hours?
Cool tech, no argument. But it needs to come down to something like a $200 add-on like the Bluetooth unit for my Nolan.
As to the ultimate reason for their demise, I have no idea. From what little I've paid attention, I'm guessing a combination of way overpriced and, yeah, hardware is hard.
I think the folks over at NUVIZ came up with a better stand alone solution, as its just an external attachment that projects the HUD for any normal full face helmet. That said, its been awhile since I've heard any updates so I'm not exactly hopeful.
People who are willing to spend a lot of money on helmets would never have gone for Skully's "meh" helmet with expensive tech inside.
That and it's a stupid idea. Honestly who wants to sysadmin their helmet?
You sound like someone at the advent of the smart phone who says "who would want to sysadmin their phone?"
I wanted to tell him "look dude, anything hardware-related will be copied in China like tomorrow, and your price point per helmet is what?"
Being an entrepreneur myself, I thought "most founders have to fail a bunch, so let him fail" and I said nothing. He also reneged on a commitment he made and in my opinion thinks too highly of himself. Good luck Marcus, try again, but stay away from high-end hardware.
Some rear view mirrors are just ludicrously small. Having the rear view projected inside the helmet's AR display would be a massive boost to safety and confidence, as any rider who has ever waited at lights should be able to tell you.
I feel sorry for the engineers working on this, who will not be able to bring it to the light of day, and for all those who already paid for theirs should chargeback not be available.
You should always filter straight to the front of the line at a stop light to avoid being hit from behind.
Not true.
The product seemed very gimmicky to me. I also would be very concerned how safe the helmet is compared to a snell approved Arai Signet-Q
