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Lily Drone Files for Bankruptcy

115 points by samfisher83 10y ago

nakedrobot2 10y ago
"Lily raised over $35 million in pre-sales and even secured $15 million in investment" How in the holy crapping hell did they manage to burn so much cash with NOTHING to show except a fraudulently-produced pitch video? Is there criminal investigation happening? This smells very bad. edit: removed capital letters of outrage and replaced with asterisks
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Is there criminal investigation happening? This smells very bad. Yes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/31/failed-drone-startup-lily-robotics-raided-for-possible-criminal-investigation-says-source/#7a1b6ea96d0f https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/31/failed-drone...
  - zatkin 10y ago
    They supposedly didn't even fully pay the company that made that video on their homepage from over a year ago. >According to a different unnamed source, the company who made the video, CMI Productions, has also not been paid in full for its work. A CMI employee did not respond immediately to a request for comment. CTO Bradlow did not respond to questions about the video payments before hanging up on FORBES. A Lily spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit to FORBES, though the company is expected to file a response to the district attorney on Thursday.
- emcq 10y ago
  They had a factory line and were manufacturing devices, but they weren't able to reach their claimed production quality and never shipped. I'm not sure how many failed devices they made which could easily eat millions in material, manufacturing, and design costs. Hardware is hard!
- samfisher83 10y ago
  Supposedly 34 mil of customer money was in escrow. They were only operating of the 15 mil in investment. I don't know if that is true. If they invested that 34 million they could have made some money in interest. in http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-cancelled-32m-in-orders/ http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-cancel... Apparently their original footage was from a DJI inspire.
  - ionwake 10y ago
    So basically the video was just of some guy controlling a drone? There was no actual following ? The wrist device didn't actually do anything ? Is this true ? Or did the prototype atleast work ?
    - samfisher83 10y ago
      Supposedly all fake: http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-court-pursue-lily-drone-legal-battle/ http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-co...
    - pmarreck 10y ago
      Well, DJI drones have "follow" features as well, so
  - basseq 10y ago
    Not a bad idea as fraud goes: 1. Build slick marketing pitch. 2. Collect $35M in pre-orders. 3. Apologize after a year of "trying" and return the principle. 4. Make $1.75M in interest.
  - microtherion 10y ago
    > Supposedly 34 mil of customer money was in escrow. They were only operating of the 15 mil in investment. I don't know if that is true. The bankrupcy filing posted above in the thread https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0D229D2-FCF6-11E6-9996-3326DBA93163 https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0... largely bears this out. On page 13, they declare that they still have $25.6M in their bank account, and a bit more than $31M of current assets in total. By Kickstarter standards, this looks like a fairly responsibly run company.
- dang 10y ago
  "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- NDizzle 10y ago
  Nothing to show for it? I bet a non-zero amount of execs at that company have a sweet rock waterfall pool in their back yard...
- jerryr 10y ago
  As samfisher83 pointed out, $34M was in escrow, so they were probably running on closer to $15M. When setting up a volume production line for a complicated product, it's really easy to burn through tens of millions of dollars. Kickstarter scares the crap out of me for this reason. Typically, I would recommend that a startup begin with a small domestic run of the simplest product possible, targeted at an early adopter market. There's so much a startup has to put into place for hardware: a contract manufacturer (and a sane contract, which takes time to establish), suppliers, supply chain, testing (development and production), certification, packaging, sales channels, distribution, support, reverse logistics, etc. Companies such as PCH, Dragon, etc. can help accelerate some of this, but there's still a ton of work to do. Trying to simultaneously tackle all of that and a complicated engineering design requires a ton of resources--more than a typical startup will have. Setting up a reliable manufacturing line and test procedure typically takes about 6 months from the time your engineering team begins handoff to the contract manufacturer. Moreover, as much as we'd like it to be, manufacturing is not agile. All of that work is very change-intolerant. So, if you begin the handoff with a half-baked design (which most startups do, in my experience) that you have to change as you proceed through the setup process, you can easily blow away that nominal, 6-month timeline with tooling changes, contract renegotiation, supplier verification, etc. as your engineers scramble to work with the factory to make the design manufacturable and cost-effective. Jumping straight into a full-blown manufacturing effort is not a cash-effective way for a startup to prove a complicated design. You can force it to work, but it's really expensive. Apple, for example, parallel-paths a lot of stuff. They can afford to discard a million-dollar tool and move on if it doesn't work out. They also send huge engineering teams to Asia for months at a time. Instead, I'd suggest that startups begin with more manual domestic builds in the low hundreds of units until the engineering team is confident in the manufacturability of the design and the manufacturing requirements are understood. These will, of course, have much higher per-unit costs, but you can iterate way, way faster because you're not constantly flying overseas to battle the inertia of a manufacturing line. Unfortunately, Kickstarter--while still qualifying as an early adopter market--is driving first-run numbers way higher than they should be for the average startup, which is causing them to jump too quickly into scale manufacturing efforts. Because of this, I think we are seeing some spectacular failures such as Lily. tl;dr: Manufacturing is expensive. Kickstarter is driving hardware startups into manufacturing too soon.
minimaxir 10y ago
HN discussion of the Lily Drone when it was first announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532777 > That is one of the first videos I've seen in a long time where I've thought "wow we can do that now?"
- binarymax 10y ago
  Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGcH0Bk3hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGcH0Bk3hg
- ww520 10y ago
  There are lies, damn lies, and commercials.
  - sleepybrett 10y ago
    The DJI Mavick does most of the things that video claims the lily can do.
    - bootlooped 10y ago
      I read a while back (did not independently confirm) that they used a DJI Inspire for most of the promo video footage. I think the Inspire can do a lot of the same stuff too. I thought it was funny they were using an existing product from a competitor to simulate what they claimed their future product could do.
      - tim333 10y ago
        I just watched the DJI video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1d_ptE6yrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1d_ptE6yrc It seems the Mavick tracks objects by image recognition from the camera. I'm not sure the stuff shown on the Lily video where you track a presumably radio transmitter from a small device is actually a thing that exists. I was trying to figure out how to do it for tracking kids if they run off in stores etc and it's not easy. You could probably do it with a several feet across receiver so you could detect the timing differences. In the Lily faked video the Inspire was flown by a human operator. Guess it the tracker and drone both had gps receivers and communicated that could work although it still might be hard to get the altitude right.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Color me unsurprised. They marketed it as an action-sport-filming drone, but the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. It literally wouldn't keep up with Usain Bolt running the 100m, nevermind a regular person on a bicycle. Shameless plug: a friend of mine is one of the founders of a competing startup making a self-filming drone that has more than twice the top speed, so is actually usable. They've been shooting on location with top athletes using pre-production models for the past year, first production models are going to final assembly these days. https://www.staaker.com https://www.staaker.com Edit: s/full disclosure/shameless plug/ as per discussion below.
- CGamesPlay 10y ago
  > the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. This wasn't the reason they failed, though. They sold plenty of units, they just never delivered them.
- olegkikin 10y ago
  There are many drones on the market that have high speeds and can follow you. AirDog is one of the well known ones, can go up to 42 mph, costs $1600. The cool thing about Lily was the waterproof aspect. There are very few of them that aren't toys and aren't very expensive at the same time.
  - sizzzzlerz 10y ago
    And there is one fewer now
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      No, there never was.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Lily also promised enough 'coordination' to track an athlete from multiple angles over varying terrain and obstacles. That's a much taller order than "follow me", and it doesn't look like they ever managed to get something that could track a skier or kayaker the way they implied.
laurent123456 10y ago
$35 millions for doing nothing is quite impressive. I was watching the South Park episode "Go Fund Yourself" [0] just last night, and as often they are pretty much spot on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Fund_Yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Fund_Yourself
tyleo 10y ago
Whenever I see companies like this with a spectacular demo but no product to show, I always think of the Richard Feynman quote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
- neduma 10y ago
  Meh.. what about NeXT/BlackBox/SteveJobs? There was actually none of it exists and he did awesome PR and made it work.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    Steve Jobs was one of a handful of people in the world who could pull off such feats. I think tyleo's comment still stands when it comes to everything (and everyone) else.
  - rgbrenner 10y ago
    but next was well on its way to declaring bankruptcy... Next had terrible sales.. even jobs said so. The factory they built was so underutilized, they assembled the computers by hand instead of using the equipment because it was less work than doing the maintenance on it. It was designed to produce 150,000 machines a year... next sold 50,000 machines total over 6 years (an average of 700/month). After 6 years, Next abandoned the computer market, focusing on software. They tried to sell the factory to Canon, who pulled out of the deal. They laid off 2/3rds of their employees. On multiple occasions, investors were forced to put in more funding just to keep Next solvent. Just a couple of years after abandoning hardware, they agree to merge with apple. I wasnt able to find an exact number, but the amount of money apple paid for next may actually exceed the total revenue next pulled in during the 12 years they were in business.
  - tim333 10y ago
    Feynman's quote was more in terms of the product obeying the laws of physics. Most of Jobs' products did.
    - 10y ago
DrNuke 10y ago
lol they raised so much with nothing in hand but a few cad files while we have a worldwide original test bench for drones made&done and can't raise a penny? deeper line being can you startup a single-model drone in an already populated, very competitive market?
- rboyd 10y ago
  That looks like awesome tech, but it also looks like your only major customers would be drone manufacturers or hardcore hobbyists/racers? Maybe perceived market size is the problem with your raise?
  - DrNuke 10y ago
    Efficiency certification going to be regulated pretty soon for safe flight permit so this would open a pretty big market for services, training of certificators and our novel universal efficiency benchmark, we think.
mikikian 10y ago
Here's the court filing [1] describing the circumstances that led up to the bankruptcy. [1] https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0D229D2-FCF6-11E6-9996-3326DBA93163 https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0...
- mikikian 10y ago
  Looks like the IP will be for sale soon. "68. Second, the Debtor will pursue a competitive auction and work to close a sale transaction. The Debtor intends to file a sale procedures motion shortly after the Petition Date to initiate that process. The Debtor has received indications of interest from a number of potential buyers of its intellectual property portfolio and believes that its planned 363 sale will realize value from the portfolio. Due to the potential loss of value to the IP if it goes stale, the Debtor hopes to expedite the closing of any transaction. "
  - duskwuff 10y ago
    The real question is whether there's any real IP to be had. Their demo video was faked, after all -- was there any work "behind the scenes" on a functional prototype, or is the portfolio limited to the (now worthless) brand?
    - wmf 10y ago
      Check out the filing; reportedly they spent about 18 months refining the prototypes.
microtherion 10y ago
"Lily, whom despite raising millions in dollars to build their highly anticipated consumer drone, have just filed for bankrupcy." On an entirely unrelated note, this is an early contender for "most ungrammatical sentence I hope to read today".
- theoh 10y ago
  Isn't it just missing one comma? (I suppose "whom" should be "who")
  - clebio 10y ago
    Lily has (a company has filed for ...). And generally "millions of dollars". meh.
    - JimDabell 10y ago
      Always treating organisations as singular rather than plural ("has" vs "have") is something specific to American English, and treating them as plural isn't ungrammatical in English.
  - microtherion 10y ago
    "whom" is wrong in 3 different ways in my opinion: (1) It should be "who", not "whom". I find that hypercorrection immensely annoying. (2) But actually, since Lily is a company, it should be "which", not "who". (3) But even "which despite raising […] has filed" is wrong. It actually should just be "Lily, despite raising […], has filed" or "Lily, which raised […], has filed". "which despite raising" subordinates "has filed […]", so the whole sentence turns into a noun phrase missing its verb phrase.
    - theoh 10y ago
      I'll accept the who/whom complaint. As another poster has said, your point 2 is not a universally agreed rule. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h... Your point 3 is totally valid, I assumed you were quoting a wannabe noun phrase. I wasn't paying enough attention.
bane 10y ago
Man, one of these days I need to go get $35 mil in funding and produce nothing but a vision video.
- alekratz 10y ago
  ...and then file for bankruptcy?
  - dahdum 10y ago
    Are the founders going bankrupt, or just the company? I'm guessing only the latter.
    - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
      I'm consistently surprised there is no jailtime involved.
      - wmf 10y ago
        Yeah, after you spend 18 months developing a product and then refund all your customers you should go to... wait, what?
        mikeyouse 10y ago
        In Lily's case, it seems there was potentially fraud occurring too.. If that's the case, I wouldn't mind seeing some jail sentences: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dronemaker-lily-robotics.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dron...
      - techthroway443 10y ago
        Good thing for them going bankrupt isn't a crime.
        detaro 10y ago
DroningON 10y ago
SelFly is next, 8,000 backers, $1m and yet an impossible specification... http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/09/selfly-1m-funding-next-zano-failure/ http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/09/selfly-1m-funding-next-za...
coverband 10y ago
At least they seem to be shutting down in an orderly fashion (maybe because of the State intervention) and attempting to refund most customers. The bankruptcy court documents also talk about some potentially valuable IP and patents.
indiansama 10y ago
Logan full movie online Free https://www.societyleadership.org/content/film-2017-logan-full-movie-free-online-putlocker-0 https://www.societyleadership.org/content/film-2017-logan-fu...
pencilpup223 10y ago
This news is over a week old...
- techthroway443 10y ago
  Your point?
krushing 10y ago
A floating camera has to be one of the major hardware projects Snap is working on.
vkou 10y ago
So, their demonstration videos were completely fabricated. "Are you sure that the GoPro lens does not create a unique deformation/pattern on the image? I am worried that a lens geek could study our images up close and detect the unique GoPro lens footprint. But I am just speculating here: I don’t know much about lenses but I think we should be extremely careful if we decide to lie publicly." - an except from an e-mail by a Lily founder. [1] There's optimism, there's prototyping, there's proof-of-concept demos... And there's plain, old deception. [1] http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-lily.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-lily.h...
- Balgair 10y ago
  Now that is a quote that has every HS physics teacher shaking their heads.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
Exactly as I expected.
iamleppert 10y ago
I know someone who worked for Lily. Apparently, they hadn't progressed based the vicon stage in terms of actually getting their drone to fly indoors, let alone outdoors. Expect the IP, if any, to be near worthless. Who knows the reason(s) why, but it doesn't seem like they had very good engineers or leadership if they burned through all that time and money and couldn't even get basic flight working.
yalogin 10y ago
Speaking about spectacular demo videos how is magicleap doing?
neotek 10y ago
What amuses me about Kickstarter is that the stuff that's actually going to work, that's 100% definitely going to ship - that is to say, Alibaba resales, existing product repackaging, etc - are the one thing that Kickstarter doesn't allow. But if you want to create a project that literally breaks the laws of physics, something which a high-school science student could demonstrate is physically impossible, Kickstarter will proudly slap their editor's recommendation on your project and help you pimp it to the media so you can widen your net and catch more suckers to siphon money from. Stuff like Water Seer, Fontus, Solar Roadways, Triton Artificial Gills - that's all I think of when I think about Kickstarter now. Their brand is utterly toxic to me, and don't even get me started on Indiegogo!

115 points by samfisher83 10y ago

"Lily raised over $35 million in pre-sales and even secured $15 million in investment" How in the holy crapping hell did they manage to burn so much cash with NOTHING to show except a fraudulently-produced pitch video? Is there criminal investigation happening? This smells very bad. edit: removed capital letters of outrage and replaced with asterisks

mikeryan 10y ago
Is there criminal investigation happening? This smells very bad. Yes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/31/failed-drone-startup-lily-robotics-raided-for-possible-criminal-investigation-says-source/#7a1b6ea96d0f https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/01/31/failed-drone...
- zatkin 10y ago
  They supposedly didn't even fully pay the company that made that video on their homepage from over a year ago. >According to a different unnamed source, the company who made the video, CMI Productions, has also not been paid in full for its work. A CMI employee did not respond immediately to a request for comment. CTO Bradlow did not respond to questions about the video payments before hanging up on FORBES. A Lily spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit to FORBES, though the company is expected to file a response to the district attorney on Thursday.
emcq 10y ago
They had a factory line and were manufacturing devices, but they weren't able to reach their claimed production quality and never shipped. I'm not sure how many failed devices they made which could easily eat millions in material, manufacturing, and design costs. Hardware is hard!
samfisher83 10y ago
Supposedly 34 mil of customer money was in escrow. They were only operating of the 15 mil in investment. I don't know if that is true. If they invested that 34 million they could have made some money in interest. in http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-cancelled-32m-in-orders/ http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-cancel... Apparently their original footage was from a DJI inspire.
- ionwake 10y ago
  So basically the video was just of some guy controlling a drone? There was no actual following ? The wrist device didn't actually do anything ? Is this true ? Or did the prototype atleast work ?
  - samfisher83 10y ago
    Supposedly all fake: http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-court-pursue-lily-drone-legal-battle/ http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-co...
  - pmarreck 10y ago
    Well, DJI drones have "follow" features as well, so
- basseq 10y ago
  Not a bad idea as fraud goes: 1. Build slick marketing pitch. 2. Collect $35M in pre-orders. 3. Apologize after a year of "trying" and return the principle. 4. Make $1.75M in interest.
- microtherion 10y ago
  > Supposedly 34 mil of customer money was in escrow. They were only operating of the 15 mil in investment. I don't know if that is true. The bankrupcy filing posted above in the thread https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0D229D2-FCF6-11E6-9996-3326DBA93163 https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0... largely bears this out. On page 13, they declare that they still have $25.6M in their bank account, and a bit more than $31M of current assets in total. By Kickstarter standards, this looks like a fairly responsibly run company.
dang 10y ago
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
NDizzle 10y ago
Nothing to show for it? I bet a non-zero amount of execs at that company have a sweet rock waterfall pool in their back yard...
jerryr 10y ago
As samfisher83 pointed out, $34M was in escrow, so they were probably running on closer to $15M. When setting up a volume production line for a complicated product, it's really easy to burn through tens of millions of dollars. Kickstarter scares the crap out of me for this reason. Typically, I would recommend that a startup begin with a small domestic run of the simplest product possible, targeted at an early adopter market. There's so much a startup has to put into place for hardware: a contract manufacturer (and a sane contract, which takes time to establish), suppliers, supply chain, testing (development and production), certification, packaging, sales channels, distribution, support, reverse logistics, etc. Companies such as PCH, Dragon, etc. can help accelerate some of this, but there's still a ton of work to do. Trying to simultaneously tackle all of that and a complicated engineering design requires a ton of resources--more than a typical startup will have. Setting up a reliable manufacturing line and test procedure typically takes about 6 months from the time your engineering team begins handoff to the contract manufacturer. Moreover, as much as we'd like it to be, manufacturing is not agile. All of that work is very change-intolerant. So, if you begin the handoff with a half-baked design (which most startups do, in my experience) that you have to change as you proceed through the setup process, you can easily blow away that nominal, 6-month timeline with tooling changes, contract renegotiation, supplier verification, etc. as your engineers scramble to work with the factory to make the design manufacturable and cost-effective. Jumping straight into a full-blown manufacturing effort is not a cash-effective way for a startup to prove a complicated design. You can force it to work, but it's really expensive. Apple, for example, parallel-paths a lot of stuff. They can afford to discard a million-dollar tool and move on if it doesn't work out. They also send huge engineering teams to Asia for months at a time. Instead, I'd suggest that startups begin with more manual domestic builds in the low hundreds of units until the engineering team is confident in the manufacturability of the design and the manufacturing requirements are understood. These will, of course, have much higher per-unit costs, but you can iterate way, way faster because you're not constantly flying overseas to battle the inertia of a manufacturing line. Unfortunately, Kickstarter--while still qualifying as an early adopter market--is driving first-run numbers way higher than they should be for the average startup, which is causing them to jump too quickly into scale manufacturing efforts. Because of this, I think we are seeing some spectacular failures such as Lily. tl;dr: Manufacturing is expensive. Kickstarter is driving hardware startups into manufacturing too soon.

minimaxir 10y ago

HN discussion of the Lily Drone when it was first announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532777 > That is one of the first videos I've seen in a long time where I've thought "wow we can do that now?"

binarymax 10y ago
Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGcH0Bk3hg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGcH0Bk3hg
ww520 10y ago
There are lies, damn lies, and commercials.
- sleepybrett 10y ago
  The DJI Mavick does most of the things that video claims the lily can do.
  - bootlooped 10y ago
    I read a while back (did not independently confirm) that they used a DJI Inspire for most of the promo video footage. I think the Inspire can do a lot of the same stuff too. I thought it was funny they were using an existing product from a competitor to simulate what they claimed their future product could do.
    - tim333 10y ago
      I just watched the DJI video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1d_ptE6yrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1d_ptE6yrc It seems the Mavick tracks objects by image recognition from the camera. I'm not sure the stuff shown on the Lily video where you track a presumably radio transmitter from a small device is actually a thing that exists. I was trying to figure out how to do it for tracking kids if they run off in stores etc and it's not easy. You could probably do it with a several feet across receiver so you could detect the timing differences. In the Lily faked video the Inspire was flown by a human operator. Guess it the tracker and drone both had gps receivers and communicated that could work although it still might be hard to get the altitude right.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

Color me unsurprised. They marketed it as an action-sport-filming drone, but the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. It literally wouldn't keep up with Usain Bolt running the 100m, nevermind a regular person on a bicycle. Shameless plug: a friend of mine is one of the founders of a competing startup making a self-filming drone that has more than twice the top speed, so is actually usable. They've been shooting on location with top athletes using pre-production models for the past year, first production models are going to final assembly these days. https://www.staaker.com https://www.staaker.com Edit: s/full disclosure/shameless plug/ as per discussion below.

CGamesPlay 10y ago
> the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where drone filming would be cool. This wasn't the reason they failed, though. They sold plenty of units, they just never delivered them.
olegkikin 10y ago
There are many drones on the market that have high speeds and can follow you. AirDog is one of the well known ones, can go up to 42 mph, costs $1600. The cool thing about Lily was the waterproof aspect. There are very few of them that aren't toys and aren't very expensive at the same time.
- sizzzzlerz 10y ago
  And there is one fewer now
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    No, there never was.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Lily also promised enough 'coordination' to track an athlete from multiple angles over varying terrain and obstacles. That's a much taller order than "follow me", and it doesn't look like they ever managed to get something that could track a skier or kayaker the way they implied.

laurent123456 10y ago

$35 millions for doing nothing is quite impressive. I was watching the South Park episode "Go Fund Yourself" [0] just last night, and as often they are pretty much spot on. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Fund_Yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Fund_Yourself

tyleo 10y ago

Whenever I see companies like this with a spectacular demo but no product to show, I always think of the Richard Feynman quote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

neduma 10y ago
Meh.. what about NeXT/BlackBox/SteveJobs? There was actually none of it exists and he did awesome PR and made it work.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Steve Jobs was one of a handful of people in the world who could pull off such feats. I think tyleo's comment still stands when it comes to everything (and everyone) else.
- rgbrenner 10y ago
  but next was well on its way to declaring bankruptcy... Next had terrible sales.. even jobs said so. The factory they built was so underutilized, they assembled the computers by hand instead of using the equipment because it was less work than doing the maintenance on it. It was designed to produce 150,000 machines a year... next sold 50,000 machines total over 6 years (an average of 700/month). After 6 years, Next abandoned the computer market, focusing on software. They tried to sell the factory to Canon, who pulled out of the deal. They laid off 2/3rds of their employees. On multiple occasions, investors were forced to put in more funding just to keep Next solvent. Just a couple of years after abandoning hardware, they agree to merge with apple. I wasnt able to find an exact number, but the amount of money apple paid for next may actually exceed the total revenue next pulled in during the 12 years they were in business.
- tim333 10y ago
  Feynman's quote was more in terms of the product obeying the laws of physics. Most of Jobs' products did.
  - 10y ago

DrNuke 10y ago

lol they raised so much with nothing in hand but a few cad files while we have a worldwide original test bench for drones made&done and can't raise a penny? deeper line being can you startup a single-model drone in an already populated, very competitive market?

rboyd 10y ago
That looks like awesome tech, but it also looks like your only major customers would be drone manufacturers or hardcore hobbyists/racers? Maybe perceived market size is the problem with your raise?
- DrNuke 10y ago
  Efficiency certification going to be regulated pretty soon for safe flight permit so this would open a pretty big market for services, training of certificators and our novel universal efficiency benchmark, we think.

mikikian 10y ago

Here's the court filing [1] describing the circumstances that led up to the bankruptcy. [1] https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0D229D2-FCF6-11E6-9996-3326DBA93163 https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0...

mikikian 10y ago
Looks like the IP will be for sale soon. "68. Second, the Debtor will pursue a competitive auction and work to close a sale transaction. The Debtor intends to file a sale procedures motion shortly after the Petition Date to initiate that process. The Debtor has received indications of interest from a number of potential buyers of its intellectual property portfolio and believes that its planned 363 sale will realize value from the portfolio. Due to the potential loss of value to the IP if it goes stale, the Debtor hopes to expedite the closing of any transaction. "
- duskwuff 10y ago
  The real question is whether there's any real IP to be had. Their demo video was faked, after all -- was there any work "behind the scenes" on a functional prototype, or is the portfolio limited to the (now worthless) brand?
  - wmf 10y ago
    Check out the filing; reportedly they spent about 18 months refining the prototypes.

microtherion 10y ago

"Lily, whom despite raising millions in dollars to build their highly anticipated consumer drone, have just filed for bankrupcy." On an entirely unrelated note, this is an early contender for "most ungrammatical sentence I hope to read today".

theoh 10y ago
Isn't it just missing one comma? (I suppose "whom" should be "who")
- clebio 10y ago
  Lily has (a company has filed for ...). And generally "millions of dollars". meh.
  - JimDabell 10y ago
    Always treating organisations as singular rather than plural ("has" vs "have") is something specific to American English, and treating them as plural isn't ungrammatical in English.
- microtherion 10y ago
  "whom" is wrong in 3 different ways in my opinion: (1) It should be "who", not "whom". I find that hypercorrection immensely annoying. (2) But actually, since Lily is a company, it should be "which", not "who". (3) But even "which despite raising […] has filed" is wrong. It actually should just be "Lily, despite raising […], has filed" or "Lily, which raised […], has filed". "which despite raising" subordinates "has filed […]", so the whole sentence turns into a noun phrase missing its verb phrase.
  - theoh 10y ago
    I'll accept the who/whom complaint. As another poster has said, your point 2 is not a universally agreed rule. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h... Your point 3 is totally valid, I assumed you were quoting a wannabe noun phrase. I wasn't paying enough attention.

bane 10y ago

Man, one of these days I need to go get $35 mil in funding and produce nothing but a vision video.

alekratz 10y ago
...and then file for bankruptcy?
- dahdum 10y ago
  Are the founders going bankrupt, or just the company? I'm guessing only the latter.
  - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    I'm consistently surprised there is no jailtime involved.
    - wmf 10y ago
      Yeah, after you spend 18 months developing a product and then refund all your customers you should go to... wait, what?
      - mikeyouse 10y ago
        In Lily's case, it seems there was potentially fraud occurring too.. If that's the case, I wouldn't mind seeing some jail sentences: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dronemaker-lily-robotics.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dron...
    - techthroway443 10y ago
      Good thing for them going bankrupt isn't a crime.
      - detaro 10y ago

DroningON 10y ago

SelFly is next, 8,000 backers, $1m and yet an impossible specification... http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/09/selfly-1m-funding-next-zano-failure/ http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/09/selfly-1m-funding-next-za...

coverband 10y ago

At least they seem to be shutting down in an orderly fashion (maybe because of the State intervention) and attempting to refund most customers. The bankruptcy court documents also talk about some potentially valuable IP and patents.

indiansama 10y ago

Logan full movie online Free https://www.societyleadership.org/content/film-2017-logan-full-movie-free-online-putlocker-0 https://www.societyleadership.org/content/film-2017-logan-fu...

pencilpup223 10y ago

This news is over a week old...

techthroway443 10y ago
Your point?

krushing 10y ago

A floating camera has to be one of the major hardware projects Snap is working on.

vkou 10y ago

So, their demonstration videos were completely fabricated. "Are you sure that the GoPro lens does not create a unique deformation/pattern on the image? I am worried that a lens geek could study our images up close and detect the unique GoPro lens footprint. But I am just speculating here: I don’t know much about lenses but I think we should be extremely careful if we decide to lie publicly." - an except from an e-mail by a Lily founder. [1] There's optimism, there's prototyping, there's proof-of-concept demos... And there's plain, old deception. [1] http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-lily.html http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-lily.h...

Balgair 10y ago
Now that is a quote that has every HS physics teacher shaking their heads.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

Exactly as I expected.

iamleppert 10y ago

I know someone who worked for Lily. Apparently, they hadn't progressed based the vicon stage in terms of actually getting their drone to fly indoors, let alone outdoors. Expect the IP, if any, to be near worthless. Who knows the reason(s) why, but it doesn't seem like they had very good engineers or leadership if they burned through all that time and money and couldn't even get basic flight working.

yalogin 10y ago

Speaking about spectacular demo videos how is magicleap doing?

neotek 10y ago

What amuses me about Kickstarter is that the stuff that's actually going to work, that's 100% definitely going to ship - that is to say, Alibaba resales, existing product repackaging, etc - are the one thing that Kickstarter doesn't allow. But if you want to create a project that literally breaks the laws of physics, something which a high-school science student could demonstrate is physically impossible, Kickstarter will proudly slap their editor's recommendation on your project and help you pimp it to the media so you can widen your net and catch more suckers to siphon money from. Stuff like Water Seer, Fontus, Solar Roadways, Triton Artificial Gills - that's all I think of when I think about Kickstarter now. Their brand is utterly toxic to me, and don't even get me started on Indiegogo!