15 ms·
So Close
- nartz 9y agoIts a good post - but it must be said: the CEO (and board?) fucked up hardcore. They let themselves be tempted by acquisition, and then didn't protect themselves or the team in negotiations.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nkkollaw 9y agoThat doesn't sound like a good deal. They went all-in with the acquisition with no backup plan, and lost.
- jphoward 9y agoIt’s striking how little humility there is in the post. The majority of it sounds like a sales pitch, and I suppose, who can blame them if it is one in disguise?
- rgbrenner 9y agoCan someone fix the title? it's click bait. There's no way to tell what the article is about without clicking on it. At least mention the company. (Good article though.)
- a13n 9y agoIt's the title of the article though, seems fine to me.
- yoodenvranx 9y agoNo, it is not fine. I know it is standard practice on HN but I really don't like it at all. Just imagine every submitted article had a title like this: the HN frontpage would be full of links like "so close", "a look back", "introducing our most important features yet", "a statement regarding the events last weeks"... HN would completely unusable like this because you would have to click on every single link to figure out what it is about.
- nkkollaw 9y agoLuckily, most writers pick better titles than this guy. If what you describe actually happened, the rules would change.
- yoodenvranx 9y agoThe problem is that this guy did not select the title for HN but for his own personal/company blog. If you visit his blog then his title makes completely sense in this context but it loses its meaning in all other contexts.
- anigbrowl 9y agoQuite. Often our reasons for being interested in something are quite different from those of the audience it was written for.
- dirkdk 9y agocan't we namespace it? like Otto: So Close ?
- nkkollaw 9y agoOriginally it did, I guess it got moderated to the actual title of the article, as per rules?
- bdcravens 9y agoGuidelines say to not editorialize titles, and stick with original, but I agree. Putting short summary in parentheses would help (like "So Close (Otto postmortem)")
- anigbrowl 9y agoThat guideline needs to go. HN submitters often summarize the content of an article more appropriately for other readers than the original writer does. Often the newsworthiness of an article isn't apparent for one reason or another. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that this was a story of a promising hardware startup that ran out of operating cash during acquisition negotiations.
- bdcravens 9y agoI think it just shouldn't be so strictly enforced, and allow for an objective summary, while still enforcing rules against clickbait/editorializing. On Reddit a headline that says "USD losing steam" would be changed to "Fiat crashing hard - Bitcoin is the salvation!" which is what the HN rule wants to prevent.
- DrScump 9y agoI've never seen dang or other editors take action against any title expansion/clarification that was intellectually honest in its nature. When authors or site editors choose titles for their presumed audience, they aren't necessarily considering clarity for deep-linking external sites like HN.
- tlb 9y agoOuch. A sadly common outcome of talking to corp dev. http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html Agreeing to no-fundraising and exclusivity clauses during a long due diligence process really puts your head in their vise. And once it's there, people within the acquirer will start saying, Hey, we could built this ourselves! Let's run the clock out and kill the competition.
- twblalock 9y agoMaybe. But I'd like to see the other side of the story, including why a public company wanted to purchase a startup making a smart lock that cost $699 that hadn't even hit the market yet. Maybe the potential acquirer decided it wasn't a competitive product, and decided to back out.
- michaelt 9y agoSeems strange that anyone would agree not to raise more funds or negotiate with other parties for their entire remaining runway. I mean, it puts you in the situation that you either sell to that company or you go out of business. They could offer you a fraction of the amounts they were talking about before you signed, and you'd have no alternative. Hell, even asking you to agree to such unbalanced terms seems like a sign they're planning to pull a fast one on you and they don't intend to negotiate in good faith. What kind of chump would agree to shoot themselves in the foot like that, unless they'd exhausted every alternative?
- joshuahutt 9y agoA greedy one.
- siddharthdeswal 9y agoNot defending him, but seems like a chump who had exhausted every alternative, but won't talk about it honestly, and prefers to go with "this wasn't a failure, you were amazing, I was amazing, product was batshit amazing, onwards to our next adventure!"
- 9y ago
- a13n 9y agoThe deal's not done till it's done. I wonder if the bigger company had that plan all along...
- twblalock 9y agoIf I understand the sequence of events properly, the company entered acquisition negotiations and agreed not to solicit other bids during that time. When the acquisition fell apart, the company was out of money and had to stop operations. If that's correct, it seems to me like it's something they should have known in advance -- if they knew they would be out of money by the end of the year, why would they enter acquisition talks that were planned to last until then? Either they didn't know when they would run out of money, which is a pretty important thing to know about a startup company, or they decided to bet the company on the assumption that the acquisition would not fail, which was very irresponsible. An employee named Ben Havilland wrote a comment on the article that's worth reading.
- mcny 9y agoThank you for pointing this out. For those reading, an archive now exists https://archive.fo/CJF9r https://archive.fo/CJF9r the original comment is at https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let-go-i-dont-share-the-same-gratitude-posted-by-some-of-the-team-4029737df4ea https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let...
- brucephillips 9y ago> CEO and investment team ignored the negative aspects of the $700 lock and didn’t see that the competition would be able to provide the same features (and more) at less than 1/2 the price. If Ben realized this, he should have never worked at this company in the first place. It sounds like it was a failure of a product strategy.
- jjoonathan 9y agoA $700 lock is a product offering, not a product strategy. A strategy could have been "start with a $700 offering at the top of the market and work down," but that's not something they tell you on the way in, and even if they do, it's no guarantee that the execution will/won't work.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 9y agoIs (was?) there something more to this product that I missed, or is it really a $700 smart lock?
- twblalock 9y agoIt doesn't even have a proximity sensor -- you have to touch it to make it work. Might as well stick a key in at the same time. If I paid that kind of money I would expect my door to unlock for me when I approached it. It also has no manual override with a key like some smart locks -- it just has some backup batteries that last an unspecified amount of time. Because it has no key, it can't be re-keyed, so good luck convincing a landlord to let you install it in an apartment or rental home. And the company says it needs to be professionally installed. I bet the owners of these things would spend more time thinking about and solving problems with them than most people spend operating their normal deadbolts with a key.
- mikeash 9y agoMy $200 August is smart enough to unlock when I approach. For $700 I’d at least expect it to massage my backside as I walk through or something.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoOr open the door, not just unlock.
- mikestew 9y agoIf I paid that kind of money I would expect my door to unlock for me when I approached it. For $700, it better open the door for me. I can get locks to merely unlock it for me for half that.
- bdcravens 9y agoHaving just bought a "non-luxury" car that locks and unlocks by proximity (plus things like OSX that does the same with Apple Watch) this seems like a no-brainer.
- 3cham 9y agoI just couldn't understand it all, how could a CEO decide to sell his startup without any plan for the interim period, at least let the production can continue in that time and several months afterwards?
- kevinburke 9y agoThey have literally zero dollars in the bank. They have not had enough money to cover their liabilities since at least October.
- stevemk14ebr 9y agoThis title needs fixed. I had no idea what I was clicking on
- dang 9y agoOn HN not every title needs to explain itself immediately. It's good for users to have to work a little. With this type of post-mortem post in particular, there's a tradition of elegaic titles, and it seems fair to give poetic license to the author under such circumstances.
- smackfu 9y agoIt doesn’t help that the url doesn’t give any clue either. If this post was on their domain, then that would probably give enough context.
- ikeboy 9y agoSo they had people willing to pay for the product, but not enough runway to launch? Why not get people to pay in full ala Tesla and use that money to launch?
- greglindahl 9y agoThis is not what Tesla has ever done. Only a small fraction of people pay a large deposit for super-premium cars that come out first, and the rest pay a limited deposit. On the other hand, just about every Kickstarter ever has a ton of people who've paid in full. Yet these Kickstarters frequently fail, because it takes a lot more money than entrepreneurs expect to ship a quality product.
- mikeash 9y agoTesla took in $250 million of full-price preorders for their next-gen Roadster, which is years away from production. The comment you replied to didn’t imply that Tesla does this with every car.
- greglindahl 9y agoThe next-gen Roadster has 2 preorder levels, one that's full price for an early car, and another for 1/5 the amount that's farther back in the queue. Tesla has done the same system with every car they've launched. My purpose was to explain what Tesla actually does. I was not implying that the previous poster was wrong.
- mikeash 9y agoI’m not aware of any previous model where Tesla has offered a full price preorder. Certainly they haven’t done so for the X, 3, or semi. I don’t understand how “This is not what Tesla has ever done” could mean anything other than that they were wrong.
- rdiddly 9y agoIt's better that this happened, than if they had gotten further and become the Juicero of door locks. Edit - all the things that had my subconscious chanting ¡Juicero! The consultation of a Swiss watchmaker, indicating an exacting exquisiteness of mechanical design (for a door lock) indicating idealistic overdesign. ¡Juicero! The resulting $700 price tag. ¡Juicero! ...to replace an older system that already works great. ¡Juicero! ...despite its not having any of what he calls "intelligence," which equals an internet connection and a CPU. When in fact, a system as old as the deadbolt lock has a lot of true intelligence built in, and reliance on an internet connection and a CPU is a weakness, not a victory. ¡Juicero!
- boltzmannbrain 9y agotl;dr Otto was almost successful in making a high-end smart door lock, but despite incredible engineering and design, bad luck (read: negligence) through an acquisition deal led Otto to run out of money.
- jmull 9y agoVery interesting. I love to hear the other side of it though, because it feels perhaps self-serving. E.g., he seems to imply the potential acquirer unexpectedly screwed them over, but no deal is done until it’s done, and this one did not really seem like it was that close. There’s no reason for Otto to agree to an acquisition process that prevents them from raising money they desperately need if they had any reasonable prospects. As he said, they were not actually looking for acquisition. So it seems like this was a last gasp effort to stay afloat in some form, which ultimately failed (as previous efforts had). One reason an acquisition might be looking good before due diligence and fall apart after is because things turn out to be significantly less rosey than initially presented. When you’re looking to make a deal of course you’re going to accentuate your positives but you have to acknowledge and address your problems as well or you’re simply wasting everyone’s time. I suspect the fundamental problem is that a $700 smart door lock is a very difficult sell, especially with all the competition out there.
- wellboy 9y ago> While a tedious process, we built a close working relationship and shared their enthusiasm about our future together. On December 11th, they called me and stated they would not complete the acquisition nor revisit the investment proposal. I was stunned. The reason is still not understood. That's the problem if your CEO is an inventor with no or little business acumen. They are always super-enthusiastic and can be played like puppets by some M&A guys with mediocre experience. Memo: Don't be enthusiastic with "acquirers", restraint enthusiasm is the keyword. Screen them vs. them screen you. Memo2: Deals are made to fall trough - Paul Graham. Never bid everything on one horse, don't put all your eggs in one basket etc. 9 out of 10 deals like this fall through, adjust accordingly.
- zemvpferreira 9y agoHowever, this article was written by an experienced executive who had raised a $45M seed round for the company. Lack of business acumen or paper-thin attempt to excuse himself of this ridiculous failure? You be the judge.
- brucephillips 9y ago> I define startups as companies that don’t have control of their own destiny because they rely on investor cash infusions to operate. By this definition, Microsoft wasn't a startup.
- solarkraft 9y agoyep.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoDid someone say they were?
- john_moscow 9y ago>Our signed agreement restricted our ability to solicit other bids or fundraise and targeted a close on December 11th, 2017. It is hard for me to understand the logic of doing that at the end of your runway, without a backup plan and without agreeing on a compensation in case the deal falls through. Unless you are deliberately trying to crash the company and blame someone else for it. So looking more into this, is it just me, or it looks outrageously inefficient to raise $45m and have ~40 employees spend 4 years to release a product that is basically an IoT door lock? Both the mechanical and the electronic parts are based on commodity components, so I can imagine a well-motivated team of 5 delivering something like this in a year and being able to offer it at a much lower price. So was making a competitive product ever a priority here, or have the founders discovered a different way to benefit from the over-optimistic tech investment climate?
- solarkraft 9y agoIt seems that they focused on perfection (security, UX) way over a low price and by own claims people were actually willing to buy. Still not sure how they managed to burn through that much money developing it. The IT security parts are likely already available for free as well. Maybe inviting a mechanical watch guru to review their design in person and having the whole team watch him doing it is a good example of their spending.
- _aarti 9y agoThe product was built in China on the same lines that build the iPhone with the same detail. Manufacturing quality hardware is capital intensive, Finding people who can support that level of engineering is capital intensive, Hiring security engineers is capital intensive, they chose to go all in. The company was not wasting money. I have worked in Silicon Valley startups with lavish spending. This was not one of them. There was no free food, no wine/beer on tap, no lavish parties, no free memberships to the equinox.
- john_moscow 9y agoI dunno. Going all in before you have validated the product/market fit sounds like a textbook rookie mistake. I don't understand how you can raise close to $50m while having a business aptitude of a 3 year old.
- code4tee 9y agoThis smells way off. Solid companies don’t fold and close up shop overnight because one acquisition deal falls though. Sounds like company leadership trying to take attention away from their own mismanagement.
- brucephillips 9y ago> planned for first revenue in just four weeks Not "so close".
- goatherders 9y agoLots of people making the points that occurred to me so I'll avoid repeating those. But does anyone have any insight into what data (if any) supported a $700 device that no one seems to have asked for?
- amarkov 9y agoA $700 lock isn't meant to be even an MVP. It's public proof that you're doing something, and a test that your production pipeline can generate reasonable quality products. The strategic vision for these kinds of startups is that the industry is super far behind the times, and billions of dollars can be captured by just trying to innovate. Remember that Keurig was originally a $900 coffeepot.
- simonebrunozzi 9y agoCan we use titles that are more self-explanatory? "So close" doesn't mean anything, and it forces me to take a peek at the article. E.g. "how smart-lock startup Otto almost became a success, but eventually failed"
- a13n 9y agoWho are you asking? The article's author?
- phnofive 9y agoSite administrators, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang The HN team does a pretty good job of cleaning up uninformative link titles such as this.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoMy assumption: the general audience here. When someone submits an article, they are supposed to use the actual title of the piece, unless (insert list of provisos). In practice, if there is a problem with the name, one can alter it before submitting.
- angel_j 9y agoWhat a garbage post from a garbage project that wasted lots of time. Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-less system with new gears to move the same deadbolt, is providing zero innovation, b/c it's still just a little deadbolt securing all ~inch of door-perimeter to the frame (unless I missed something and they also re-invented the door hinge). So much business BS in this post, too. Like claims of a new UX! As if the process of unlocking is the "experience" factor of importance! And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock! And the part about "we created a culture of innovation"!!! What inflated garbage!
- slackingoff2017 9y agoI think the cost honestly killed them. If they would have just bolted a SoC and decent software onto a mostly existing lock, they could have sold the thing for $50 more than a regular lock and still made money. Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new technology, so take a regular lock and bolt ur magic sauce onto it!
- unicornporn 9y agoBut why? Keys work pretty well. But then, people buy IOT toothbrushes. So perhaps there would've be a market of idiots waiting in line.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThere's a few obvious use cases I can think of: 1. If you forget/lose your keys. If you still have your phone with you, then you can use that to unlock it, or if you set up a passcode ahead of time, you can use that too. 2. If you're having someone over and you're OK with them letting themselves in since it'd be inconvenient for you to meet them to let them in. I've had both of these situations happen to me. Granted, the solution shouldn't cost $700, but a lock you can open with your phone and also email/text someone a time-limited passcode for is useful.
- csytan 9y agoThis is not surprising to me. I've worked in this space, and I think consumer hardware startups are just incredibly hard. I just finished my stint at one (https://www.electricobjects.com/ https://www.electricobjects.com/) last year after we failed to raise series B. Why are consumer hardware startups hard? - Consumers have high expectations and want high quality products from the get go. - Quality products are incredibly capital intensive, resulting in much shorter runways. - Building a quality product often times means partnering with an expensive design firm + hiring the engineering talent to back it up. - Margins are much lower than a typical SAAS. This makes it less appealing for VCs than a pure software play. - Scaling hardware is harder than scaling software. Lead times are long. The right decisions have to be made ahead of time. Any missteps or problems with your suppliers will delay your launch. If this happens around Black Friday / Christmas -- it's a big deal. - Not only do delays impact your sales, they will also delay fundraises for much needed cash infusions.
- lqet 9y agoThe amount of pompous wording in this article is simply unbearable. They are describing an electric door lock, right? It seems fitting that the first name "Otto" is informally used in German to describe a person of little practical avail.
- textor 9y agoHard to put into words how reassuring it is to see so many sane, grounded and critical reactions (both here and on hackernoon) instead of gullible hackneyed accolades that the author's tone implicitly demands. I feel like thanking everyone for calling him out, but this is a bit tasteless. I wonder, though, if Sam himself believes his narrative. Startup CEOs tend to be borderline delusional in their optimism, one could even argue this is a job requirement. Still. Is there a subtler interpretation, such as this being a smart cover-up for personal irresponsible enrichment, or does he really think they did their best?
- ridgeguy 9y agoNo opinion on the product, market, etc. But two business lessons: Never sign a 'no-shop' agreement unless the other party covers your burn rate during the no-shop period. Burn gets paid weekly, one week in advance. A missed burn payment auto-terminates the no-shop in seven days. This protects your enterprise and screens against tire-kickers. Never assume a deal is done until the check or EFT clears. Doesn't matter how good the vibes feel. I lost a $10M scale-up round when (Big ChipCo) pulled its "solid commitment" less than 24 hours before the signing meeting. I do feel your pain.
- hoodoof 9y agoWhen making a deal, don't agree to stop all negotiations with other parties. One of the very most important properties of a deal is competition. A sense of competition ensures deals move along in a timely manner and push the value of the deal and keep everyone's options open. If a company ever wants you to stop negotiating with all other parties, say "YES, when you've put the sale price in our bank account, until then, we are dealing with other parties too". And if they refuse to deal because of this point, then it's not a real deal anyway so walk away and save yourself the price that this company paid, which is total.
- JepZ 9y agoWhy are there so many (large) companies calling themselves or their product Otto? A probably incomplete list: - http://www.otto.com http://www.otto.com - https://www.ottomotors.com https://www.ottomotors.com - http://www.otto-company.com http://www.otto-company.com - https://www.meetotto.com https://www.meetotto.com
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoWow you made a digital door lock, it doesn't need all this purple prose. It's debatable whether what you made is superior to a 97 cent key from Walmart. You would think you landed on the moon!
- rosegarden 9y agothere's a ton of focus on the price, but they could have easily priced it at $499 or $399 and ended up in the same situation. the acquisition was going forward even at that product price. It clearly wasn't the price that was the issue. They were pre-revenue and the acqusition fell through - that's a very vulnerable spot for a start up.
- dingo_bat 9y agoWhat about if the lock was priced according to the established prices of locks? This is a random lock of the same type: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CMMBATI/ref=abs_brd_tag_dp?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CMMBATI/ref=abs_brd_tag... $40 on Amazon. So you've got a lock with bluetooth which adds utility. So double it, hell triple it. $120. I think if their product was priced at $120 we would not be looking at this result.
- garganzol 9y agoWhy not bootstrap it if the product is ready? Sell 100 of locks and boom you have some money to produce and sell another 200. Rinse and repeat. I bet there is a bigger issue down the rabbit hole.
- ryanbrunner 9y agoGenerally manufactured goods require at least some economy of scale. Selling 100 locks would probably mean that the per-unit cost to produce the locks would be an order of magnitude higher than a proper sized run.
- rosegarden 9y agothe focus on price is misleading. they could have priced their product at $399 and still be in the same situation. they were in a financing window - so they needed the cash - and it became an acquisition. They had no hedge just in case. Lots of lessons to be learned and the CEO clearly sparked a conversation.
- fencepost 9y agoMy immediate reaction on reading it was "Whoever they were talking to wasn't serious about buying them but was serious about killing them." There's a reason why a lot of acquisition deals include a "breakup fee" like the one that allowed T-Mobile to buy a bunch of spectrum. I also can't imagine a $700 lock unless I'm desperately trying to keep my collection of Juiceros safe, but I'm not really their target market. Likely even consumers weren't their target market, builders of very high-end homes were because they were selling image and style as much as functionality.
- kevinburke 9y agoYour reaction does not reflect the reality of the situation
- fencepost 9y agoObviously you're a lot closer to the situation than some shlub reading a Medium post from the guy who shafted everyone working for him. It's entirely possible that a major player in locks or home automation was going to invest a big chunk of change or outright purchase the company. It's also entirely possible that with no earnest money or termination penalty in the negotiations stringing Otto along until it folded (and its IP might become available at fire sale prices) probably cost that potential suitor very little - a few tens of thousands of dollars in salaried employee time and travel, but that's about it. Depending on who it was, that company might also have a much better grasp on the potential market size for a high-tech wireless smart lock - be it at $700 or something significantly lower. I will note that a simple search for "Bluetooth door lock" turns up a wide variety of listings with prices ranging from $90-260, and even if some have different feature sets right now anything truly innovative could likely be copied and added to the firmware on many of them. Even the concept of a door with a sensor that picks up the presence of something carried and unlocks is far from novel - you can find that in hundreds of thousands of office buildings around the world.
- kevinburke 9y agoI worked on Otto's server side software as a contractor for five months. The company had some servers written in C and exchanging messages using a custom binary protocol, designed for millions of transactions per second, when they needed only 2-3tps, readability, and the ability to make fast changes. We rewrote those servers in Go, found and fixed consistency errors in them, and actually got to the point where you could understand the code and deploy changes to it in hours, in other words, we delivered in a big way on what they asked us to do. The company did not have the money to pay its bills for at least two months before shutdown, finally laying everyone off on December 12. There was nothing to indicate they didn't have money to pay us before then. I probably won't see a dime for the last two months of work. Other contractors took bigger hits than me. In total Otto owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors for work already performed. I'm beyond upset at the recklessness of the management and the board in this situation. They could have laid off the contractors in October when they realized they did not have enough money to pay all liabilities. They could have explained the situation and offered a bonus in the event of a successful exit. Instead they said nothing about their insolvency, continued having us working on the (implicit) assumption that they could pay us, and continued gambling with invoices owed to me and other contractors. If I ran my own company this way, if I just lost customer data or wrote broken code, I would not be in business for very long. Yet in VC land, the board (Reid Hoffman, Josh Elman, Sam Jadallah) will just go to the next venture. I'm in a hole and looking for work in January, if you or your company needs help. I'm also happy to pass on the names of the other contractors who are getting 86 cents on the dollar for their work in 2017. https://burke.services https://burke.services
- _aarti 9y agoThank you, Kevin, for everything you did.
- chatmasta 9y agoSorry. That sucks. But why did you spend so long working without getting paid?
- kevinburke 9y ago
- siddharthdeswal 9y agoIt's good this happened, else we'd have another Juicero on our hands. Ridiculous price, beautifully over engineered product, a slight update to a centuries old problem, but at least they didn't get the opportunity to burn up as much investor money as Juicero.
- jamestimmins 9y agoThat said, most people use locks multiple times a day (and keep keys with us at all times), whereas we rarely drink juice. Juicero was a high cost solution for a relatively uncommon use case. This appears to be a high cost solution for a common one. It's possible that it was overpriced, but the idea of paying $600+ for a phone would have seemed nuts years ago as well. It's easy to say something has a ridiculous price, but there are plenty of products that have launched with a high price and 1) redefined a category as something where premium is worth paying for, and 2) used a premium first product to pay for development of a cheaper model afterwards.
- siddharthdeswal 9y agoAgreed, building a high cost high value brand, and then moving downmarket is known to work. I compared this to Juicero because the "degree of innovation" in their product doesn't seem to justify the 20x price premium [1]. To compare, a cheap Nokia is ~INR 4000, a OnePlus 5 is ~INR 30000 and an iPhone 7 is ~INR 45000. However, there's a world of difference in features, components, software in the 10x phones. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00EZYA61K/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1514861455&sr=8-4&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=door+lock&dpPl=1&dpID=41RlI3r9ylL&ref=plSrch https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00EZYA61K/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?ie=...
- dingo_bat 9y ago> and keep keys with us at all times Except this lock also has a key. It's the $1000 smartphone you carry everywhere. That is prone to running out of charge, getting stolen, getting broken, not being in range of a signal, etc. The whole idea was bullshit from the get-go.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoStuff like this--naive "CEO" making rookie decisions--happens all the time so I'm not surprised. However, I really don't understand what made him think it's OK to celebrate the failure going out, with such an idiotic blog post, pretending that everything is OK. That's the thing that makes people angry about stuff like this. If you failed, just acknowledge it and move on. Better yet, don't even proudly write a medium post about how it's not your fault. It's your fault if you're the CEO, period. Feel sorry for those who you've hurt while you're riding around in your Tesla. I knew this would be just another bullshit "incredible journey" article even before reading it, just based on the title. Why are there so many bullshitter founders nowadays? There used to be days when people used to actually feel some shame when they fail their startups.
- exergy 9y agoHaha, I predict 2018 will be the year of the "I failed at my startup and didn't write a Medium piece" Medium piece. Similar to the "I quit Facebook/cut the cord but it's no biggie" Medium post.
- dwaltrip 9y agoI found the article/story to be interesting, but I do agree it could have used more self-reflection on mistakes that were made or different decisions that could have been taken.
- mathattack 9y agoThis wasn't a naive 20something. He had 30 years of experience, including time as a VC Managing Partner.
- bartread 9y agoI found myself having to stop reading because the breathy tone was getting on my nerves so much. Honestly, so much verbal diarrhoea, so little taking of responsibility. I agree with you: I don't see any reason to celebrate. Company leadership failed spectacularly and left their workforce high and dry. :(
- jamestimmins 9y agoThese responses contain a lot of condemnation (based mainly on price) of a product that these people have never used. Building a premium first product to fund further development is a common approach (think Tesla), as is creating a premium niche in an otherwise commoditized market (Apple). While it does sound like costs/scope got out of control, please remember that price is oftentimes determined fairly far down the development path, and that the ending price may not reflect the initial plans. They may have just pushed scope too far and then backed themselves into a corner. Once the money is spent on R&D it's not like you can get the money back just by developing a simpler product. Startups are hard. Hardware is hard. Products are hard. Security is hard. This is a site for people who want to build things. Please stop pissing on the grave of a failed attempt to build something new, especially when your information is limited to a Medium post by the CEO who just had to fire all of his employees days before Christmas. That hardly counts as an objective or substantial source of information.
- _aarti 9y agoThank you so much for saying this. The engineering team was literally in tears because they could not ship. We all wanted to ship the product so bad. It hurt.
- peoplewindow 9y agoYes, but ... surely questions should have been asked at the point where they raised $45 million? It's a lock. Has there been any ordinary door lock in history that cost even a fraction of that to develop? I don't think this can just be blown off by saying "hardware is hard". People have been making locks for millenia. It is objectively not hard. Hotels and offices routinely have cryptographic unlock keycard systems that are managed remotely and they do not cost $700. There just seems to be a disconnect from the rest of the world in this business plan.
- _aarti 9y agoThey chose to do it their way and not make incremental improvements. It's America - Land of dreams - right?
- 9y ago
- hackathonguy 9y agoThis doesn't feel right. The CEO managed to raise $45M; he must know a deal's not done until it's done. There's more to this than meets the eye.
- milkmilklemon 9y agoState filings pointing to the same entities make it look like the CEO might still have a dog in the great lock race: https://www.wedgetls.com https://www.wedgetls.com Wonder why it's not full of bluetooths and clouds since that's clearly the way of the future.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]