7 ms·

Clever move, get out before the indictments land when investors figure out they've been had. uBeam's been completely full of shit from day one, and Perry is eve

• village-idiot 8y ago
  My immediate thought was always “oh boy do I not want to be in the same room as that thing”. [insert scene from Oceans 11 with Basher covering his testicles in fear before triggering an EMP].
• legohead 8y ago
  > Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, CrunchFund, Marissa Mayer and Mark Cuban how were these people so easily bamboozled? this is some pretty dubious tech straight from the get go.
  • minimaxir 8y ago
    From Michael Arrington: https://web.archive.org/web/20170819183727/https://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170819183727/https://uncrunche... > I’m sitting backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’m introduced to (let’s call her) Mary, a 22 year old recent college grad. She spends ten minutes setting up a science experiment on my desk. There are jokes about how she managed to get this thing through airport security. She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time. > Stuff like that is what makes my job so much fun. In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary.
    • _pmf_ 8y ago
      > She spends ten minutes setting up a science experiment on my desk. There are jokes about how she managed to get this thing through airport security. She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe he should go to Las Vegas instead of making decisions about technological investments.
  • pmorici 8y ago
    It's not complete snake oil, it does work it just isn't practical. I'd guess those investors were betting that they could over come the issues of practicality.
    • jhall1468 8y ago
      You can't overcome basic physics. And this chick is a nutter. Her TEDx was cringey as hell, spending the majority of the time claiming she'd figured out solutions to problems in minutes that PhDs spent years on. The fact that you'd need a power plant to charge a room full of people's phones isn't some practicality issue. This was absolute nonsense from day 1.
      • cdmckay 8y ago
        This woman, not “this chick”
        • SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
          chick, dude, guy, gal
        • EpicEng 8y ago
          Getting off into the weeds here, but I doubt you would have been offended if he was referring to a man and used "dude".
  • manigandham 8y ago
    VCs are usually not as smart as they and others think, they're very susceptible to emotional presentations and hype, and portfolio theory means that serious due diligence isn't worth the effort.
    • jbapple 8y ago
      > portfolio theory means that serious due diligence isn't worth the effort. Could you expand on this?
      • mbesto 8y ago
        I actually wrote a whole blog post on this if you're curious: https://medium.com/startup-grind/technology-due-diligence-or-lack-thereof-fbeb46687bec https://medium.com/startup-grind/technology-due-diligence-or...
      • manigandham 8y ago
        VCs have an investment fund that is divided amongst X startups. A small percentage will break even, and a very tiny percentage will return more than the entire fund (this is where profits come from). The vast majority of companies will lose money, and in this scenario it's better to move quickly to get into the startups that will succeed rather than do the proper due diligence for every investment. Basically, speed and quantity is better than deep investigation. It's just how the numbers work out, but it's also why you'll see some crazy startups get funded even if others have more solid financials. In addition, people are much better at disqualifying then qualifying. It's easier to say "no" then to say "yes" to something, so it could be argued that you should say no very quickly to these kind of startups. But history shows that wilder ideas are more likely to lead to the outsized returns so VCs will say yes to the things that other investment classes would always say no to. Then again, it's called "venture capital" for a reason.
        • dnautics 8y ago
          so due diligence for infotech startups maybe doesn't make sense but wouldn't at least a "first pass no phebotonium" filter mean better likelihood of returns for hard sciences? I have been closely watching indie bio do their accelerator and I'd say a full 60% of their startups are phlebotonium, or at least "this is not a crazy idea, but the choices you have made are totally crazy".
  • gaius 8y ago
    how were these people so easily bamboozled? The simplest answer is the most likely: they weren’t.
    • EpicEng 8y ago
      Then how has uBeam raised so much money? Napkin math pretty much sticks a fork in their ideas.
      • DanBC 8y ago
        > Then how has uBeam raised so much money? They were good at selling a product that cannot work. Imagine how much better they'd do with something that does work.
        • EpicEng 8y ago
          So these VCs are at least technically ignorant and stupid enough to fail to perform due diligence. What's the difference?
      • gaius 8y ago
        Imagine you are a Dutchman in 1636. You know perfectly well that tulip bulbs are worthless. But you also know that any tulip bulbs you can buy now you can sell at a vast profit later. What do you do?
        • EpicEng 8y ago
          That presumes you know for a fact that the price will go up. You can hardly make that claim for uBeam. Maybe I'm just ignorant/naive of the VC world.
          • gaius 8y ago
            Right. You just don’t want to be holding the bag when the wheels come off. It was the same with CDS’s in 2007. People who got out at the right time made fortunes. Theranos was another example of experienced investors hoping the bubble would last just a little longer than it actually did.
  • technobabble 8y ago
    I remember going to a StartupGrind event, and the VC they were interviewing flat-out said "VC's are dumb and stupid". I'm not kidding. Initially, I was glad that he was upfront about the situation. But the more I thought about it, I realized VC's have so much money they can literally afford to be uneducated. They can afford to "spray and pray" with their investments.
• harryh 8y ago
  There is no reason to think there will be indictments. They raised a relatively small amount of money from sophisticated investors.