I give credit to Meta for having made so much progress as an “indie” player in AR hardware. They shipped a device comparable to Hololens or Magic Leap with a fr

I give credit to Meta for having made so much progress as an “indie” player in AR hardware. They shipped a device comparable to Hololens or Magic Leap with a fraction of the budget. That said, the main narrative around their shutting down (blaming the US-China trade war for spooking their Chinese investors) seems a little too convenient. The real problem with the Meta, as the founder alludes to at the end, is that it had no clear use case or killer app. If they had a successful consumer device, or even a dev kit that looked like it had a chance to one day be that device, I suspect the trade war would be a non issue. For any other ambitious startups dreaming of AR glory, the CEO’s advice here is good. Find killer app first, then raise big money to ship hardware. Not the other way around. Note that HoloLens and Magic Leap have the same problem. But they can get away with failing for a lot longer due to massive amounts of funding. I was at CES this year and saw a few upstarts with promising tech. I predict something truly groundbreaking will launch by next year CES.