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Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors
- sdan 7y agoWow... that was pretty unexpected. But to be honest they haven't done anything too notable within the last year (Plus.ai is pretty much the biggest thing I can think of right now and maybe Ike in the trucking space). Really interesting to see how everything in the AV space plays out: Deepscale/Drive.ai were both aquihires, Cruise/Torc/Argo/Aurora were bought out mostly, and the others are either just starting (Ghost and Voyage) or doing something that aids them (Renovo). So essentially: either you're bought out by an OEM or funded by VCs hoping to get acquired (I don't think you can surivive in this space without being bought out or aquihired). Disclaimer: I worked at Renovo.
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoZoox was supposed to announce a new funding round by the end of last year, and still crickets. The further into 2020 we get the more I think they might not get any more money.
- sdan 7y agoI actually loved what they were (and still are doing).The only thing that concerns me about them is this: 1. Ousted one of their CEOs the day they got funding (something dirty like this) 2. Making their own car (which I guess isn't too far fetched, but Cruise seems to be much further along even though they did the whole thing in secrecy)
- ycombonator 7y agoJust checked out the demos on their website. I have always been curious what graphics they use to represent what car sees. Are there any open source versions of these out there to explore ?
- sdan 7y agoAll this stuff is internal. However, there is always Uber AVS (avs.auto).
- gonesilent 7y agoStiching cams like this has started to hit the back up camera market. Takes a few hours of setup. Stop at an RV dealer and check out the cams systems on the $$$$ units.
- huac 7y agoOct 21, 2019 https://www.axios.com/zoox-self-driving-car-fundraising-52aa4ef6-9b7d-4a4d-b9be-306ecf6f3511.html https://www.axios.com/zoox-self-driving-car-fundraising-52aa...
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoThat's the bridge round while the close the actual round, as it says in the article you linked.
- rckoepke 7y agosdan: > But to be honest they haven't done anything too notable within the last year Per the article: > The company was the first to complete a fully unmanned truck trip on a 9.4-mile stretch of public highway and claims to have set a speed record for an unmanned truck, reaching 55 mph, in June 2019. I'll admit that their telepresence human driver isn't ideal for self-driving vehicles. Its strategic merits, and product merits are very arguable. But it does follow a familiar model in automation progression, and I'd imagine that quite a few investors would have been interested. Likely just came down to timing and potentially valuation or other details. Can really hurt when an investor pulls back at the last minute. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013700 for a take on that from baremetrics founder.
- sdan 7y agoForgot it was them who did it, thanks for reminding me.
- yalogin 7y agoInteresting, it looks like I am out of the loop, haven’t heard about most of these except cruise and aurora. Where do you think Zoox falls on this spectrum?
- some1else 7y agoThe article omits the size of the company. Apparently 54 people were employed at some point[1]. LinkedIn now lists 36 employees[2]. 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotics+employees&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSI812SI812&oq=company+info+starsky+robotics+employees&aqs=chrome..69i57.5416j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotic... 2: https://www.linkedin.com/company/starsky-robotics/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/starsky-robotics/
- sdan 7y agoStarsky was definitely hiring. They posted on every "Who's Hiring" on HN for a considerable amount of time. Unsure if it was ever 54, but they definitely were aggressive in hiring (job postings also kind of reflected that).
- rdiddly 7y agoWebsite still says they're hiring. They signal robust growth, you pay for it in wasted time. I wonder how many jobs I've applied for have been like that.
- pyb 7y agoFake vacancies is a huge and underreported problem for jobseekers. It is impossible to tell just from the job description.
- 2J0 7y agoI know of deep fake employment opportunities designed exclusively for identifying opportunities for IP larceny. This is a huge reason for locking down everything if you have any relatives of important people in your organisation as interns. This is the oldest privilege escalation hack I know of, and you might want to see if your outside legal will support a fake interview process for your own people via a headhunter. Reciprocal and wholly legitimate arrangements exist like this in many industries. It’s frightening how much we found we were leaking over family breakfasts in seemingly innocent ways like revealing meeting details and simply mood responses to eager-junior inquiries. Send your sons and daughters to start their own business and learn to value poker playing before they get inside the “family” business. BillG played poker rather well I’ve read...
- pyb 7y agoNot sure I understand what you are denouncing ? The fake vacancies I had in mind are not so malicious. But for the candidates, in aggregate, they are a waste of precious time and energy. - Company has still opportunities on their website, in order to look healthy, when they are in fact laying everybody off (as is the case in the OP) - Company publishes an offer for legal reasons, but in fact wants to hire a cheaper resource from abroad once they've "proven" that they "couldn't get any local talent" - Company publishes non-urgent offer, in the hope to fish for resumes, and/or waits for years for the "perfect" talent to knock on their door - Company forgot to take down vacancy, someone got hired 3 months ago
- seibelj 7y agoWhy couldn’t they raise more money or get acquired? I thought self-driving car startups were worth $1mil per engineer (at least!) in an acquihire let alone semi-functional tech. Was it a scam?
- a_t48 7y agohttps://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps-nearly-10-mile-unmanned-run/?utm_medium=single_article&utm_campaign=site_click&utm_source=in_story_promotion https://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps-nearly-10-... It's possible that they relied too much on remote assistance. Really hard to say what state their tech is in and what stage investors want to see before putting in cash.
- shorts_theory 7y ago> “We beat Waymo. We beat all the big OEMs. We’ve beat just about the whole industry,” says Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, founder and CEO of the San Francisco based start-up. I find this statement pretty disingenuous when Waymo is trying to tackle the part of the problem Starsky isn't able to solve with their own self-driving tech - driving without a human in the loop for the last mile.
- anon102010 7y agoGiven they beat all these big players their valuation should be extremely high
- newaccount1234 7y agoYou should check your figures. I believe Drive.ai, one of the leaders in the industry, was acquired for about $500,000 an engineer last summer. The numbers you are thinking of are more appropriate during 2016-2018 when the hype train was at full speed. Last summer there was a palpable feeling that the industry was beginning to 'consolidate'. I would not be surprised if all of the non-OEM, non-Google backed AV companies go bust soon.
- colonCapitalDee 7y agoWow, I interviewed with Starsky for a summer internship position back around the beginning of December. The interview went well, but I never heard back from them. I just assumed that I didn't quite clear the bar, but it looks like they got the news that funding wasn't coming (timetable from the article matches up) and just shut hiring down. During the interview I asked my interviewer about Starsky's long-term prospects, and he said that they would have near doubled in size come summer. Lol
- jiveturkey 7y agoWhat I find LOL that in December, the interviewer thought "long term" meant 6 months from then.
- treyfitty 7y agoI’ve never been involved in fundraising, so I have to ask: how often to investors balk at the last minute? Seems like a dick move.
- danpalmer 7y agoWhat it probably means in this case is that they had a term sheet, but that during due-diligence (1-3 months between term sheet and signed contracts) they pulled out. It's possible they found things they didn't like in DD. It's not uncommon to find oddities, but normally not a big issue at all. It's a really bad move. It looks very bad to companies who might be seeking investment, and could get a VC a name for causing issues in deals, so they only do it when they really need to. It typically means the company closes down as most companies raise when they have ~months of runway left, and raising a new round would take too long in most cases.
- chooseaname 7y ago> “Our approach is taking the drivers out of the truck and have them working remotely to make high-level decisions while the truck is on the highway,” Seltz-Axmacher told FreightWaves in May 2019. “To be honest, I don’t think that a super-computer can be built that is smarter than a truck driver.” Probably why they didn't get funding. VCs don't want to hear that (even if it may be closer to the truth than anyone wants to hear).
- walrus01 7y agoThis seems like a setup that while a logical architecture decision, would be reliant upon really rock solid mobile broadband on the routes driven by its trucks. Like, seven nines reliable. I saw videos of their test setup with a driver at a desk workstation/"cockpit" which was driving a remote truck. Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the LTE network where the truck happened to be at that moment was having a hiccup. It's much worse than a cargo drone that might have a 12-14 satellite GPS+GLONASS lock, that could be programmed to stop and hover in place, or retrace its flight path breadcrumb style back to base in the event of brief loss of WAN network connectivity. It's something with possibly 20,000 kilograms of mass moving at 70 mph with live humans in traffic all around it, and a lot of inertia. It's an external technical problem that the company itself can't solve, because they're not in control of LTE/5G network operators, they don't make LTE radios/modems/antennas, etc. The only places that I'm aware of using fully remote driven trucks are giant open pit mines in western Australia, where the mining company fully owns and operates in-house the network linking the trucks. I personally know very little about self driving technology, but working in network engineering, the idea of relying upon the normal publicly-accessible nationwide LTE network operators for something that could be a life-critical safety function really scares me. Even with a max-priority service like Firstnet on ATT it would be sketchy.
- topynate 7y agoThe trucks could have AI that worked most of the time. Not well enough to rely on for normal operations, but good enough for a fallback in case of losing connectivity. Some made-up numbers to explain my point: Consider a situation where the remote operator will make the right response 99.9% of the time, failing 0.1%, and the AI is 20 times worse, making an error 2% of the time. The actual error rate will be (0.1% * connection reliability) + (2% * (1 - connection reliability)). For 3-nines reliability, which is pretty poor, the error rate will be about 0.102%. For 4-nines it will be 0.1002%. Those sorts of figures would effectively pay for themselves in terms of safety, once you factor in the benefits for monitoring and work conditions for a desk-operator vs a physically present driver, and they don't require either a particularly reliable connection or a particularly good backup AI.
- _sbrk 7y agoHutch knew this would happen. Those trucks are no Gran Torino.