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Translation from VC-Backed PR Jargon to English of Magic Leap CEO Statement
- trollied 6y agoWow, they managed to raise another $350m. What a strange world we live in.
- chrisco255 6y agoVC money printer go brrrrr.
- person_of_color 6y agoI think this is harsh. The CEO surely must be acting in good faith to his investors?
- trollied 6y agoThe CEO has actually stepped down: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/29/magic_leap_ceo_rony_abovitz_steps_down/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/29/magic_leap_ceo_rony...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 6y ago'spatial computing in enterprise' << for some reason I expect this to be the result of a summer intern's project
- pfortuny 6y ago“We have closed significant new funding and have very positive momentum towards closing key strategic enterprise partnerships” So meaningful...
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoLoosely translates to: Some (more?) fools agreed to part with (more?) of their (someone else’s?) money, and we’ve nearly finished transferring those funds to our cronies.
- BigJono 6y agoRofl. The last startup I worked for had "very positive momentum towards closing key strategic enterprise partnerships" from the day I joined to the day we went down like the Hindenburg.
- kangaroozach 6y agoHahahahahahahah!
- sdan 6y agoRealistically, which "enterprise" would buy this?
- nickflood 6y agoGiven that HoloLens already exists, I guess, they're looking to leverage their investor selling skills on some enterprise execs that don't need this stuff...
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoWho will then force it on to their subordinates who have no use for it.
- xabotage 6y agoThis. I have worked and developed on the HoloLens; it is 20% cool tech demo and 80% cardboard propped up by Microsoft's over-eager marketing (think Xbox Kinect). Only difference between them and Magic Leap is that Microsoft has a large swath of existing gullible enterprise customers who will happily buy whatever superfluous products they can be talked into buying, whereas I guess Magic Leap's core competencies are on the opposite end, selling to gullible VCs.
- eDameXxX 6y agoAs for the Hololens, it's used by Trimble[1], Volvo[2], Mattel[3]. There are also cases where hospitals use it [4],[5]. [1]https://mixedreality.trimble.com/ https://mixedreality.trimble.com/ [2]https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/172082/the-future-is-now-volvo-cars-and-microsoft-enable-people-to-talk-to-their-cars https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele... [3]https://vrscout.com/news/mattel-mixed-reality-toy-design/ https://vrscout.com/news/mattel-mixed-reality-toy-design/ [4]https://www.medgadget.com/2018/08/hospital-introducing-hololens-augmented-reality-into-the-operating-room.html https://www.medgadget.com/2018/08/hospital-introducing-holol... [5]https://www.businessinsider.com/london-doctors-microsoft-hololens-headsets-covid-19-patients-ppe-2020-5?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/london-doctors-microsoft-hol...
- robinduckett 6y agoOh, shut up Gruber. Why not put your own money, time and effort into building something? Extremely easy to write stuff like this from your Armchair you giant hypocrite. Disclaimer: I used to love how snide this guy was when I was younger and I don't really care about Magic Leap!
- trollied 6y agoMagic Leap put billions, years & plenty of effort in. What did they actually produce vs what they promised?
- saagarjha 6y ago> Why not put your own money, time and effort into building something? He did, it’s called Daring Fireball.
- julvo 6y agoAnd markdown, a text format most of us use on a daily basis
- zapzupnz 6y agoSo you can ONLY point out when somebody is pulling off an obvious con, gathering billions of dollars in funds with complete vapourware, producing no deliverables of any value for 9 years — and, I reiterate, ONLY — if you have managed to make a successful company? Good job Gruber manages to run his own full-time business, then, because apparently one isn't allowed to criticise Magic Leap. God forbid somebody prevent others from falling victim to yet another snake-oil salesman. Better we all just quietly and blithely accept what our capitalist overlords tell us, yes? Only the successful ~~rich~~ have any right to tell us what to think! What kind of insane gatekeeping is this? ^
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> Why not put your own money, time and effort into building something? You know he invented Markdown, right, which I'm guessing has added more real world value than anything that has ever come out of Magic Leap.
- IngoBlechschmid 6y agoWhen I visit https://www.magicleap.com/ https://www.magicleap.com/ without cookies enabled, I'm redirected to a non-existent page.
- notkaiho 6y agoMagic Leap more like Tragic Leap.
- cosmojg 6y agoTragic Heap* See: https://palmerluckey.com/magic-leap-is-a-tragic-heap/ https://palmerluckey.com/magic-leap-is-a-tragic-heap/
- Animats 6y agoWho put in $350 million more? Did anybody? So far there's just an internal email from Magic Leap management.
- rapsey 6y agoSomeone suffering from sunk cost fallacy maybe
- ur-whale 6y agoSoftbank? They've been know to do way dumber things.
- kovacs_x 6y agoor it's almost as if they sold to someone, just named it differently. I'm assuming if they flop after those 350M, everything (IP, materials, etc) will go to those investors.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago$2.4B wasted on this. They weren't smashing atoms together to discover world-changing new physics. They didn't send people to space or develop some new revolutionary type of transport that could transform society. They made some really average AR glasses. Two point four BILLION dollars. The Tesla Model S cost ~500M to develop from start to finish[0], so Magic Leap has spent 5 times that amount. The ENTIRE Starlink satellite network will cost ~$10B total to develop, build, and deploy [1]. So Magic Leap spent a quarter of that. Apple developed and released the original iPhone on a budget of $150M. Magic Leap has spent 16 times that. These aren't apples to apples, of course. But I think it puts in perspective just how much of a scam Magic Leap is in general. [0] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-s-development-costs-so-far.7294/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-s-development-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)
- cma 6y agoFor $500million did Tesla invent the cell chemistry?
- gruturo 6y agoNo, but for $2.4B Magic Leap didn't invent much physics or chemistry either (or anything, really). Seems like a fair comparison. Hell, Cards Against Humanity achieved more (and faster, cheaper) with their hole in the ground Black Friday fundraiser: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/27/503502142/people-donated-nearly-100-000-to-dig-a-big-pointless-hole-in-the-ground https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/27/503502142...
- cma 6y agoI'm not saying Magic Leap is better, I'm just saying what is their tech advantage and innovation and how is it comparable to people doing novel nuclear physics? So far they have lost money and paid out more in a celebrity fundraiser bonus than all profitable quarters combined.
- fermienrico 6y agoHow come VCs are not learning from examples like this? Perhaps get engineering consultants take a look at the tech, provide their independent assessment of the tech and guide them to not make these mistakes again? Hindsight is always 20/20 except when you also have foresight which is maybe 20/40? Surely, Juicero with foresight was a bad idea. Or ostensibly, these things are not that straightforward as they seem to be?
- yborg 6y agoBecause the VCs get paid win or lose? There's literally no downside, there's massive amounts of money looking for returns and as has been proven time and again, even a long terrible track record is no deterrent to getting money out of public pension funds that also have no real downside to making terrible decisions.
- rmnoon 6y agoThis isn't really accurate. VCs would much rather get paid 20+% carry than 2% management fees (and raising a follow-on fund would be quite difficult if you failed to make returns and publicly blew most of your fund on a boondoggle like Magic Leap).
- fermienrico 6y agoAt some point reputation is on the line I would guess. The whole credit system and all.
- paul_f 6y agoIn any given fund, true. VCs re always raising the next fund and need to show results.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoSuccess of the product isn’t necessarily the point. The volume and velocity of money certainly would have fattened the wallets of more than a few consultants, lawyers, accountants, and their hangers-on.
- aaron695 6y agoAR is like homeopathy if you believe in it then I'm not sure you are ever being lied to.
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoDo we have any evidence of the $350mm raised? Might the e-mail have gone out on a term sheet, as opposed to anything binding having been signed? On a whim, I tried to see if the SEC’s EDGAR [1] showed any recent Forms D by Magic Leap. Not that surprisingly, it looks like they haven’t ever bothered filing one. [1] https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml
- bzb3 6y agoThis sounds like a lot of envy. They made a lot of money conning people legally. Live with it.
- foobar_ 6y agoMore like disgust.
- zapzupnz 6y agoWhy should people just live with it? Why aren't people entitled to opinions, much less unable to post those opinions on their own blog? And why should disapproving of shysters and snake-oil salesmen should reduce to simply envy? Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. This kind of nonsense that Magic Leap has managed to pull off makes it so much harder for tech companies that actually have something to contribute to the world.
- bzb3 6y agoOf course they are entitled to their opinion. They have one, right?I have mine: they are envious.
- danielscrubs 6y agoFor anyone wondering about how much Google invested in them, it was at least $542 million [1]. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/magic-leap-google-investment-2014-10?op=1&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/magic-leap-google-investment...
- MangoCoffee 6y ago"Magic Leap: Spatial Computing for Enterprise" you gotta love whoever come up with "Spatial Computing for Enterprise".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xarope 6y agoELI5 what constitutes spatial computing platform for the enterprise? $500 measuring devices (aka rulers)?!?
- seemslegit 6y agoVery smart people might have been duped into investing alright, but it's not because they were duped to believe in the tech or the product, rather it was because they were duped to believe that a bigger sucker will come along as from their previous experience one usually did eventually.
- stephc_int13 6y agoPredicting the future is notoriously hard. I think plenty of successful products were once in a shaky/buggy/bulky state. The hype was high on AR and only a few experts had a good understanding of the constraints, especially about optics, physics, and sensors.
- kulor 6y agoDon't hate the player, hate the game
- oftenwrong 6y agoThis is my first time hearing about Magic Leap, and it is quite a story. Reminiscent of Theranos. Was the retinal projection tech ever real, even in an imperfect, non-miniaturised form? Also, I stumbled upon a Variety piece [1] about a Magic Leap conference that sounds straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley: >However, Magic Leap decided to go a different route. When its CEO Rony Abovitz took the stage at the beginning of the conference’s opening keynote, he vaguely framed the company’s technology as a remedy to political and other divisions plaguing today’s world, postulating: “Our new medium of spatial computing is fresh. It doesn’t carry the baggage and negative headlines that are dominating the news today.” ... >“The conversation that we are starting here goes on for decades,” proclaimed Abovitz. He went on to talk about Magic Leap’s idea to build city-wide AR information layers — an interesting idea, but not anything we should expect to materialize any time soon, as he freely admitted, while inexplicably bringing up the spectre of fascism: >“There is gonna be other companies proposing alternate x-verses. There will be all these competing universes and systems, like there is competing governments. There is monarchy, there is democracy, there is fascism, and there is progressive, liberal thought. And these holistic systems will be how governance might happen. How many people live their life. And this is not tomorrow, this might be a few years from now. But you set the stage for that right now.” >Abovitz seemed to sense that there was still some work to be done before Magic Leap could defeat fascism in the Magicverse — and he promptly proposed to host a Burning Man-style gathering to get it done: >“In order to continue this conversation, we probably kind of need a Burning Man in the desert. Like a kind of Magicverse event where we hang out for a few days, do a vision quest, build weird things. So more on that later, can’t commit to it 100%, but we think it’d be cool.” >There were some other odd moments that morning. A third-party developer read a poem to the audience. Science fiction author and Magic Leap chief futurist Neal Stephenson talked close to 10 minutes about virtual goats. The three-hour keynote didn’t feature a single live demo. [1] https://variety.com/2018/digital/opinion/magic-leap-leapcon-1202978949/ https://variety.com/2018/digital/opinion/magic-leap-leapcon-...
- itronitron 6y agoretinal projection tech is pretty old actually, from the HIT lab at UW (http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrd/ http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrd/) "The VRD, based on the concept of scanning an image directly on the retina of the vi ewer's eye, was invented at the HIT Lab in 1991."
- karmakaze 6y agoAn entertaining read, but I don't believe for one second that this is how it was for most of the life of the company. Perhaps toward the end this became their reality. It's really more of a case of drinking too much of your own kool-aid and biting off more than you can chew. I believe that everyone from the top down really did believe they were creating an amazing future. It reminds me of the similarly named company General Magic from the 90's. I tried it out in the day and the documentary is simultaneously sad and joyous. Hats off to Magic Leap for trying. But.. they should have released sooner and often rather than trying to create an entire medium and ecosystem behind a curtain for v1.