I worked with the Tango tablet a bit when it was released as a dev kit, and it worked decently well (as far as I remember). The biggest problem seemed to be that it never really got past the "dev kit" stage, as far as I'm aware. I'd guess that behind their decision was the fact that there were (and still are) very few use cases for phone/tablet AR that are useful to the consumer market - in a lot of ways it's still a toy. (that's not to say it's useless - I could name a bunch of important niche use cases - but only that I haven't seen a compelling mass-market need)
I have no data to back this up, but my expectation is that this is mostly a result of two things:
1. It's often surprisingly difficult to fire an underperformer (anecdata: a friend of mine has lost multiple talented members of his team in the past few months - all the result of having to work with one completely unqualified person. For some reason, the other person has not been fired). As a result, a bad hire can have an outsized and lasting effect on a company.
2. Unless you're looking at very senior positions, there are almost always more people available to fill a role. You may miss 9 out of 10 people who would be effective in the role, but you only need to hire one person.
The math changes a bit when you look at the mythical 10x developer, so maybe it would be worth looking into false negatives specifically in that case. Still, getting that 10x dev would be much more important in a more senior position.
Related question: How does one balance objective, numbers-driven reporting like this with the terms of an NDA? I imagine that most companies would consider the financial impact (or other similar statistics) of many features to be a trade secret.
As far as I'm aware, there aren't any LEO satellite internet providers at the moment (a few in GSO, but the latency there is probably too long to make it relevant for trading), so I think that it just isn't an option. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the first LEO constellations come online.
Location: SF Bay Area
Remote: ok
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: Hardware Program Management (EPM/OPM/NPI)
Résumé/CV: email for resume, or LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jordanebrooks/
Email: [email protected]
I was lucky enough to meet Keahi at a World's Fair Nano in SF a few years ago and chat with him a bit afterwards as well. He's a really smart guy, and his boots are awesome, but I have to echo a few other commenters here: he seemed too focused on the design and engineering and didn't seem to know how to execute past that. In particular, it seemed to me that the boots themselves weren't ready for production. They worked exceptionally well, but they were hand-made, and it was clear that they weren't designed to be made in a factory setting.
Hardware is a slow business by its nature, especially when coming into it from the inventor/designer side. But at some point the lean startup is right. "Fail Fast" has one concept at its core: win or lose, you have to execute. Keahi actually went out and built his design (which is more than many hardware inventors can say). But the next step in the execution of a consumer hardware business has to be building enough of your product to sell to customers, and that's a different skill set.
If you find yourself stuck in the design phase, try to find a way to push forward. If you're short on cash, maybe a group of early, dedicated customers (or a Kickstarter) can provide the funds you need to set up small-scale manufacturing. If you can't find some initial customers and can't successfully run a Kickstarter, at least you'll know it's time to move on. Hardware's a tough industry, and I firmly believe that there are plenty of great ideas out there that would survive if they could get past this particular bump.
Anyway, I hope he manages to push past the design phase and into production - it's a cool product, and one that I'd love to be able to buy someday.
I think his real issue is market fit. He only talks about his vision, what he wants to do. Not a word about his customers. The ability to run that fast is amazing, but the boots themselves are ungainly and the stride looks awkward as hell. I wonder what kind of speed boost he could get in a boot that looks more like a boot than a pair of stilts. I'd bet there's a bigger market for a "normal" boot that gives you, say, a 10% boost in speed, than these things.
I'm not arguing that this is the way it SHOULD be, but as far as I can tell the difference stems from a perceived difference in "area of effect". For example, an assembly line worker's job is to physically make as many widgets per hour as possible at high quality. Maybe the limit of human ability is 100 widgets/hr. If the company CEO replaces half of the workers with robots that can make 1,000 widgets/hr, the workers won't benefit from that because they're still making 100 widgets/hr, while the executive just 5x'd the factory's output, which is likely to be worth a bonus.
That's simple enough, but there's a problem with this line of reasoning. What if, rather than replacing the workers, the CEO gives half of them a WidgetTool3000, which allows workers to make 1,000 widgets/hr with no extra training or effort? From the executive's position, she just did the same thing: She adjusted the process to 5x the factory's output by adding a piece of technology. But half of the workers are now producing 10x more widgets, so shouldn't they get a piece of the newly created wealth too?
(Here's where I toss in the disclaimer of "this is how it works, but I'm not going to comment on the morality of it")
The answer is no, according to corporate tradition. The market has already determined that the value of a worker with a set level of training and ability is $X. Amplifying the worker's output doesn't change anything about the value of the worker (in fact, nothing has changed about the worker at all. He could be swapped with someone not using a WidgetTool with no loss in value for the company) - the WidgetTool is what has created the extra value for the company - it doesn't matter who uses it.
On the other hand, it sure as hell feels like crap to be the guy making 10x the widgets for the same pay.
>If the company CEO replaces half of the workers with robots that can make 1,000 widgets/hr, the workers won't benefit from that because they're still making 100 widgets/hr, while the executive just 5x'd the factory's output, which is likely to be worth a bonus.
Where's the value add of the CEO here? They didn't create the robot. They are not operating it. They're a middleman.
Middlemen should typically have very low margins in an efficient market.
You're getting at the heart of it here, I think. The CEO's job in this case was to gather the information necessary to make a good decision about which robot to purchase, then use her (hopefully) experienced judgement to make the best possible decision for the value of the company. There's definitely some value to that process, but I think most people would agree that it's not worth the multi-million dollar bonus she'd probably get from the 5x productivity increase.
Executive pay being tied to company performance is a good thing for the health of the company (no comment on whether that's "good" or "bad" overall) as long as the metrics are defined correctly, but at some point the absolute amount of compensation lost its relationship with the actual effect the CEO has on the company. But that makes sense... I mean what do you expect to happen when people essentially set their own pay? The "in" club of board membership is very much a real thing, and responsible behavior at the expense of other board members is easy enough to punish at another company's board meeting where the pecking order is reversed.
Depending on the scale of the increase, I have no problem with her multi-million dollar bonus as a result of superior business outcomes generated under her leadership. Hell, I don’t even care if she was originally opposed to buying the robots and only decided to after a compelling presentation from the COO. The buck stops with her and if she generates superior results in 8-10 figures, multi-million payouts aren’t hard for me to swallow as a shareholder, employee, or customer.
That would make sense if CEOs had some downside to failure, but they don't anymore. All though CEOs who have golden parachutes to cover their failure, and massive salaries to cover their successes mean there is no connection between performance and pay. They just get a lot all of the time
The CEO is not a middleman. The CEO is the one who does the market research to decide if the market can absorb making 1000 widgets/hr, or if it will saturate and cause him to be unable to make payments on the robot and thus go bankrupt. The CEO is the one who decides if they put R&D into making widget 2.0 (which the robot wouldn't be able to make but the humans can), or if widget 2.0 couldn't be enough better to be worth the R&D and thus isn't worth it. The CEO is the one who sees competition coming from China and realizing he cannot compete and comes up with a plan to do something else so that as China is ramping up he is ramping down and transitioning.
The above is a very hard job with hundreds of places where some decision could be wrong. A good CEO generally makes enough good decisions that the company stays open for years, while a bad CEO will make decisions that cause the company to go out of business.
Of course many ceos are a negative on the company. There are many studies on ceos, high priced ones generally are bad, while the unknown insider who moved up the ranks is probably good.
That's assuming a static system. Large increases in output and margin attract competitors which reduces margin. Things will reach a steady state again where the margin matches the opportunity cost. It's very difficult for a company to sustain a margin advantage.
Also, productivity increases lead to price reductions, which lead to the increased output per labor not necessarily meaning the labor value goes up.
I agree completely, but I still think it's interesting to explore the data behind WHY hardware is hard. As a hardware founder who went the Kickstarter path (along with 56% of hardware companies), a lot of what the article says about early funding resonates - crowdfunding isn't enough, unless you're wildly successful (and even then, not always). It may seem obvious to you, but it's something most aspiring hardware founders I talk to don't understand (and I didn't really grasp either).
The crowdfunding platforms bill themselves as just that - funding platforms. Once you raise on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, you're supposed to be able to take off like a rocket. The only problem with the story they sell you is that most startups don't take off, even after a successful campaign. You could say maybe they didn't raise enough money (and in most cases, I think you'd be right), but that still doesn't solve their problem - they raised what they could. If they couldn't raise enough money through crowdfunding, is crowdfunding really a viable option for hardware? And if not, why do over half of hardware startups choose to go that route?
On the other hand, maybe the horrible survivor rate for hardware startups is partially due to crowdfunding. After all, it allows companies to raise funds without being vetted in the same ways that a VC-backed company might be. Maybe it allows a lower quality of product/company/founding team through the gates, and as a result, we see a lower success rate for hardware.
The bottom line is I have no idea, but it's interesting to get a peek at the mechanisms behind "hardware is hard", rather than just falling back on the mantra and ending the discussion there.
This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say.
I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere.
NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...
There's no doubt that Amazon has much more established delivery logistics than Uber at this point, but I wonder if the real value would come from another angle:
Uber has been pushing hard on self-driving cars (I mean, in the long term, it strikes me as their only viable business model, so it makes sense). By my best estimates, salary for delivery drivers for Amazon packages run somewhere between $6B and $10B per year (for comparison, if I remember correctly, Amazon's revenue is somewhere around $35B/yr). Automating delivery could be a HUGE deal for them, and an opportunity to scoop up a major player in the autonomous driving space might look very appealing.
Then again, with Washington State throwing the doors open for autonomous testing, Amazon could likely develop their own system on their own turf for less, even if Uber's valuation goes WAY down.
