The article mentions a large helmet. Any pictures of it around?
The best thing we have so far is this revealing illustration tweeted by Rony Abovitz himself:
https://twitter.com/rabovitz/status/807077358624772098?ref_s...
Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
61–70 of 144 posts
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#62It doesn't matter if their tech doesn't yet work. Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen. Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position. It's a gamble, but they have a likelihood of succeeding with money and hard work. That's what they've sold to their investors.
I'd hazard a bet that augmented reality already peaked with Pokémon Go.
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see the same phenomenon and think it's the opposite. Raising millions is not a reward. I understand why you think that way since I used to think that way too. But I learned the hard way that raising money is nothing more than the price you have to pay to get to somewhere you want. So what IS reward? Obviously, if your business does well and "growing" crazy, that's your reward. That way you didn't even have to give…
> Raising millions is not a reward. They get paid for the X years it takes their startup to crash, probably quite well. Afterwards, they are considered an "Experienced entrepreneur" and thus more likely to get their foot in the door to more negotiations, given press time etc. What part of this is failing?
In most cases the companies that fail after X years have been failing for at least X-1 years. This means these guys were under total stress for X-1 years.
One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
Another thing is, you're pretty much locked into that company for X years. Even if you realize on year 1 that it's not what you started out to build, you still need to go with it, otherwise you're seen as an irresponsible prick, and people won't see you as "experienced entrepreneur". Most of the times what happens is you either trick yourself into thinking that it will work, or compromise your initial vision into building something mediocre that generates money (For example you may start out thinking you will build the next generation social network that will change everything, and end up with a behavioral targeting ad network)
Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm. Work there now. Major leadership failures across the board. Engineering talent is mostly there. The "wrong team" starts at the C-level. Looking for an out in FL now -- finding it very hard to maintain salary. May move back to west coast, but not quite ready for that yet.
Are they at least paying you a Bay Area dev salary? Curious if they used retention bonuses with a big cliff? I for one will never take a job with a vesting cliff if I can help it.
NDAs of anything about the company for departing employees too, which is what I meant to say
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#65I think what's missing from this discussion is the demo is apparently really, really good. Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim, or some investment thesis. And everyone I've spoken to who's gotten the demo is a believer. I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (afo…
Your faith in Google and Alibaba's judgment is weird to me. Google squandered a lot more than $500 million on terrible projects in the past (Glass and Plus for example.) I see no reason to think Alibaba is run by infallible geniuses either.
They may indeed have had a very slick demo. That doesn't mean the tech is anything special. That story has happened many times.
There's also no such thing as too big to fail.
People made all the same points you're making about Theranos.
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#66I think what's missing from this discussion is the demo is apparently really, really good. Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim, or some investment thesis. And everyone I've spoken to who's gotten the demo is a believer. I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (afo…
You know... this thesis that they've raised 1.1BUSD so it /must/ be good just doesn't hold water for me. It's almost an argument from authority, and it's not very useful. In particular, investors have made large investments in the past which it turns out did not have a strong technical foundation. So there's track record here. Yes, there's obviously something. There's obviously a team of people doing something. That'…
While I think the money raised is a vote of confidence from the investors -- and it's only a vote -- my point about "too big to fail" is actually more a sunk-cost argument. With that much funding, the worst-case glide path for Magic Leap might be to stumble along, sucking in continuation funding until it gets a product to market. (It's no Theranos.)
To be clear, I'm not making predictions about ML specifically. I don't have a clue about what they're doing. My general point is that huge sums of money have both momentum and gravity of their own. (I'm not saying this is rational, good, or just -- just that it seems to be true.)
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#67I think what's missing from this discussion is the demo is apparently really, really good. Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim, or some investment thesis. And everyone I've spoken to who's gotten the demo is a believer. I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (afo…
Your faith in Google and Alibaba's judgment is weird to me. Google squandered a lot more than $500 million on terrible projects in the past (Glass and Plus for example.) I see no reason to think Alibaba is run by infallible geniuses either. They may indeed have had a very slick demo. That doesn't mean the tech is anything special. That story has happened many times. There's also no such thing as too big to fail. Peop…
You're right that I'm assuming there's a thorough DD process associated with those investments. It's possible ML just showed them smoke and mirrors, too. But I don't think so (partially because I've spoken with people who've seen the demo -- they're under airtight NDA, but they're clearly not skeptical of the company).
After some introspection about why I think this way, perhaps it's the sum of money that makes it seem less risky... and but it could be an artifact of scale: most investments of that size are growth capital or PE. Instead, we're seeing risk capital assigned to a potentially enormous market, so it's scaled up, too. Almost like the world's biggest seed funding? (Take that, Clinkle!)
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#68I think what's missing from this discussion is the demo is apparently really, really good. Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim, or some investment thesis. And everyone I've spoken to who's gotten the demo is a believer. I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (afo…
Friendly pedantic usage note: you mean by means of or some synonym (via perhaps?), not vis-à-vis. The latter literally means “face to face”, but can more broadly be used to mean something like “compared to” or “in relation to”. Your use here is unidiomatic/ungrammatical.
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#69The article mentions a large helmet. Any pictures of it around?
The best thing we have so far is this revealing illustration tweeted by Rony Abovitz himself: https://twitter.com/rabovitz/status/807077358624772098?ref_s...
I believe this picture from wired is supposed to be of "the beast" that they use for demos: https://assets.wired.com/photos/w_1200/wp-content/uploads/20...
There are drawings of something more helmet like in their patents, like this one: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=D0758367&homeurl=http%3A%...
Re: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know... this thesis that they've raised 1.1BUSD so it /must/ be good just doesn't hold water for me. It's almost an argument from authority, and it's not very useful. In particular, investors have made large investments in the past which it turns out did not have a strong technical foundation. So there's track record here. Yes, there's obviously something. There's obviously a team of people doing something. That'…
While I think the money raised is a vote of confidence from the investors -- and it's only a vote -- my point about "too big to fail" is actually more a sunk-cost argument. With that much funding, the worst-case glide path for Magic Leap might be to stumble along, sucking in continuation funding until it gets a product to market. (It's no Theranos.) To be clear, I'm not making predictions about ML specifically. I don…
How often do institutional investors fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy? If you don't meet your milestones, you're probably not getting more money from the same investors. VC's make a lot of mistakes, but throwing good money after bad seems pretty rare to me.