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So Close

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31–40 of 274 posts

Re: So Close

#31

Post by rdiddly »

It's better that this happened, than if they had gotten further and become the Juicero of door locks.

Edit - all the things that had my subconscious chanting ¡Juicero!

The consultation of a Swiss watchmaker, indicating an exacting exquisiteness of mechanical design (for a door lock) indicating idealistic overdesign. ¡Juicero!

The resulting $700 price tag. ¡Juicero!

...to replace an older system that already works great. ¡Juicero!

...despite its not having any of what he calls "intelligence," which equals an internet connection and a CPU. When in fact, a system as old as the deadbolt lock has a lot of true intelligence built in, and reliance on an internet connection and a CPU is a weakness, not a victory. ¡Juicero!

Re: So Close

#32

Post by boltzmannbrain »

tl;dr Otto was almost successful in making a high-end smart door lock, but despite incredible engineering and design, bad luck (read: negligence) through an acquisition deal led Otto to run out of money.

Re: So Close

#33

Post by valuearb »

tlb wrote: post #6

Ouch. A sadly common outcome of talking to corp dev. http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html Agreeing to no-fundraising and exclusivity clauses during a long due diligence process really puts your head in their vise. And once it's there, people within the acquirer will start saying, Hey, we could built this ourselves! Let's run the clock out and kill the competition.

They were trying to sell a $700 custom designed lock based on its “user experience”. How much sense do you think this management team had?

Re: So Close

#34

Post by greenleafjacob »

twblalock wrote: post #10

If I understand the sequence of events properly, the company entered acquisition negotiations and agreed not to solicit other bids during that time. When the acquisition fell apart, the company was out of money and had to stop operations. If that's correct, it seems to me like it's something they should have known in advance -- if they knew they would be out of money by the end of the year, why would they enter acqui…

I wonder what, if anything, the agreement to proscribe other fundraising was traded for? Why would the management enter that deal without something in return (i.e. a cancellation penalty payment)? It seems negligent at best.

Re: So Close

#35

Post by nkkollaw »

vkdelta wrote: post #30
nkkollaw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally it did, I guess it got moderated to the actual title of the article, as per rules?

Yes, I edited it but got changed either by bots or mods.

Was better when it mentioned the name of the company :-)

Re: So Close

#36

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

mikeash wrote: post #22
twblalock wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even have a proximity sensor -- you have to touch it to make it work. Might as well stick a key in at the same time. If I paid that kind of money I would expect my door to unlock for me when I approached it. It also has no manual override with a key like some smart locks -- it just has some backup batteries that last an unspecified amount of time. Because it has no key, it can't be re-keyed, so good luck c…

My $200 August is smart enough to unlock when I approach. For $700 I’d at least expect it to massage my backside as I walk through or something.

Or open the door, not just unlock.

Re: So Close

#37

Post by nkkollaw »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #13
a13n wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the title of the article though, seems fine to me.

No, it is not fine. I know it is standard practice on HN but I really don't like it at all. Just imagine every submitted article had a title like this: the HN frontpage would be full of links like "so close", "a look back", "introducing our most important features yet", "a statement regarding the events last weeks"... HN would completely unusable like this because you would have to click on every single link to figur…

Luckily, most writers pick better titles than this guy. If what you describe actually happened, the rules would change.

Re: So Close

#38

Post by nkkollaw »

twblalock wrote: post #19
mikeash wrote: post #14

Is (was?) there something more to this product that I missed, or is it really a $700 smart lock?

It doesn't even have a proximity sensor -- you have to touch it to make it work. Might as well stick a key in at the same time. If I paid that kind of money I would expect my door to unlock for me when I approached it. It also has no manual override with a key like some smart locks -- it just has some backup batteries that last an unspecified amount of time. Because it has no key, it can't be re-keyed, so good luck c…

It's so awesome when people create problems to fix non-problems.

I never once thought my life would be better if I didn't need to put up with those nasty keys...

Re: So Close

#39

Post by jmull »

Very interesting. I love to hear the other side of it though, because it feels perhaps self-serving.

E.g., he seems to imply the potential acquirer unexpectedly screwed them over, but no deal is done until it’s done, and this one did not really seem like it was that close.

There’s no reason for Otto to agree to an acquisition process that prevents them from raising money they desperately need if they had any reasonable prospects. As he said, they were not actually looking for acquisition. So it seems like this was a last gasp effort to stay afloat in some form, which ultimately failed (as previous efforts had).

One reason an acquisition might be looking good before due diligence and fall apart after is because things turn out to be significantly less rosey than initially presented. When you’re looking to make a deal of course you’re going to accentuate your positives but you have to acknowledge and address your problems as well or you’re simply wasting everyone’s time.

I suspect the fundamental problem is that a $700 smart door lock is a very difficult sell, especially with all the competition out there.

Re: So Close

#40

Post by anigbrowl »

bdcravens wrote: post #25
rgbrenner wrote: post #5

Can someone fix the title? it's click bait. There's no way to tell what the article is about without clicking on it. At least mention the company. (Good article though.)

Guidelines say to not editorialize titles, and stick with original, but I agree. Putting short summary in parentheses would help (like "So Close (Otto postmortem)")

That guideline needs to go. HN submitters often summarize the content of an article more appropriately for other readers than the original writer does. Often the newsworthiness of an article isn't apparent for one reason or another.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that this was a story of a promising hardware startup that ran out of operating cash during acquisition negotiations.

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