121–130 of 274 posts
Why are there so many (large) companies calling themselves or their product Otto? A probably incomplete list: - http://www.otto.com - https://www.ottomotors.com - http://www.otto-company.com - https://www.meetotto.com
Presumably for the "auto" homophone?
What a garbage post from a garbage project that wasted lots of time. Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-less system with new gears to move the same deadbolt, is providing zero innovation, b/c it's still just a little deadbolt securing all ~inch of door-perimeter to the frame (unless I missed something and they also re-invented the door hinge). So much business BS in…
Trying to recreate something each of us uses every day and make it delightful is a completely worthy goal. To say that a “keyless lock” isn’t a new user experience makes zero sense whatsoever - it’s a new UX by definition. The fact that it wouldn’t stop a SWAT team from breaking the door down is beside the point - they never claimed it would, and that wasn’t the goal.
Why is their passion for building great locks any more silly than the passion each of us has? They took a stab at it and it didn’t work out, and that’s too bad, especially since it seems to have been for business reasons as much as product reasons.
It’s ok to say it shouldn’t have worked out because it’s fundamentally flawed. But to cheer and mock the demise of a project a lot of people were passionate about, one that was dedicated to making a great anything, seems to me to be the antithesis of what a community of hackers and makers should be for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, there's possibly some reason for sympathy here. But how much were these 70 people being paid? How much did they save? How many of them could have been in a position to have a month or more of cash saved as an emergency fund? It's smart in any situation to save for a rainy day but especially so when you're working for a startup.
It's unlikely any of the employees are truly broke, they're just (rightfully) complaining about not getting a reasonable severance.
What a garbage post from a garbage project that wasted lots of time. Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-less system with new gears to move the same deadbolt, is providing zero innovation, b/c it's still just a little deadbolt securing all ~inch of door-perimeter to the frame (unless I missed something and they also re-invented the door hinge). So much business BS in…
I think the cost honestly killed them. If they would have just bolted a SoC and decent software onto a mostly existing lock, they could have sold the thing for $50 more than a regular lock and still made money. Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new…
(who knows what the state of their software is but that isn't something people will focus on compared to price)
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.
> Treat investors as saying no till they unequivocally say yes, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies.
>I mentioned earlier that investors prefer to wait if they can. What's particularly dangerous for founders is the way they wait. Essentially, they lead you on. They seem like they're about to invest right up till the moment they say no.
> When you talk to investors your m.o. should be breadth-first search, weighted by expected value. You should always talk to investors in parallel rather than serially.
If Otto had done the many investors in parallel thing they might still be launching.
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…
So, I disagree with his comments about the product. His points about management should be taken into consideration. The shutdown was mismanaged.
The core engineering team had folks with 3+ years working on Mechanical, Electrical, Firmware, iOS, Android and Backend engineering. This was not an easy feat to pull given the small team and that the manufacturing was in China on the same lines that build Apple's iPhone with the same level of quality.
I also can't imagine a $700 lock unless I'm desperately trying to keep my collection of Juiceros safe, but I'm not really their target market. Likely even consumers weren't their target market, builders of very high-end homes were because they were selling image and style as much as functionality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love == Trust -- or we really disagree about love, so much in fact, we might as well use different words.
That’s an interesting definition of love. May I ask if you have kids? For me, love is multi-faceted and can’t be defined as a single attribute like trust. People love food that literally kills them. You don’t always get to choose whom or what you love.
Yes you may. I have 3 (8-9-12). I don't "trust" them to not eat candy that I said they shouldn't eat, but I do trust them not to kill me in my sleep -- which is what trust is about (IMHO).
In fact I think I trust them more than I love them, and I love them a lot. But sometimes I'm upset with them. Being upset or angry doesn't affect trust.
Trust is a kind of binary quality that is either on or off; it may be too strong to say that love == trust, but I really can't imagine how I could love someone without trusting them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unlikely any of the employees are truly broke, they're just (rightfully) complaining about not getting a reasonable severance.
It's likely that several of these employees are legitimately broke (for reasons beyond their control, not because they're bad at adulting), but they conceal it. Signs of weakness harm your negotiating position.
The company did not have the money to pay its bills for at least two months before shutdown, finally laying everyone off on December 12. There was nothing to indicate they didn't have money to pay us before then. I probably won't see a dime for the last two months of work. Other contractors took bigger hits than me. In total Otto owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors for work already performed.
I'm beyond upset at the recklessness of the management and the board in this situation. They could have laid off the contractors in October when they realized they did not have enough money to pay all liabilities. They could have explained the situation and offered a bonus in the event of a successful exit.
Instead they said nothing about their insolvency, continued having us working on the (implicit) assumption that they could pay us, and continued gambling with invoices owed to me and other contractors.
If I ran my own company this way, if I just lost customer data or wrote broken code, I would not be in business for very long. Yet in VC land, the board (Reid Hoffman, Josh Elman, Sam Jadallah) will just go to the next venture.
I'm in a hole and looking for work in January, if you or your company needs help. I'm also happy to pass on the names of the other contractors who are getting 86 cents on the dollar for their work in 2017. https://burke.services