Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 125 posts

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#81

Post by ryandrake »

adl wrote: post #56
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but depending on your political views, you also have to tolerate living in florida , which can be a distasteful experience to people whose cultural, religious and political values more closely align with the residents of portland, OR.

For someone who lives outside the US, but has visited Florida (Miami and Orlando), what do yo mean by tolerate? I understand that they may be more... conservative?. As a tourist, Miami seemed multicultural and fairly liberal, are state politics different?

Speaking as a former Floridian who lived both in south Florida and the panhandle: South Florida is a tiny blue outlier in an otherwise deep red southern state. State laws and politics are dominated by Tallahassee which is physically and culturally closer to Alabama. It would be a shock to someone moving from the Bay Area or Seattle.

That said, zero income taxes, low sales taxes, warm weather year round, and great beaches are all very compelling.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#82

Post by wand3r »

iooi wrote: post #4

> Magic Leap has raised more than $2.3 billion to date, and has been valued at above $6 billion. How can you raise that much money without shipping a product? Or better question, why do you need raise that much money in the first place?

> How can you raise that much money without shipping a product?

Some businesses and technologies are extremely capital intensive and funding can/should/is provided on achieving benchmarks instead of a cohesive product. This is different than shipping an MVP and improving it which in some industries is not possible. YC for example funds hardsci fusion reactor companies and SA talks about how they iterate really fast during the YC period to produce some tangible benchmark which is obviously much less than a full-fledged product but much more than some nebulous "concept".

So yes, it makes sense that certain industries receive larger than average investment relative to other industries at similar product stages. While I myself am extremely skeptical of Magic Leap, their technology and the likelihood investors aren't participating in some sunk-cost fallacy investment thesis there is a non-cyncial view: MagicLeap has been showing significant achievement along both technological and production benchmarks privately to investors and they are confident that the technology & manufacturing improvements warrant continued investment.

I think the amount of capital raised pre-validation is insane as it isn't simply larger than average it is orders of magnitude larger...

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#83

Post by wmeredith »

walrus01 wrote: post #19
iooi wrote: post #4

> Magic Leap has raised more than $2.3 billion to date, and has been valued at above $6 billion. How can you raise that much money without shipping a product? Or better question, why do you need raise that much money in the first place?

I wonder if given the bulky size of the thing, the tech might be great, but it's just too early. For those people who are old enough to have been working in the tech industry in the dotcom 1.0 boom days, the business model proposed by the epic failure of Webvan was later validated by Amazon/Prime Now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan Look at all that money down the drain.

Timing is... everything.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#84

Post by vernie »

Holomakerbot wrote: post #24
iooi wrote: post #4

> Magic Leap has raised more than $2.3 billion to date, and has been valued at above $6 billion. How can you raise that much money without shipping a product? Or better question, why do you need raise that much money in the first place?

Only a couple weeks to find out. They have multiple presentations slated for GDC, the largest gaming developer conference.

I expect that they'll do what they do at every conference: show video of a celebrity wearing and reacting to the product.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#85

Post by maxxxxx »

velominati wrote: post #27
walrus01 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if given the bulky size of the thing, the tech might be great, but it's just too early. For those people who are old enough to have been working in the tech industry in the dotcom 1.0 boom days, the business model proposed by the epic failure of Webvan was later validated by Amazon/Prime Now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan Look at all that money down the drain.

It's possible. The Apple Newton is a great case study of a good idea that was too early. And the inability to minitiarize it sufficiently to fit in a pocket was one reason for it's failure. A few years later the Palm Pilot was much more successful because it could fit in your pocket, especially the baggy jeans that were fashionable in the late 90's. Webvan's model hasn't yet been validated. The local delivery startup…

I think it's more likely that Magic Leap will be way too late at release time.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#86

Post by deltron3030 »

jorgemf wrote: post #60

I think this is just incredible. Let's suppose they have an incredible technology and that works (which it is not true at this time because they don't have any product out yet). How do they justify the product adoption which such high valuation? (with patents of products they also don't have any idea if the people will want them?). Even it is the best technology ever, if not enough people buy it the company will go d…

They could pivot into being an OEM. Marketing doesn't seem to be their strength, it only got a bit better recently after they outsourced their branding to a bigger agency.

I suspect that they spend a lot for content, because growing organically is almost impossible if you target entertainment with an rumored $2k price point. Nobody would buy that if the're only a few apps, even if they're unlinke anything else.

Then, as the next step they'd need to provide a good developer experience. Needing a PC for a device that aspires to disrupt the industry and replace other devices, won't cut it. It would need to run on the device.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#87

Post by vernie »

philip1209 wrote: post #46

A16Z investor Benedict Evans's Twitter reply today to a skeptic: > Frontier hardware tech is expensive. And, the investors have actually seen the tech. As will you, pretty soon ;) source: https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/971404194300141568

I guess you also get a pamphlet on the Rony Abovitz "tell, don't show" approach to PR when you invest.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#88

Post by Holomakerbot »

vernie wrote: post #84
Holomakerbot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a couple weeks to find out. They have multiple presentations slated for GDC, the largest gaming developer conference.

I expect that they'll do what they do at every conference: show video of a celebrity wearing and reacting to the product.

I think you'll be surprised if that's really what you expect. Developers don't pay money to see something like that. They're there to learn and the three presentations are aimed at using the platform. Expect an SDK release as well.

Re: Magic Leap Raises $461M from Saudis

#89

Post by edshiro »

When will we have a _real_ product? And what is the company's strategy? I mean they are trying to bring something new to the market (read something much more mainstream than Google Glass), and aside from the fact that the hardware is not ready, I doubt they have reached an affordable enough price level for general public adoption nor developed killer apps yet.

My only thinking here is that they expect to be acquired by Google/Amazon/Netflix/Apple et al for the team and promising tech, as they know they'll never make the revenue to justify the billions they ate in funding.

Post reply on HN