121–130 of 215 posts
North was a scam, and was about to be bought by patent trolls. This was a legal move by alphabet. They pretty much paid ransom to the North (Thalmic labs) founders to not be harassed by trolls later on.
I guess it at least shows that google haven't abandoned google-glass entirely (or their legal dept doesn't know they aren't in the glass business any more, i wouldn't doubt it)
Thalmic Labs/North helped to normalize the act of exaggerating the capabilities of your tech, lying to investors, raising millions of dollars and pivoting to something completely unrelated. We have to stop celebrating tech companies that are able to raise millions of dollars and still fail to deliver.
That's because they were in the business of selling shares, and now they sold them all. This story is as old as America itself. The bank that is now JP Morgan Chase, the sixth largest bank in the world, was started by Aaron Burr's fundraise for a ripoff water supply system in Manhattan. He collected $2mm, used $100,00 on the stated purpose and the rest to start a bank. These are our role models, where the point is to…
I think you means "This story is as old as Canada, itself." North was Canadian.
Also, the story is older than America. It goes way back to medieval Europe, at least. Possibly farther back than that in the Middle East, but that's not an area of history I know much about.
This acquisition along with the Fitbit deal sets up Google perfectly to dominate the health wearables market.
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My experience with the startup scene in another country agrees with your description. When tech is funded by government incubators, it tends to become a fake imitation of the VC funded industry that we know from Silicon Valley. Which often is itself a fake imitation of actual innovation, so (fake imitation)^2.
> When tech is funded by government incubators, it tends to become a fake imitation of the VC funded industry that we know from Silicon Valley. Seems a little strong? https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ (Cockroach Labs, GitLab, DataRobot, databricks, Cloudera, mongoDB (I know), probably more you've heard of) https://www.energy.gov/lpo/portfolio/portfolio-projects (Tesla) https://www.sbir.gov/news/success-stories (Qualcomm…
The problem with "government VC" is not the low hit rate--private VC has a low hit rate too.
The problem is also not that government funds get gamed--private VC gets gamed too. See WeWork for an absolutely enormous example.
The problem is really with the different cultural expectations for government vs private capital.
If a private VC firm loses 95% of their investments to failure and fraud, but has huge hits with the remaining 5%, well, that's just how VC works. The only thing that really matters is their net. If they end up with a big return, they are geniuses.
But if the government loses 95% of their investments, that's a ton of wasted taxpayer money. That's a lot of fodder for press, politicians, and activists to make hay out of. And if the remaining 5% are hits, well, the government does not exist to turn a profit. So the credit does not work out the same, even if the hit rate is similar.
Sigh, all I can think is yet another promising startup vanishes into the depths of Google, never to be seen again. Google, please stop buying companies, please learn to support your products and build a loyal customer base. You are not a startup anymore, you need to make the transformation that companies like Microsoft did, and quit moving fast and breaking things. People don't want an agile foundation, they want a h…
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I'm not sure "promising startup" describes North (previously Thalmic Labs) that well. Everything I've heard around the Waterloo tech scene is that it was mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government. Tales from past employees are not flattering. Being bought by Google is likely the best thing that could happen to both the founders…
> mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government This describes a surprisingly high number of companies I’ve worked at in Canada. These SRED credits keep afloat so many companies that should have otherwise perished and that won’t ever go anywhere. You can even hire SRED consultants that will help you milk those credits as much as pos…
It needs to be replaced.
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Stackdriver did not disappear, but having used it daily for the past 4 years and witnessed its painfully slow and buggy migration into the GCP admin, I can't say it's a product that has visibly gotten much love. We kept using it for some things out of inertia, but I can't say it ever impressed me.
How so? I've only ever used it on GC, not pre-acquisition.
Also, until recently the admin lived outside of the main GCP admin and logging into it required some kind of redirect-bouncing oauth handshake that was consistently buggy for me. Something to do with browser defaults/3rd party cookies along the chain of redirects that would cause an infinite loop. I managed to work around it on my work computer, but it was broken for at least a year...not awesome for a tool you'll be logging into in emergencies, often from other devices.
This acquisition along with the Fitbit deal sets up Google perfectly to dominate the health wearables market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google, please stop buying companies, please learn to support your products and build a loyal customer base. You are not a startup anymore, you need to make the transformation that companies like Microsoft did, and quit moving fast and breaking things. It's actually not Google's fault. It's the founders of these startups who can't resist their offer nor can they do anything to control the company once they have tak…
Are Snap and Dropbox really examples of what companies should do??
It's also not limited to those companies I mentioned, but 15 years ago, Microsoft, Google, Viacom, Myspace, Yahoo, AOL all wanted to buy Facebook pre-IPO and FB resisted all attempts and they have now become highly profitable themselves as such that they have owned the social media market. Even Netflix was approached an offer of $50 million by Blockbuster and resisted a buyout.
Given the hindsight of the growth of those companies, including Apple and Facebook, had you'd been the CEO of either of them, you'd think that selling wouldn't have been a good idea.
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> mostly smoke and mirrors from the founders who were able to maintain their own lifestyles using grants from the Canadian government This describes a surprisingly high number of companies I’ve worked at in Canada. These SRED credits keep afloat so many companies that should have otherwise perished and that won’t ever go anywhere. You can even hire SRED consultants that will help you milk those credits as much as pos…
I’ve noticed the same thing. Have you found any good writing on this topic and how the American approach differs from the Canadian approach? I’ve been fascinated by this dynamic after spending most of my working life in the USA then returning to Canada, and just feeling like something is “off” whenever I talk to Canadian startups, and it feels like a lot of the time it comes down to the way the flow of investment dif…
Also in the US there's a real sense of having to hunt and compete for talent, but at least then in the Toronto startup scene you were to feel blessed for not having to work for a bank or insurance company, so put up the with the bullshit and dysfunction please...