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Skully has crashed and burned

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Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#11

Post by mikestew »

ansible wrote: post #4

I recently installed a Sena BT system for my helmet. And I'm fairly pleased with it. It would be nice to have a HUD for driving directions, but relying on just the voice prompts is usually sufficient. The Skully design is neat, but I don't see a big enough market for it.

The Skully design is neat, but I don't see a big enough market for it.

How much of a market could there possibly be for a $1500 helmet? I shudder at the thought of a $700 Shuberth hitting the ground. I consider a helmet to be disposable as well. How disposable is a $1500 helmet? And are you a Shoei head or an Arai? IOW, will this helmet even fit my style of head, or is it going to leave hotspots after a few hours?

Cool tech, no argument. But it needs to come down to something like a $200 add-on like the Bluetooth unit for my Nolan.

As to the ultimate reason for their demise, I have no idea. From what little I've paid attention, I'm guessing a combination of way overpriced and, yeah, hardware is hard.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#12

Post by ginkgotree »

Really sad to hear this. I was rooting for them and thought the helmet could save lives, in addition to making it way easier to navigate turn-by-turn on a motorcycle. True, not many would pay $1500 for a motorcycle, but like any other hardware technology, that cost would have come down with scale. I already invested half that in a normal Shoei helmet. I had planned to purchase one to support the product and future scale once they started delivering pre-orders. I hope someone picks up on this idea and starts it again with better investors and culture.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#16

Post by dmix »

gkya wrote: post #10

Why was actually wrong with the company? I did not understand what caused them to stop operations. Also, the HUD seems to be a very useful thing for GPS navigation (IDK if the rear view is all that useful, but GPS certainly is).

Hardware startups are incredibly challenging and capital intensive. It seems they ran into the classic cash flow problem and didn't have a coherent enough leadership situation to follow through with the next round/acquisition.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#17

Post by dmix »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

For those of you going through this for the first time, this is what the loss of "loose money" feels like. For some it will feel "sudden" but it started last year. "Big name" startups were getting re-valued downward by their investors and founders trying to raise a series A or B kept getting "we would prefer to follow in this round, rather than lead it." I feel for the employees. One of my friends in the dot com bust…

The company that nearly acquired Skully before they apparently "messed up" (LeSports) just got $1.2 billion in capital so I don't think you can say easy money has stopped floating around for AR startups. This headline could just have easily been that the company was getting bought out.

Skully just couldn't hit their targets for the 2nd round. Especially with the founder getting dramatically booted out and Intel Capital Partners is quoted in this article as still being actively involved until the very end - they clearly had greater problems than access to capital.

So I'm not sure this story backs up your narrative very well.

http://variety.com/2016/biz/asia/chinas-le-sports-raises-1-2...

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#20

Post by muzz »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #2

How did payments work for this? In the UK - I don't know about the US where this was presumably 'on sale' - you can issue a chargeback against the credit card company if a sale falls through in this manner.

Most of the time, credit cards are not charged until goods are shipped. In any case you can do a chargeback and are protected by the Fair Credit Billing Act:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Billing_Act
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