111–120 of 125 posts
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They buy a lot of expensive weapons using a gift card from uncle Sam. You've got the causal relationship backwards.
What gift card? I thought they are living off oil.
Changing the world one murdered-by-starvation Yemeni at a time. How do you accept funding from oppressive, dictatorial, mysoginist regimes and then claim to “make the world a better place”? Sigh. The political implications are so ironically cringe-worthy
I don't think they want to change the world, just multiply money.
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Theranos' tech plain didn't work. If you're looking for a historical analogy that fits better, I'd suggest Segway. There's a number of parallels with Magic Leap. Both have engineering founders. Both founders made their first big money in medical tech (Kamen with stents and Abovitz with Mako Surgical). Where things got away from Segway was on the PR + Hype front and that seems where Magic Leap is at as well. Magic Lea…
> …going to lay the foundation for what replaces mobile phones I having a hard time seeing how this technology (and AR glasses/devices in general, at least what we hear of it) is going to be more of utility in the future than the billions of people with cheap smartphones are today. I think brain(neural) computer interfaces (transmitters/sensors) have a better chance of leaping over the smartphone than anything coming…
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I used to work with people who now work there. I can say for sure that they are both good at what they do and good people. If it is a scam, the employees I know there don't appear to think so. Also, Theranos was lying to the general public about very important health issues that affect your daily life. So far, Magic Leap hasn't released a single product. Even if they do, at worst it will be a computer that isn't as g…
I also know people who work there. Very talented engineers. I find it highly unlikely that they have been duped. And even if they are, they're sure as shit still making money out of the deal.
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That's why long term Magic Leap's hip-worn battery/processor and Apple's likely to be iPhone connected to glasses solution will trump the all-in-one Hololens style design.
Very good point. But even iPhones can't do HD 60fps video + bluetooth for too long. I guess if it's just used to send AR text and tiny UI that could last longer.
I really can't understand the hatred directed towards Magic Leap. All we know at this point in time is a) those who have experienced the technology are impressed (but obviously bound to NDA) and b) ML has raised near-unprecedented amounts of money for a company with no product on sale (2.3MM by CB[1]). To think Google and Alibaba, not to mention other big funders, are so wrong in their large contributions is serious…
They sell dreams. Unfortunately they got social proof - "quickly, other already gave us a lot of money, you should too!". There is already existing HoloLens tech which you can already buy.
Is there any way to short these guys or otherwise get exposure to a value decline?
Yes, fund a competitor.
Shorting a company will bet specifically against that company, in a way that both:
1. Gives you monetary gain if that specific company/stock decreases in value.
2. Puts pressure on the stock to be lower value.
Thus it acts as a correcting mechanism to the market, since just by the fact that a lot of people who have an incentive to make a correct bet on a stock declining, upon placing that bet, help correct the price downwards.
Funding a competitor doesn't act anything like that, and specifically probably doesn't give you a great monetary reward, since most startups fail (thus most competitors will fail).
I really can't understand the hatred directed towards Magic Leap. All we know at this point in time is a) those who have experienced the technology are impressed (but obviously bound to NDA) and b) ML has raised near-unprecedented amounts of money for a company with no product on sale (2.3MM by CB[1]). To think Google and Alibaba, not to mention other big funders, are so wrong in their large contributions is serious…
Maybe you would better understand if you read technical source like: https://www.kguttag.com/2018/02/22/magic-leap-one-tunnel-vis... They sell dreams. Unfortunately they got social proof - "quickly, other already gave us a lot of money, you should too!". There is already existing HoloLens tech which you can already buy.
We're not talking about people raising money from the general public or using heavy-handed sales tactics. We're talking about billionaires funding this thing - I'm not going to cry if they lose money on a bad investment (unless there is outright fraud involved).
> 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?
Why? You're building something that requires massive upfront capitilization.
People here act like this kind of money is unprecedented. How much many goes into building infrastructure? How much money do investors put into building a new building? Large construction projects routinely raise 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars.
Sure, if you're funding a building you're "buying" a "product" that is much better understood and has a higher chance of success (but can also fail!). But it also has a much lower chance of getting you very high returns. All that startups like Magic Leap do is take both of these numbers to the extreme: very small chance of success, but at being a 100-billion-dollar company. Some investors like this tradeoff, and they tend to be pretty savvy and educated. This also tends to be a small part of their portfolio. I think we shouldn't assume we know better than them, just because we read some stuff on the internet.
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Maybe you would better understand if you read technical source like: https://www.kguttag.com/2018/02/22/magic-leap-one-tunnel-vis... They sell dreams. Unfortunately they got social proof - "quickly, other already gave us a lot of money, you should too!". There is already existing HoloLens tech which you can already buy.
This assumes a very high level of naivety by the people funding the company, who at least theoretically, should be, or have access to, technical experts that can study the technology for themselves. We're not talking about people raising money from the general public or using heavy-handed sales tactics. We're talking about billionaires funding this thing - I'm not going to cry if they lose money on a bad investment (…
Anyway for me it is sad they still invest in ML only for this reason that supporting more players would greatly improve chances that some company would figure out better solutions and ML is stuck in local minima to keep most of their story and promises.