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Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

therobotreport.com

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Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#111

Post by Triv888 »

the-pigeon wrote: post #110
nikolay wrote: post #106

Really?! Only $1B for a real company with unique and futuristic products? When I look at the valuations of some Internet companies - it is sad!

That's just software versus hardware. If you have a solid software platform you can scale it up to millions of users at very little operation cost per user. But a robot? You have a very significant cost per unit. Not to mention lots of risk if you have any warranties and for your brand. Like if you ship 100k units and they have a critical component that gives out after 2 months due to a bad manufacturing run that's a…

Then you have Tesla....

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#112

Post by robotresearcher »

nikolay wrote: post #106

Really?! Only $1B for a real company with unique and futuristic products? When I look at the valuations of some Internet companies - it is sad!

> with unique and futuristic products

... that hasn't found a scalable business model in 28 years of operation. Hence the low valuation despite great tech.

I seriously admire their work and it's great that they've been able to fund it in various ways when almost all the robot businesses come and go quickly. They've been able to grind away at very hard problems. But so far no scalable product.

I hope they (and the mobile robot business in general) finds some more killer apps after weapons, vacuums, warehousing and (almost) cars. They seem to come along pretty slowly.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#113

Post by ASalazarMX »

nikolay wrote: post #106

Really?! Only $1B for a real company with unique and futuristic products? When I look at the valuations of some Internet companies - it is sad!

Boston Robotics should have stated that his goal was making an autonomous robot that delivers food to your dinner table, and takes professional pictures of the food for Instagram.

Seriously, I can't understand why a company developing advanced products that will have civil and military uses was valued so low. Is it struggling with money? Did their progress stall?

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#114

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

karmasimida wrote: post #57

Boston Dynamics is such a hyped company, yet it constantly gets shoveled from one mega corp to another...Does it mean none of those companies see a profitable future with it?

There are two activities for companies like Boston Dynamics. They can either develop technology or develop a product. Those activities take very different skill sets, as Tesla can attest, and many startup hardware companies fail trying to evolve from one into the other.

My guess would be that Hyundai's product development organizations, in theory, can take Boston Dynamic's technology and integrate it into products that can be sold commercially. As an automobile and robotics[0] manufacturer, Hyundai actually has a better chance than Google or SoftBank since they know a fair amount about manufacturing machines.

[0] https://www.hyundai-robotics.com/english/

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#115

Post by cpach »

dalbasal wrote: post #68
cpach wrote: post #18

Sounds like a quite low valuation...?

On what basis? I'm not disagreeing, but BD doesn't really have a business. There isn't even really an industry/market for these kind of robots. How do you value an R&D lab? A billion dollars is still a lot of money.

Good point. I guess that’s key, there’s no straight-forward path to monetization.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#116

Post by vonmoltke »

libra1 wrote: post #75
chadash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Boston Dynamics might be a cool company, but they don't seem to have a widely used product on the market (and they were founded 28 years ago). b) Is there a specific app with just a few thousand users that sold for more than $1B?

Clubhouse was worth ~$100m with only 1,500 users in May; might be more now: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/clubhouse-app-is-where-mc-ha... .

Clubhouse was "worth" $100MM in the sense that A16z paid $12MM for 12% of it. That's not the same as someone paying $100MM for all of it.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#117

Post by forgotmysn »

317070 wrote: post #98
forgotmysn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marc is no longer CEO

No, but will that stop him? Or will that allow acquiring companies to start asserting some control? Or will Boston Dynamics yet again use the US military as a counterbalancing force to do what they want? The main point is that profitability is probably not the issue why BD is switching owners so often. Some of these owners did not need the cashflow from the sale in the first place.

i understand, and i agree that his inflexibility was a large contributor to why Google moved them to softbank.

since softbank though, marc has transitioned to a chairman role, and the company has put in a lot of work into commercialization. i suspect they are still mostly R&D focused, but they are focusing more on commercialization than they ever have before in their history.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#118

Post by ASalazarMX »

rtx wrote: post #77
dragonelite wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one thing i have seen stock market != real world economics. You had a car rental go broke and its stock got pumped 500% or so after the fact.

Stock market is real, what's fake is all the modelling they do in excel.

Stock market is real for the few privileged insiders, the rest of us have modest profits or even loses that pay for someone else's profits.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#119

Post by teknopaul »

jessaustin wrote: post #90
jskajakzkjx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the hard work of scientists and engineers is enabled by chats, though.

"On the joyous and satisfying occasion of this, our first successful journey to Mars, we think back not only on all those who died along the way, but also on the Slack clone that allowed us avert disaster on this mission..."

I do wonder why we want humans on Mars. Given the huge amount of fossil fuels that must be burned on this planet to get us there. We may find Mars is dry and arid when we get there, and so is Earth.

Re: Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics

#120

Post by magicsmoke »

formerly_proven wrote: post #66
souprock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITAR or even classified The robots are practically weapons. Imagine the 4-legged one chasing you down like a large cat could, then pouncing on you. Imagine the 2-legged one with armor, relentlessly stalking you like Terminator.

Imagine getting blown up by a guided missile launched from a largely automated aircraft.

More likely to be a flying guillotine.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-u-s-missile-aims-to-kill...

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