Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, a death by NIH?
What’s NIH? Not Inough Humility?
That is so right. We’ll all be giving talks about this soon. NIH: Not invented here, aka not enough humility. :)
Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
121–130 of 145 posts
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was the engineering leadership all from academia or something?
yes, both ceo and cto recent mit grads
The CTO is a recent MIT PhD, but I don't think either of the CEOs are academics. The original CEO & founder did go to MIT, but as an undergrad and years before founding the company. The most recent CEO has a business/MBA background.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#123They spared no expense ever. Ouch. Sadly, not an uncommon failure mode. Raise more than you can easily be bought out for (> $50M) and spend it faster than you can grow into product fit. That said, I am a bit surprised that there isn't more demand for a domestically developed drone operating system. Given the issues the Army has with DJI stuff it seems like it would be a natural support a local company that could prov…
Isn't DARPA investing in this space? Seems like the kind of thing they're usually interested in.
And then you have your usual suspects: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop General Dynamics in the US, BAe Sytems in the UK, Dassault and Airbus in France and Germany. Not sure wether the military is really interested in a civilian OS.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, a death by NIH?
Certainly sounds like it. I find this bit pretty funny though: > entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers I'm of the opinion that the JS ecosystem is one of the few spaces where a healthy dose of NIH can save you a lot of time and money in the long run. And it seems like the only place where they didn't go for a custom solution.
“But developer experience!”
Takes 3 weeks to debug.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly sounds like it. I find this bit pretty funny though: > entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers I'm of the opinion that the JS ecosystem is one of the few spaces where a healthy dose of NIH can save you a lot of time and money in the long run. And it seems like the only place where they didn't go for a custom solution.
At the end of the day, a lot of what NIH ends up being is employees extracting experience and resume value at the expense of business goals. It's kind of funny, then, that the JS ecosystem gives you a better resume if you have keyword soup with trendy frameworks.
Sometimes engineers are just curious about new and exciting stuff and don’t make the right risk/reward calculations.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
One other usecase with a lot of potential is inventory control and counting in warehouses. Not small articles, but for industrial warehouses and larger products drones combining bar code scanners and visual artical identification can improve things considerably. Fraunhofer ran some first test like two years in Germany. No idea what came out of it.
I always hear people raise this point but there are better solutions than a flying robot inside of a warehouse.
Out of interest, could you name a couple? I just happened to come across a couple students that are tackling this problem via drones.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
SV didn't lose to China; everyone lost to DJI. Their competence was staggering (I think they kind of slowed down lately being that they're so far out from everyone; throttling their innovation a bit). If DJI represents the future of Chinese corporations[0], many people on the other side of the ocean should be very wary. [0] edited from "products". In fact what's so impressive with DJI is not just the products themsel…
> In fact what's so impressive with DJI is not just the products themselves, but also the design, marketing and branding, which is kind of an Apple/GoPro hybrid. They are not just creating immense value - they are packaging it the right way. This is what always struck me as so short-sighted about Western corporations offshoring their manufacturing. Japan and the Asian Tigers proved that it's possible for nations to s…
Why worry about the long term, when you can get rich in the short term? After you are rich, long term is someone else’s problem.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#128> Airware launched its own Commercial Drone Fund for investing in the market in 2015 Lossmaking companies launching in-house VC funds while continuing to raise money is a huge red flag. It suggests operators who prefer to be fund managers, two very different roles.
> It suggests operators who prefer to be fund manager
It could be suggestive of that, but I'm not sure it is in this case.
Looking at the press around the CDF, they made a couple of co-investments (can't find anything where they led a round or were the first through the door), and it wasn't "in-house" as much as Airware branded: they had LPs and I think it's likely Airwave's involvement was simply being the technical due diligence on a deal and then somebody else doing the paperwork, legals, etc.
It seems like it was a beauty parade for talent, ideas, and future acquisitions.
There's a whole other argument around whether or not that's a sensible idea, but I think it's a big leap to suggest that a market leader in a nascent market setting up an investment vehicle specifically for that market is indicative that they 'prefer' to be investing not operating.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#129I'm not really surprised by this. At a drone conference in 2016, I first saw presentations from them among many other interesting technology vendors. They had a "vision" that they carefully presented on stage of what they would do, but everyone else at the show was either demoing technology or taking orders. Airware had a "call us for pricing" kind of attitude. Meanwhile, its been a year since Verizon acquired Skywar…
Do you have a view of Airmap?
I’ve not personally used it, so I can’t comment on that part, but, it appears that they have gone with the open, extendable, and most critically - actually for sale - route. That would bode well in my book.
On my soapbox, the big missing piece in drones is a real platform for managing the concept of time series map data for a layperson. There is a lot of dimensions in the data that drones generate (lat, long, alt, color, time, camera stuff, angle of image, etc). Tons of data, and nobody has convincingly showed anything that goes into trend analysis. I’m not sure that any company is really delivering on the concept that this data needs to be controlled and analyzed. Especially in farms, the time series part is important, but it is mostly snapshots and intuition right now.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always hear people raise this point but there are better solutions than a flying robot inside of a warehouse.
Out of interest, could you name a couple? I just happened to come across a couple students that are tackling this problem via drones.
A vehicle on wheels or a track is orders of magnitude more efficient. It’s not sexy but it’s more effective than having to power a flying vehicle and control it autonomously. If you really want something more drone-like, hang it from the ceiling.