131–140 of 145 posts
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Usually when things happen this way it means that facts changed in some way. Either they presumed until today that some sale or financing deal would come through, or their investors met and decided they had had enough.
Yep. I've seen this happen to another startup. They leased a massive (for them) office space only to shut down a few months later after a funding round fell through horribly.
They 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.
I presume that is why the Army has been doing things with the DJI drones (I'm sure they do stuff with Boeing drones or equivalents as well but I am also sure they aren't $1500 off the shelf at WalMart).
It just seems like having a vibrant domestic drone market would be a strategically useful thing.
Hi buddy, if you are seeing this :)
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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.
I'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…
I'm not sure what conference you were at/what you saw presented, but there is drone software that creates a lot of value for construction, engineering, and mining companies. BVLOS may create a lot of value some day, but there are a lot more technical hurdles that will need to be cleared before it becomes safe and mainstream, just like Level 4/5 self driving cars. (unless you're talking about doing FPV inspections.) D…
Where do the savings come from?
I'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…
It has less to do with the space, and more to do with the odd engineering decisions and multiple pivots. There wasn't a SDK or platform to build on and we didn't take any actual orders for anything (so we had minimal success stories or $$$). The hardware we showed was built by us, and ran a custom OS (not based on linux) that was nearly impossible to work with. We had a very talented engineer rage-quit after spending…
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So, a death by NIH?
What’s NIH? Not Inough Humility?
I'm absolutely going to add "not inough humility" to the list from now on, it works just too well :)
so it seems like Drones is one of the first big nascent industries, SV utterly lost to China b/c of their dominance of manufacturing?
SV is good at Software, UI/UX and, historically anyway, Silicon. But it can't do end hardware. And the stuff it has been successful at is designing consumer hardware but outsourcing the manufacturing to another country. Arduino is Italian. Samsung is South Korean. TSMC is Thai. ARM and RPi is British. Shenzhen is the hardware place to be now. It didn't even steal that crown from SV. It stole it from Akihabara.
Anyone at Airware looking for a new gig, our aviation team at Uber is holding drones experts -- shoot me an email, ngoel@uber.com.
Presumably you meant hiring drone experts, but the idea Uber is kidnapping flight scientists and keeping them locked up in an underground lair has a certain attraction :-) It might even make the pitch deck - "How we are reducing competition in our space"
so it seems like Drones is one of the first big nascent industries, SV utterly lost to China b/c of their dominance of manufacturing?
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…