Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Skully has crashed and burned

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 112 posts

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#71

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

dmix wrote: post #17
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 Capit…

Basically LeSports has all the technical know-how now and can respin this concept using cheaper NRE for a lower price point with the pesky Americans out of the picture.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#72

Post by wwalser »

sbierwagen wrote: post #27
a_small_island wrote: post #18

Skully has a few interesting glassdoor reviews: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/SKULLY-Reviews-E1046917.ht...

Why does management always plant incredibly glowing fake reviews? At least do 3 stars, that would look more plausible than a 5 star review praising the CEO in a sea of 1 star reviews talking about how the CEO is burning investor money.

I agree that this specific case looks pretty damning but as a general rule I've always considered Glassdoor reviews to be a poor proxy for company quality. It suffers from the same problems of all other anonymous review platforms with a few unique kinks thrown in for good measure. IMO, it's a reasonable way to get a pulse but not much more.

As for the fake reviews… People across the org may have wildly divergent experiences working at a company. Even a fairly small company. Often the person who someone reports directly to has an outsized impact on said person's experience. In an early stage company the individuals doing people management tend to be, at best, very new to that specific part of the job. At worst the company grows large-ish before any official "reports-to" structure is put in place.

I've worked at places where my advice to leadership would be "keep doing what you're doing" while other Glassdoor reviews seemed to have had one of the worst experiences of their lives. That doesn't mean that I planted a review. Maybe I had a particularly good manager? I could have worked in the only good part of the org or a negative review may have come from someone who worked in the only bad part of the org.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#73

Post by jessaustin »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #71
dmix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Capit…

Basically LeSports has all the technical know-how now and can respin this concept using cheaper NRE for a lower price point with the pesky Americans out of the picture.

If you're implying that LesPorts looked over their shoulder and got valuable IP for free, that too would be something of a failure on the part of Skully's management.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#74

Post by bravo22 »

rdtsc wrote: post #60
whack wrote: post #24

"Weller ... and his brother were forced out of the company after investors disagreed with the LeSports deal he brought to the table, opting instead for an inside round. Another source familiar with the matter confirms his story that he brought in the LeSports deal but said Skully was rapidly running out of cash and it was down to the eleventh hour determining if the numbers added up. Adding to that, we’ve been told t…

> In what world is shutting down, a superior alternative to selling the company to LeSports for some cold hard cash? In a world with lots of cash where a companny like Skully is just pocket change and they'd rather not deal with as they have bigger fish to fry. So you are in the business of buying and selling houses and you do $1M transactions every month. This is like finding a lawn mower in a garage, and yeah you c…

Any company IP would be cheaper to pick-up in a post shutdown sale. It isn't the VCs personal money they invested, but they do have a lot of personal relationships which could pay off in the future for strategic reasons. You don't need all the investors on board to pull off such a thing. I've seen it before.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#75

Post by ansible »

zbun wrote: post #65
ansible wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't treat my helmets with nearly the care I do my iPhone Just as a note to everyone: If you drop your helmet, you should throw it away. You can't tell if the foam has been cracked, which reduces its protection.

This is a pretty common misconception. Info from Snell Foundation: http://www.smf.org/helmetfaq#aDroppedHelmet Most manufacturers also offer a free inspection service where you can ship them your helmet and they'll check on the internals/foam.

That's good to know.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#76

Post by ChuckMcM »

jessaustin wrote: post #73
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically LeSports has all the technical know-how now and can respin this concept using cheaper NRE for a lower price point with the pesky Americans out of the picture.

If you're implying that LesPorts looked over their shoulder and got valuable IP for free, that too would be something of a failure on the part of Skully's management.

I don't know how it went down at all, but I can relate a story about a dot com casualty that I helped purchase. The company's assets were bought from the investors, as far as I could tell that transaction happened between the board of directors at the company where I worked, and their board of directors. The "cover story" that their board told their CEO and CTO was that they should consider taking us over, and we went over and talked to everyone and did some technical due diligence. I found both the CEO and CTO fairly annoying with their "why would we want to buy you?" attitude.

Then on Monday the week after that get together our CEO told us they had purchased "certain assets" of that company and we should "hire" anyone who we thought was good, we had a spreadsheet with their time of service and salary info. And a green light to just move them into our org with the same salary. They came right across as a horizontal transfer as far as the employees were concerned.

I know for a fact that it surprised the heck out of the CEO as when we went over there to talk to people his office monitor was sitting on the floor and the CRT tube was broken. And we never saw any of the senior management after that one time. Definitely left a sour taste and it reminded me how "expensive" it was to take bridge funding.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#77

Post by ivraatiems »

bhouston wrote: post #26
whack wrote: post #24

"Weller ... and his brother were forced out of the company after investors disagreed with the LeSports deal he brought to the table, opting instead for an inside round. Another source familiar with the matter confirms his story that he brought in the LeSports deal but said Skully was rapidly running out of cash and it was down to the eleventh hour determining if the numbers added up. Adding to that, we’ve been told t…

The VCs are mad at Weller -- it sounds like a pissing match to teach Weller a lesson to do what the investors wanted or else.

A pissing match costing 50+ people their livelihoods is disgusting to me. The fact that every player in the startup game so readily screws each other over is a big part of why I'm not in it.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#78

Post by paxtonab »

sbierwagen wrote: post #27
a_small_island wrote: post #18

Skully has a few interesting glassdoor reviews: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/SKULLY-Reviews-E1046917.ht...

Why does management always plant incredibly glowing fake reviews? At least do 3 stars, that would look more plausible than a 5 star review praising the CEO in a sea of 1 star reviews talking about how the CEO is burning investor money.

The single 5 star review had some pretty insincere as the "advice to management":

It's pretty easy to openly communicate with management (all the way up to c-level) in my experience, no need to put it on some website when you could discuss it with them directly.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#79

Post by youngButEager »

I know the founder, Marcus Weller. I've had business dealings with him at the time Skully was just an idea, in the very formative stages.

I wanted to tell him "look dude, anything hardware-related will be copied in China like tomorrow, and your price point per helmet is what?"

Being an entrepreneur myself, I thought "most founders have to fail a bunch, so let him fail" and I said nothing. He also reneged on a commitment he made and in my opinion thinks too highly of himself. Good luck Marcus, try again, but stay away from high-end hardware.

Re: Skully has crashed and burned

#80

Post by Animats »

danso wrote: post #21

Its crowdfunding page, on Indiegogo, is a bit bizarre to me: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/skully-ar-1-the-world-s-s... 1,940 backers for $2.44 million, and only 24 comments? For a project with this many backers with this much skin in the game, comments usually number in the hundreds (if not thousands), especially as it becomes apparent that the campaign will miss its estimated delivery dates. Even though Skully…

    $2,446,824 USD raised by 1940 backers
    979% of $250,000 flexible goal
Did they ship to all the Kickstarter backers?
Post reply on HN