81–90 of 112 posts
Skully has a few interesting glassdoor reviews: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/SKULLY-Reviews-E1046917.ht...
"management is abusing investments on private benefits."
"management is throwing away investors' money on hot cars, bikes, parties and travels etc (only for themselves of course)"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also feel for the junior developers being minted in droves from the various bootcamps across the country, but particularly in the SF Bay Area. Since we have it the hottest here, the pain will be the most acute as well when the downturn finally arrives in full force. Those who believed in the narrative that a 10 week developer bootcamp was the ticket to a good job in the "new era" will be in for a rude awakening. It…
I would feel for them if their weren't tens of thousands of C.S. graduates who payed north of $80,000 and four years of their lives for the privilege of entering the future job market. We need more STEM right?!
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…
My question is that with 10 trillion dollars in bonds that the lender now has to pay in order to lend to the Swiss / US / Japanese governments, just how good does the likely return on startups have to be to get some of that money re-investing? Or is it simply that with wars, elections, terrorism and Brexit, everyone is scared?
What's the use of pointing to negative interest rates - if you can't make money with the business you'd always lose even more. Same reason why pointing to tax rates is disingenuous except for special cases - either a business makes sense or it doesn't. If you don't show a profit tax levels there's no need to worry about tax levels. Same goes for your example, if the business does not seem viable what use is it to point to an overall difficult situation, should you continue investing into what you think is a bad business just because of that?
Well that's a lot of sad. I was following the helmet project and thought it was a great idea ... should I ever (be foolish enough to) buy another motorbike. Some rear view mirrors are just ludicrously small. Having the rear view projected inside the helmet's AR display would be a massive boost to safety and confidence, as any rider who has ever waited at lights should be able to tell you. I feel sorry for the enginee…
> as any rider who has ever waited at lights should be able to tell you. You should always filter straight to the front of the line at a stop light to avoid being hit from behind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also feel for the junior developers being minted in droves from the various bootcamps across the country, but particularly in the SF Bay Area. Since we have it the hottest here, the pain will be the most acute as well when the downturn finally arrives in full force. Those who believed in the narrative that a 10 week developer bootcamp was the ticket to a good job in the "new era" will be in for a rude awakening. It…
What about all the tens of thousands of students that graduate with CS or related degrees every year?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as any rider who has ever waited at lights should be able to tell you. You should always filter straight to the front of the line at a stop light to avoid being hit from behind.
That's a recipe for getting your ass kicked, or at least targeted for an attempt.
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.
However, after spending a week there it was pretty clear to me that they were in a bad place managerially, so I ran away as fast as I could. I highly doubt that the issue is the bubble bursting in this case, it's the investors having no confidence in the leadership.
It's a shame for the employees, I met some really awesome and talented people, although I'm sure they'll have no trouble finding something else; one of them I saw is at Tesla now.
Anyway, my experience was pretty terrible, they dropped the ball in every way possible in terms of my experience being recruited, and left me with the strong impression that they did not have their act togethe at all, from failing to buy my ticket until the absolute last minute to not giving the manager I would be working under any heads up about my arrival, to Mitch repeatedly making inappropriate remarks about women, Maxim magazines in the office bathroom, etc. On top of that the product has some major design flaws that they were punting on, not even trying to address them and instead scrambling to get things ready for the CEO to go on a world tour showing off the helmet and apologizing for it being late.
I understand that consumer electronics is always kind of a shit show and there's usually lots of last minute scrambling and crises, but their situation seemed insane even given that. They were already thinking about version 2, deciding to use a crappier display than was originally planned and then the better display could be a huge reason for people to upgrade to the next version. Meanwhile, the non-replacable helmet battery could only last a few minutes per charge, and didn't even have deep discharge protection in place yet. The night before the world tour kickoff, all the employees pulled an all nighter to get things ready and then someone forgot to plug a few of the helmets in, or plugged them into the wrong charger so the helmets were worthless after that, cutting the number of helmets they had for the tour in half...
After that experience with them I was pretty sure they would not be successful, but then I saw a few months ago that BMW was working on basically the same thing and I knew they were doomed for sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're being tongue in cheek, but if not, honest question: aren't those examples of actual fraud rather than "just" frivolous spending?
Like everything it's a spectrum. Those are incidents of outright fraud, but most of it is far more gray. It's the boyfriend/girlfriend hired onto staff as an assistant who only actually comes into the office 3 days a week. It's the trip that's an extra day for no good reason. That being said, I think much of the grayness is for a reason. Brutal frugality will choke a business nearly as much as overspending.
In my facetious examples, the European vacation actually would be for customer acquisition. There would be a meeting or two with potential customers, but they would still fly first class and stay in top hotels, plus have a few extra "fun" days.
The motorcycle really would be for testing, but they may think what's the harm in taking it home for personal use in between testing sessions?
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 commitm…