Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW I've been following this story for a long time and here is what I think the situation is.

Early on the uBeam folks built a pretty low power acoustic transmitter/receiver that could, over a relatively short distance, actually deliver a charge to a phone. Not a super useful charge but, you know, something. Based on this demo and some handwaving (and maybe a bit of math) they went out and said "something that delivers more charge is possible. give us some money and time and we'll work out the engineering." Mostly they raised money on this. Likely without a ton of due diligence.

The actual engineers working on the project (including the one in this "spat") at some point realize the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise. But they still think "a useful product is possible here." Maybe you can deliver enough to charge a phone overnight while it sits on your coffee table. That could actually be cool? Maybe?

Meanwhile the PR machine gets going and, as so often happens, the exaggeration kicks in. Those that haven't been here themselves look at it and see LIES. I have a more nuanced view. The press can misunderstand and distort things on their own side. And then if you don't refute it fast enough then you almost have to support it. Not saying this is ok, but I can see how it happens. The statements about what is possible just get out of hand and then you're stuck with them.

So behind the scenes some of the engineers read the press and go "WTF, this is insane, I'm out!" Others say "well, that's all bullshit, but this overnight charger thing could be useful. So I'm gonna keep my head down and work on that. If we can get it to the point that we can release a commercial product then we'll see what the actual market is." Inevitably actually building a commercial product takes longer than you think. These are just normal engineering delays. No "trying to defy physics" type delays.

Which brings us to the present day. Almost certainly what has been hyped is not real. But there might be something less good there. Maybe. If they can balance the tradeoffs between input power, actual power delivered, distance and safety. That's real engineering work right there.

All just speculation. Take it for whatever it's worth.

Reminds me of Moller and his flying car.[1] Moller has been announcing a flying car Real Soon Now since 1974.[2] It still doesn't work, although he's spent lots of money over four decades, and been in trouble with the SEC. This may be a record for the longest running scam. It's outlived Madoff and the Keely Motor.

Technically, the problem is that Moller is trying to do it with Wankel engines, rather than jet turbines. He has some very high power to weight Wankel engines, and at least briefly, he's been able to get the thing a few meters off the ground. But the Wankels can't maintain that power level for long. Jet turbines can, but they cost too much.

(Want a hard problem to work on? Build a small, cheap, reliable jet engine. Many people have tried. Willams got the furthest.[3] The general result is that, below 6-passenger bizjet size, smaller jet engines don't get much cheaper. Small jet engines have been built, but the price doesn't come down much if you want the reliability and life of an aircraft engine.)

[1] http://www.moller.com [2] http://www.downside.com/scams/moller/ [3] http://www.williams-int.com/

The challenge is [small, cheap, reliable, not deafeningly loud, possible to hook an axle to]. Pulse jets win at the first three, and utterly fail at the last two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKHz7wOjb9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXWspo5hrc

Perhaps you could say that hooking an axle to a pulsejet is impractical, rather than impossible.

Or 36 tiny ducted electric fan motors.. http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160512-the-flying-machine-i...

> The actual engineers working on the project (including the one in this "spat") at some point realize the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise

From reading the blog of their former VP of engineering [0] I got the impression that the actual engineers were aware from the start of the limitations of what was physically possible. Instead, said engineer seems to have only realized with time something else: that the founder and CEO was perfectly at ease with making unrealistic promises to raise truckloads of funding at valuations that were impossible to justify with the performances he (and the other engineers) knew were physically possible.

[0] http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/

When the company came out in public, there were enough physics people who said that anyone with knowledge of physics can discredit this on the back of a beermat. And a lot of them did (search Ubeam hoax etc). The due diligence on the part of the investors is shocking as they were clearly told (as was advertised everywhere when they got their millions) that this would charge your phone at quite a distance (you sitting/walking in a room and having your phone charging while doing that).

Also, maybe they think that even if they can't get a product to market their patents will end up having value down the road. I'm less confident in this guess though as valuing patents in this area is well out of my area of expertise.

Thats weird, because actual real engineers realized what is possible, and what would be the result of trying to deliver the lie BEFORE company managed to scam first $20mil. In case you are wondering this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3NoBeNwfk is the likely outcome of trying to charge couple of phones at the same time in enclosed space the size of starbucks (actual pitch at some point) with this technology.

Managed to scam 20 million out of who? Mark Suster doesn't sound like he feels scammed and his fund has put in as much money as anyone.

Mark Suster has invested a lot of his own money, and his investors, in uBeam. So of course he'll talk it up. No way will be ever do or say anything that will harm the value of his own investment. We call it "talking your own book".

its 100% possible to transfer the energy(electricity) from one ) Place to other, For that we have to think the same something differently, Example1: We can transfer the energy by wind media(Wind Energy). We can transfer the light energy as well (like Solar).

What i thing by this the efficiency of the system is very low, but we can't say that this is not possible.

Every year there are companies in SV that raise Tens of millions of dollars without any public prototype, and many fold before they release their product. Most of the time, such failures are not newsworthy. Why is this case so polarizing?

> The actual engineers working on the project (including the one in this "spat") at some point realize the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise

Assuming they finished high school, that point would be the first day on their job.

>The actual engineers working on the project (including the one in this "spat") at some point realize the actual limitations of what is possible physics wise.

I read until here and would like to cut you off. So, at this point, can you tell me YOUR perspective on the alternate history where the company, exactly at this point, starts behaving exactly like Apple, consumer-driven instead of fundamental R&D driven, and simply pivots and enters some totally unrelated part of the power or battery market. Literally any other part of it - not just super capacitors (which were making the rounds around that time) but literally ANY part of the market, since they had obscene gobs of money in the bank for the stage they were at ($10M+) and lots of extremely talented engineers.

What would have happened? Could they have retained their goodwill, credibility, and name, and simply successfully pivoted?

How do you pivot a hardware startup that's built around a single idea?

If they were that rational, they wouldn't have started the original project in the first place.

-4 for asking? Well, okay. I wrote to them when it became obvious that they were selling snake oil, urging them to pivot to tech that can work. I'm curious if people think they could have pivoted, or if they were married to the snake oil (ie a pivot would have failed) . It's a yes/no question without preconception from me and I'd appreciate a response or explanation...

I think its a valid question on pivots, but its also pretty much the sole discretion of the founder/CEO to actually do the pivot. Without them on board and leading the change you end up with a mess, some people following the "strong" leaders and some people following the "original" leaders, and nobody gets anything done to their satisfaction. It also affects your team makeup, since at the small scale one tries to craft a team with overlapping but interlocking skill sets. Pivots require restructuring for that reason, and being able to pull that off is a skill as well.

At the end of the day, if the CEO is thinking the "least risk / best shot" is to stay the course, then a pivot is off the table until you replace the CEO.

Nonono, I'm actually curious if in harryh's nuanced view, Meredith Perry (not someone else) had this option open and could have done so once she realized the tech couldn't work. What do you think?

To what end? Not enough information for speculation. One of the nice things about HN discussions is that generally folks who comment have some line of reasoning that leads to their opinion. Unless someone was actually working at uBeam and a confidante of Perry, what ever they speculate is useless. And if they are an employee and confidante, what ever they say will no doubt lead to at least the end of their position and at worst legal action.

And the really relevant point is that uBeam hasn't, according to its current press, pivoted into anything other than its stated mission. So debating why not is like debating why you didn't ask out someone back when you were in high school and now has turned out to be someone you didn't expect. Kind of a waste of time :-)

She had a proof of concept that turned out didn't scale. If you think it's "useless" to discuss whether and how it's possible for such a CEO to pivot we have nothing further to discuss. I will say that I expect any and every world-changing CEO to be at risk of being in such a position now and in the future, and that the development of a game plan by the startup community for when (not if) this happens again is the difference between billions of dollars of value and the statement "unfortunately I have to say no to changing the world because I only have a working proof of concept. Personally I do not want to run even a 1% risk of ending up in the position that Perry ended up in - and in my conservative opinion I have a 20-90% chance of that. Oh well - I'll put this proof of concept aside and go do something else. "

Well, okay. But I hope it's blindingly obvious that we all lose. . That pre-CEO and the world.

EDIT: Whoever is downvoting me doesn't get it. She had a proof of concept. The proof didn't scale. She raised money - millions - anyway. To me this is all fine. The question is whether she HAD to stick with this non-working concept, or whether she could have pivoted, when she had all that money in the bank and learned that the concept does not work/scale. You guys just don't get the question.

Except a proof of concept that doesn't scale is explicitly not a proof of concept

The concept doesn't work because it's physically impossible and having a low power example is all you can do without severe issues. In this case having a small scale example doesn't tell you much if anything about the large scale behavior ( among other things nonlinear effects start happening at high power physically )

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