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Comment by asmithmd1 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly right. 100s of thousands of well off techies strap your product to our body and the best deal you could arrange is to put a bullet in the companies head?

It seems very strange they are basically just shutting down. That has to be an ego driven decision on the FitBit side - they wanted to kill Pebble. Are they even going to use the brand name? The combination of: working production facility, users in the wild, and (the biggest asset) a developer community had to have some value. Now that the deal is done there is no chance to pry that out of publicly traded FitBit, but it seems like this could have had a better outcome.

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>This is exactly right. 100s of thousands of well off techies strap your product to our body and the best deal you could arrange is to put a bullet in the companies head?

Actually, I think what happened is that Eric, the CEO, is now a multi-millionaire.

So, this is more of a success story than most of us might consider savory to think about.

> So, this is more of a success story than most of us might consider savory to think about.

In general this sort of thing is probably far more common than you'd think (top brass gets paid, everyone else gets a "thank you"). If I'm not mistaken, that's what happened at Sam Altman's company, and a good number of the YC company exits.

? As founder he held common stock, which would be worthless now.

There are lots of ways around that. His stock is worthless, sure, but he probably has something else, whether it's a huge retention bonus (cash or Fitbit stock, which is public and can be sold), an executive-level salary at Fitbit, or some combination of the two. There's also the possibility that he sold some of his equity to investors for cash earlier on.

EDIT: I was wrong, he is joining YC. Thank you for pointing that out kobeya.

He's not at Fitbit. He's joining YC.

Yeah seen that pattern before with the treo and handspring. That gang (palm clueless mgmt) even killed BeOS with the same stone.

Wow, I remember the Treo. That was a device long on promise, short on delivery.

I actually can't think too much about that era without being angry about how all of that sector played out. Frivolous lawsuits, bad management, amazing hardware, flashes of brilliant software.

And hope. So much hope.

FitBit got the best deal, they get any salvageable tech/developer resources and put a bullet in a competitor's head.

Your next step: boycott Fitbit and make it known you are doing this because of the shutdown of pebble. EDIT: Also, this is my last post on YC. So Pebble's CEO is joining YC. And being critical of innovation killing deals by the boys on YC gets you down votes to negative territory.

OK over and out you guys, Done with your echo chamber. So long and thanks for all the fish.

> being critical of innovation killing deals by the boys on YC gets you down votes to negative territory.

I haven't noticed this effect. Your post is currently positive, in fact. If I were to downvote you, it would have been for _complaining about downvotes_, as I think (though might be mistaken) that such commentary is not considered on topic.

> Your next step: boycott Fitbit and make it known you are doing this because of the shutdown of pebble.

This is the interesting idea. I don't think it would be effective, as I suspect that if FitBit came out with a smart watch similar to Pebble (a year from now), most of the Pebble fans would hop ship and buy one. (I might be mistaken in such a belief.)

It's possible that people downvoted you to reflect an opinion of "that wouldn't work". It doesn't seem like a personal grudge, either, as your comment history doesn't seem (well, at my inexperienced first glance) to be downvoted very much.

Why are you mad at Fitbit? They didn't cause Pebble to fail or ask them to turn down the past buyouts.

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