So Close
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
If that's correct, it seems to me like it's something they should have known in advance -- if they knew they would be out of money by the end of the year, why would they enter acquisition talks that were planned to last until then?
Either they didn't know when they would run out of money, which is a pretty important thing to know about a startup company, or they decided to bet the company on the assumption that the acquisition would not fail, which was very irresponsible.
An employee named Ben Havilland wrote a comment on the article that's worth reading.
the original comment is at https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let...
If Ben realized this, he should have never worked at this company in the first place. It sounds like it was a failure of a product strategy.
This is absolutely the kind of thing you should be asking about and they should be telling you on the way in. As an early stage startup employee you are basically an investor. You should deeply understand how the businesses you are joining are going to work, and if they wont tell you you should consider it a red flag.
> @joshelman do something. Help us. Two days notice before a holiday with no compensation for the fact that not a soul hires during these weeks. You have the $ to pay severance when you terminate 70 people. So you decided on letting us all get screwed. You need to help us.
If said person has animals, children, or a spouse it becomes even more complicated.
So we're not talking about responsibility anymore, you're moralizing on people's life choices. There's no way to responsibly live in SV without being already rich.
Now, if you can get into a remote position, awesome, but I could see living in SV or NYC or similar and feeling middle class pangs at low 6 figures.
This isn't even an uncommon occurrence. I had coworkers (at one of the big 5) who were making pretty decent money who were still in the hole for similar reasons.
Have some compassion man, jeez.
My partner worked in an industry that laid off 50% of their employees. It took her 8 years to get close to her old salary. No matter what anyone says, the reality is very few of us are truly prepared to have our jobs/industry vanish.
My brother who doesn't earn much money had significant health bills for one of his kids. I hadn't planned to spend that $10-$15k.
My idiot nephew road a dirt bike on a road (against all his parents' rules) when he was 15 and didn't have a license. He didn't look both ways, there was a truck coming, and he was hit by the truck. His parents had to buy the guy a new truck because my nephew wasn't licensed to drive, and pay the deductibles for several surgeries.
protip: never be desperate.
easier said than done, sort of like "eliminate refined carbs from your diet" or "save enough for retirement" or "stop looking for love in all the wrong places"
Also, it’s a damn internet-connected door lock with Bluetooth. Do you really need $45M and designing new mechanical systems from scratch to make it work? I’m sure their team did amazing work but all of it sounds incredibly head-in-the-clouds.
If you don't intend on making just a "damn internet-connected door lock with Bluetooth", of which there are many, but a great one, then very possibly yes.
The market for people who care that their door locking mechanism is as precise as a Swiss watch is so vanishingly small, it feels almost self-evident that there's not a viable business there.
The mechanism of a deadbolt is pretty simple. Other smart lock companies do fine with simple mechanisms. The way to differentiate a product in that space is ease of use and battery life, not by needlessly over-complicating a part that the users won't see.
C’mon really?
Similar to Juicero they could have gone to market with a simpler and less over engineered product and have a viable company but leadership had their heads in the clouds. He even starts the article with how amazing the Swiss watch engineer respected their work - as if that matters in the door lock market.
From the article: “... our customers would fall in love with the way they engaged the product and actually experience joy as they used it.”
I’m having a hard time visualizing myself experiencing joy unlocking a door.
He doesn't seem to have literally copy-and-pasted that palaver from somewhere else, but the first page of these search results suggests a malfunctioning robot stringing together memorized phrases at random:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=our+customers+would+fall+in+love+w...
I would argue that it wasn't really engineered at all. Almost anyone can build something with a practically unlimited budget; engineering is a game of trade-offs. That juice press was ridiculously over-designed and didn't need to cost anywhere near that much.
To the people you love, you don't send a code or some app or procedure. You greet them at the door.
If you need to send people a code to enter your property, you're not loving them, you're running a business. Which is fine -- just don't pretend it has anything to do with "love".
Or if you truly love everyone... then you don't need a lock.
For example if I love a junkie, I wouldn't want to enable that person to easily enter my house to steal something to pawn for drugs.
For me, love is multi-faceted and can’t be defined as a single attribute like trust. People love food that literally kills them. You don’t always get to choose whom or what you love.
Yes you may. I have 3 (8-9-12). I don't "trust" them to not eat candy that I said they shouldn't eat, but I do trust them not to kill me in my sleep -- which is what trust is about (IMHO).
In fact I think I trust them more than I love them, and I love them a lot. But sometimes I'm upset with them. Being upset or angry doesn't affect trust.
Trust is a kind of binary quality that is either on or off; it may be too strong to say that love == trust, but I really can't imagine how I could love someone without trusting them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
I just can't imagine not loving my kids even if I knew I could not trust them. Another example would be family with mental illness to such a degree you may actually fear they will kill you in your sleep, but hopefully they would be placed in a safer environment and still have their families love and support.
The case of mental imparemeent is interesting and I had not considered it. It would be possible to argue that the person isn't there anymore if they're crazy, and there needs to be someone to exercise love against. I'm not sure.
Also, maybe persons with mental illnesses could be trusted more in our society.
OK, so if love is unconditional, then what about situations where you love them but they hate you? If it's unconditional love, then you love them regardless of their feelings towards you.
What do you do if your kid is an actual psychopath and doesn't love you. Do you still love them unconditionally? Would you trust them with the keys to the gun safe?
What do you do if you have an adult child that has made some really bad life choices and is spiraling out of control addicted to hard drugs? Do you still love them (unconditional, right)? Do you trust them with the keys to your alcohol cabinet? The details to your bank account?
Love != trust.
There are some situations where if you truly love someone you do not extend them trust (because they will abuse it regardless of your love for them).
http://research.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centrefor...
Page 5:
> xx. In all four UK countries, most patients convicted of homicide also have a history of alcohol or drug misuse, between 88% in England and 100% in N Ireland. In other words it is unusual for mental health patients to commit homicide unless there is a coexisting problem of substance misuse.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/como...
Simple counterexample: An aged parent with severe Alzheimers. Maybe it's not OK for them to have unfettered access to the car.
You want oversight/control/verification because you love them, not despite it.
If not, that's ok but it's not "love" in my book.
>I define startups as companies that don’t have control of their own destiny because they rely on investor cash infusions to operate. When asked, “How’s business?”, I always replied “I don’t have a business yet, we’re still a startup.”
I despise this definition. I have grown my hardware startup sustainably while pursuing an engineering degree and maintaining full control of the company. I may soon look for VC funding, I may continue to use revenues and personal savings, but nothing will change my responsibility for my business' future.
The fact that you've had money invested into your startup means you have increased control of your destiny, not the opposite. Use that money shrewdly and build a product people want, and you will succeed. That Otto was able to burn through $45 Million in funding without shipping a product makes me believe that poor management and product strategy is behind their failure, not bad luck as the article would ask you to believe.
Being a stable bootstrapped small business is more worthy of respect than being an unstable underfunded startup, in my opinion.
Can I ask how you had time? And what was your source of income and funding while you were doing that?
And engineering degree alone is a huge workload, no?
The defining characteristic of a startup - as the word is used in the real world - is being unprofitable and funded by investors. That literally means one doesn't have control over their company, because they've sold ownership to investors.
What you have is a sustainable, bootstrapped small business. It may not sound sexy, as 'dfcowell points out, but IMO, it should - it suggests that the company is actually doing something useful, unlike many startups, which exist only as long as they can keep the growth up to solicit more investments.
So, I disagree with his comments about the product. His points about management should be taken into consideration. The shutdown was mismanaged.
The core engineering team had folks with 3+ years working on Mechanical, Electrical, Firmware, iOS, Android and Backend engineering. This was not an easy feat to pull given the small team and that the manufacturing was in China on the same lines that build Apple's iPhone with the same level of quality.
The shutdown was mishandled, we all felt the pain. Most of all the contractors and I wish I could pay them. I would if I had the money. But I am also looking for a job.
I think both people would be worth listening to. The one who was there for three months would probably have a very different perspective on the corporate culture and management, by virtue of not having worked there long enough for those things to seem normal.
This is the same reason some companies get value from bringing in outside consultants -- their different perspective enables them to recognize aspects of the business that have not occurred to the long-term insiders.
We did not know about insolvency - no one did - except the leadership team, or many would have raised concerns or left. Maybe this was the fear. Who wants to acquire a company where people are jumping ship.
We wanted the product in people's hands. Heck, it's on my door at home.
I also would say that this employee has the right air his grievances. I disagree with his criticism of the product and the company's mission and vision. I believe - there was no malice. There was mismanagement.
Indeed, that was just poor management. Did they have a board that accepted that too? It seems like having a sole bidder is the single worst way to get a good price. You only do that if there's no other choice.
Sam was a general partner at Mohr Davidow, and a Managing Director at Internet Capital Group. He was a 12 year early employee at Microsoft. He had to know better.
Agreeing to no-fundraising and exclusivity clauses during a long due diligence process really puts your head in their vise. And once it's there, people within the acquirer will start saying, Hey, we could built this ourselves! Let's run the clock out and kill the competition.
I mean, it puts you in the situation that you either sell to that company or you go out of business. They could offer you a fraction of the amounts they were talking about before you signed, and you'd have no alternative.
Hell, even asking you to agree to such unbalanced terms seems like a sign they're planning to pull a fast one on you and they don't intend to negotiate in good faith.
What kind of chump would agree to shoot themselves in the foot like that, unless they'd exhausted every alternative?
And they were succeeding. That was not their problem. And the average penny pinching Joe wasn't their target at first anyway.
You'd be surprised what people buy, and how many buy it, for way more than $700. Even smartphone covers.
Were they? Source? How big was their beta? What was their revenue? Beta users will bias toward early adopters, and often not represent the mainstream market necessary to make a company profitable.
EDIT: I just read that they had ZERO revenue. So they certainly weren't succeeding.
The CEOs excuses make near zero sense.
They couldn’t raise money because VCs realizes their product was too expensive and uncompetitive in the market. Their acquisition opportunity was a last ditch attempt to save the company.
> If you're doing really badly, meaning the company is about to die, you may as well talk to them, because you have nothing to lose.
> Treat investors as saying no till they unequivocally say yes, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies.
>I mentioned earlier that investors prefer to wait if they can. What's particularly dangerous for founders is the way they wait. Essentially, they lead you on. They seem like they're about to invest right up till the moment they say no.
> When you talk to investors your m.o. should be breadth-first search, weighted by expected value. You should always talk to investors in parallel rather than serially.
If Otto had done the many investors in parallel thing they might still be launching.
However, I really don't understand what made him think it's OK to celebrate the failure going out, with such an idiotic blog post, pretending that everything is OK. That's the thing that makes people angry about stuff like this.
If you failed, just acknowledge it and move on. Better yet, don't even proudly write a medium post about how it's not your fault. It's your fault if you're the CEO, period. Feel sorry for those who you've hurt while you're riding around in your Tesla.
I knew this would be just another bullshit "incredible journey" article even before reading it, just based on the title.
Why are there so many bullshitter founders nowadays? There used to be days when people used to actually feel some shame when they fail their startups.
I also can't imagine a $700 lock unless I'm desperately trying to keep my collection of Juiceros safe, but I'm not really their target market. Likely even consumers weren't their target market, builders of very high-end homes were because they were selling image and style as much as functionality.
It's entirely possible that a major player in locks or home automation was going to invest a big chunk of change or outright purchase the company. It's also entirely possible that with no earnest money or termination penalty in the negotiations stringing Otto along until it folded (and its IP might become available at fire sale prices) probably cost that potential suitor very little - a few tens of thousands of dollars in salaried employee time and travel, but that's about it. Depending on who it was, that company might also have a much better grasp on the potential market size for a high-tech wireless smart lock - be it at $700 or something significantly lower.
I will note that a simple search for "Bluetooth door lock" turns up a wide variety of listings with prices ranging from $90-260, and even if some have different feature sets right now anything truly innovative could likely be copied and added to the firmware on many of them. Even the concept of a door with a sensor that picks up the presence of something carried and unlocks is far from novel - you can find that in hundreds of thousands of office buildings around the world.
Why are consumer hardware startups hard?
- Consumers have high expectations and want high quality products from the get go.
- Quality products are incredibly capital intensive, resulting in much shorter runways.
- Building a quality product often times means partnering with an expensive design firm + hiring the engineering talent to back it up.
- Margins are much lower than a typical SAAS. This makes it less appealing for VCs than a pure software play.
- Scaling hardware is harder than scaling software. Lead times are long. The right decisions have to be made ahead of time. Any missteps or problems with your suppliers will delay your launch. If this happens around Black Friday / Christmas -- it's a big deal.
- Not only do delays impact your sales, they will also delay fundraises for much needed cash infusions.
Never sign a 'no-shop' agreement unless the other party covers your burn rate during the no-shop period. Burn gets paid weekly, one week in advance. A missed burn payment auto-terminates the no-shop in seven days. This protects your enterprise and screens against tire-kickers.
Never assume a deal is done until the check or EFT clears. Doesn't matter how good the vibes feel. I lost a $10M scale-up round when (Big ChipCo) pulled its "solid commitment" less than 24 hours before the signing meeting. I do feel your pain.
E.g., he seems to imply the potential acquirer unexpectedly screwed them over, but no deal is done until it’s done, and this one did not really seem like it was that close.
There’s no reason for Otto to agree to an acquisition process that prevents them from raising money they desperately need if they had any reasonable prospects. As he said, they were not actually looking for acquisition. So it seems like this was a last gasp effort to stay afloat in some form, which ultimately failed (as previous efforts had).
One reason an acquisition might be looking good before due diligence and fall apart after is because things turn out to be significantly less rosey than initially presented. When you’re looking to make a deal of course you’re going to accentuate your positives but you have to acknowledge and address your problems as well or you’re simply wasting everyone’s time.
I suspect the fundamental problem is that a $700 smart door lock is a very difficult sell, especially with all the competition out there.
So looking more into this, is it just me, or it looks outrageously inefficient to raise $45m and have ~40 employees spend 4 years to release a product that is basically an IoT door lock? Both the mechanical and the electronic parts are based on commodity components, so I can imagine a well-motivated team of 5 delivering something like this in a year and being able to offer it at a much lower price.
So was making a competitive product ever a priority here, or have the founders discovered a different way to benefit from the over-optimistic tech investment climate?
The company was not wasting money. I have worked in Silicon Valley startups with lavish spending. This was not one of them. There was no free food, no wine/beer on tap, no lavish parties, no free memberships to the equinox.
I won't name the company because to my shock (and frankly vast horror) they're still chugging along and I don't especially want to get sued but, a few years ago when I was still working for Red Gate, one of the leadership of a local company - also significantly hardware driven - came in and told their story to anyone who wanted to listen.
Over a period of maybe a decade or so, through successive rounds of funding, they'd managed to raise about half a billion and had produced... nothing commercially viable. Zilch. This guy's job in the company had been and continued to be to raise the necessary funding from investors, and I have to say he was clearly pretty damn good at separating fools from their money.
So imagine the situation: this guy comes in to a bootstrapped software company that had always been profitable and acts like he's really pleased with himself for raising half a billion dollars and pissing it up the wall because they'd gone all in over and over again with no clear product market fit. (N.B., it may have been pounds, but it was years ago and I can't remember, so let's call it dollars to keep it less dramatic.)
The reaction was quite hostile: I don't think we knew whether to be befuddled or enraged.
I mean you literally could get a better ROI by handing me $50M or $500M or whatever it is and standing by whilst I try to blow it all on cocaine and high-end hookers because there's just no way I can snort my way through that much coke in an entire lifetime without overdosing so you'd at least get some, and probably most, of your money back.
Don't get me wrong: I understand that VCs expect most ventures to fail, and to an extent that's perhaps reasonable, but surely there comes a point where you stop throwing good money after bad?
I'm wondering if the investment funds and startups provide enough transparency to the people whos money is actually invested to detect such schemes.
The company did not have the money to pay its bills for at least two months before shutdown, finally laying everyone off on December 12. There was nothing to indicate they didn't have money to pay us before then. I probably won't see a dime for the last two months of work. Other contractors took bigger hits than me. In total Otto owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors for work already performed.
I'm beyond upset at the recklessness of the management and the board in this situation. They could have laid off the contractors in October when they realized they did not have enough money to pay all liabilities. They could have explained the situation and offered a bonus in the event of a successful exit.
Instead they said nothing about their insolvency, continued having us working on the (implicit) assumption that they could pay us, and continued gambling with invoices owed to me and other contractors.
If I ran my own company this way, if I just lost customer data or wrote broken code, I would not be in business for very long. Yet in VC land, the board (Reid Hoffman, Josh Elman, Sam Jadallah) will just go to the next venture.
I'm in a hole and looking for work in January, if you or your company needs help. I'm also happy to pass on the names of the other contractors who are getting 86 cents on the dollar for their work in 2017. https://burke.services
Obviously I won’t agree to net 30 again.
Not saying it's impossible, just that it will cut down on your potential clients.
Is there any similar thing in the US?
Reading the law at the link, it says you’re only liable if there was no “reasonable chance” of avoiding insolvency. The sale they were pursuing would have provided enough cash to pay debts so I don’t think it would even pass that test. Poor management is not a crime, unfortunately.
Also, does the company have any assets? Even it's out of cash then, unless it's filed for bankruptcy/insolvency/administration (I think it's called 'chapter 8' in the US?), can't you still file a small claims court case?
Maybe get some Aerons in lieu of cash?
I have great relations with every company that has paid me! And every company I’ve worked with has been satisfied with what I’ve built for them
My absolute sincerest condolences, but it sounds like you might have made a couple rookie mistakes, too. As entertaining as hearing these insider tales might be, please don't add getting sued for breaking an NDA to that pile. Talk all the smack you want, but things like timelines, architectures and languages used are not public information at this point and we can be pretty sure these are not the most ethical people in the world.
One of the very most important properties of a deal is competition.
A sense of competition ensures deals move along in a timely manner and push the value of the deal and keep everyone's options open.
If a company ever wants you to stop negotiating with all other parties, say "YES, when you've put the sale price in our bank account, until then, we are dealing with other parties too".
And if they refuse to deal because of this point, then it's not a real deal anyway so walk away and save yourself the price that this company paid, which is total.
E.g. "how smart-lock startup Otto almost became a success, but eventually failed"
The HN team does a pretty good job of cleaning up uninformative link titles such as this.
It seems fitting that the first name "Otto" is informally used in German to describe a person of little practical avail.
That's the problem if your CEO is an inventor with no or little business acumen. They are always super-enthusiastic and can be played like puppets by some M&A guys with mediocre experience.
Memo: Don't be enthusiastic with "acquirers", restraint enthusiasm is the keyword. Screen them vs. them screen you.
Memo2: Deals are made to fall trough - Paul Graham. Never bid everything on one horse, don't put all your eggs in one basket etc. 9 out of 10 deals like this fall through, adjust accordingly.
It also has no manual override with a key like some smart locks -- it just has some backup batteries that last an unspecified amount of time. Because it has no key, it can't be re-keyed, so good luck convincing a landlord to let you install it in an apartment or rental home. And the company says it needs to be professionally installed.
I bet the owners of these things would spend more time thinking about and solving problems with them than most people spend operating their normal deadbolts with a key.
For $700, it better open the door for me. I can get locks to merely unlock it for me for half that.
I never once thought my life would be better if I didn't need to put up with those nasty keys...
When I travel and let friends or family stay in my NYC apartment, I leave them the keys in an envelope at a nearby 24/7 supermarket. It's not ideal. Key concierge services exist, but are not super practical either.
I would be more afraid of actual problems like a malfunction of some kind (no battery, money in the house so that I can't buy batteries, etc. etc.), and I can't enter the house. Or, I lock myself out and no one can open that door (while regular locks can be opened by specialized companies).
I mean, everything is simple when you can pay someone to do it. Of course, if you're paying $700 for a smart lock, you can probably afford a maid.
If you can afford a maid, then I doubt any of this would count as a problem, though.
Getting paid for building something valuable seems to be a dead concept in the startup economy.
Quality and reliability matter, and not all locks are made the same. If a run-of-the-mill smart lock goes for $200, and if you can even buy lightbulb systems that go for the same or more, it's not really difficult to imagine a $700 smart lock if it's advanced enough.
Especially since most of those $200 smart locks are usually utter crap.
Heck, people pay way $500 (and way more) for plain old secure doors. Why does everyone assume such a project should target average Joes at first?
I’m not assuming anything, I’m wondering what makes it so much more expensive than other products in this space, since the article (and the “Introdicing Otto” article I also found) don’t explain it at all.
They went all-in with the acquisition with no backup plan, and lost.
By this definition, Microsoft wasn't a startup.
Edit - all the things that had my subconscious chanting ¡Juicero!
The consultation of a Swiss watchmaker, indicating an exacting exquisiteness of mechanical design (for a door lock) indicating idealistic overdesign. ¡Juicero!
The resulting $700 price tag. ¡Juicero!
...to replace an older system that already works great. ¡Juicero!
...despite its not having any of what he calls "intelligence," which equals an internet connection and a CPU. When in fact, a system as old as the deadbolt lock has a lot of true intelligence built in, and reliance on an internet connection and a CPU is a weakness, not a victory. ¡Juicero!
I wonder if the bigger company had that plan all along...
Ridiculous price, beautifully over engineered product, a slight update to a centuries old problem, but at least they didn't get the opportunity to burn up as much investor money as Juicero.
It's easy to say something has a ridiculous price, but there are plenty of products that have launched with a high price and 1) redefined a category as something where premium is worth paying for, and 2) used a premium first product to pay for development of a cheaper model afterwards.
I compared this to Juicero because the "degree of innovation" in their product doesn't seem to justify the 20x price premium [1].
To compare, a cheap Nokia is ~INR 4000, a OnePlus 5 is ~INR 30000 and an iPhone 7 is ~INR 45000.
However, there's a world of difference in features, components, software in the 10x phones.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00EZYA61K/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?ie=...
Except this lock also has a key. It's the $1000 smartphone you carry everywhere. That is prone to running out of charge, getting stolen, getting broken, not being in range of a signal, etc. The whole idea was bullshit from the get-go.
The market says otherwise - Amazon is all over this at the moment, so is Nest.
This is a random lock of the same type: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CMMBATI/ref=abs_brd_tag...
$40 on Amazon.
So you've got a lock with bluetooth which adds utility. So double it, hell triple it. $120. I think if their product was priced at $120 we would not be looking at this result.
Wonder why it's not full of bluetooths and clouds since that's clearly the way of the future.
The strategic vision for these kinds of startups is that the industry is super far behind the times, and billions of dollars can be captured by just trying to innovate. Remember that Keurig was originally a $900 coffeepot.
I bet there is a bigger issue down the rabbit hole.
Not "so close".
Why not get people to pay in full ala Tesla and use that money to launch?
On the other hand, just about every Kickstarter ever has a ton of people who've paid in full. Yet these Kickstarters frequently fail, because it takes a lot more money than entrepreneurs expect to ship a quality product.
Tesla has done the same system with every car they've launched.
My purpose was to explain what Tesla actually does. I was not implying that the previous poster was wrong.
I don’t understand how “This is not what Tesla has ever done” could mean anything other than that they were wrong.
Just imagine every submitted article had a title like this: the HN frontpage would be full of links like "so close", "a look back", "introducing our most important features yet", "a statement regarding the events last weeks"...
HN would completely unusable like this because you would have to click on every single link to figure out what it is about.
It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that this was a story of a promising hardware startup that ran out of operating cash during acquisition negotiations.
When authors or site editors choose titles for their presumed audience, they aren't necessarily considering clarity for deep-linking external sites like HN.
I wonder, though, if Sam himself believes his narrative. Startup CEOs tend to be borderline delusional in their optimism, one could even argue this is a job requirement. Still. Is there a subtler interpretation, such as this being a smart cover-up for personal irresponsible enrichment, or does he really think they did their best?
With this type of post-mortem post in particular, there's a tradition of elegaic titles, and it seems fair to give poetic license to the author under such circumstances.
Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-less system with new gears to move the same deadbolt, is providing zero innovation, b/c it's still just a little deadbolt securing all ~inch of door-perimeter to the frame (unless I missed something and they also re-invented the door hinge).
So much business BS in this post, too. Like claims of a new UX! As if the process of unlocking is the "experience" factor of importance! And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock! And the part about "we created a culture of innovation"!!! What inflated garbage!
Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new technology, so take a regular lock and bolt ur magic sauce onto it!
1. If you forget/lose your keys. If you still have your phone with you, then you can use that to unlock it, or if you set up a passcode ahead of time, you can use that too.
2. If you're having someone over and you're OK with them letting themselves in since it'd be inconvenient for you to meet them to let them in.
I've had both of these situations happen to me. Granted, the solution shouldn't cost $700, but a lock you can open with your phone and also email/text someone a time-limited passcode for is useful.
(who knows what the state of their software is but that isn't something people will focus on compared to price)
It actually made me LOL. Sounds like someone read https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc... and tried to apply gained knowledge to a door lock.
Trying to recreate something each of us uses every day and make it delightful is a completely worthy goal. To say that a “keyless lock” isn’t a new user experience makes zero sense whatsoever - it’s a new UX by definition. The fact that it wouldn’t stop a SWAT team from breaking the door down is beside the point - they never claimed it would, and that wasn’t the goal.
Why is their passion for building great locks any more silly than the passion each of us has? They took a stab at it and it didn’t work out, and that’s too bad, especially since it seems to have been for business reasons as much as product reasons.
It’s ok to say it shouldn’t have worked out because it’s fundamentally flawed. But to cheer and mock the demise of a project a lot of people were passionate about, one that was dedicated to making a great anything, seems to me to be the antithesis of what a community of hackers and makers should be for.
Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.
The "great product" bit seems to be the usual consumer startup rhetoric by the CEO, which many people fell for.
I can confidently say that it is marketing rhetoric because a similar example already exists in the world: car locks.
I still drive a car where you have to manually insert the key and turn it to open the door.
I've also driven cars where the locks are remote controlled.
I've also seen cars where you press your thumb to the lock to unlock it.
There's nothing "great" about any of the above after the first two or three uses.
0. We could all delightfully try to innovate all day without millions of wasted funding and a guy spewing garbage like every day that for a boss, filling our heads with propaganda. Also, does a lock need to be delightful? Did you not read they wanted you do be addicted to using their lock????
1. What's the difference? How about money, ego, and industry. we all get to have passions, but do they all deserve millions in funding?
2. Uh, what community is that? One of those "global" communities? I'm a hacker and maker, but I certainly don't feel like i'm a member of any such community. I'm not here to pat on the back the privileged failure of people I don't know, just cuz they are by some loose definition "makers" or hackers. Like, hackers do things with ingenuity and curiosity, not $50M. And I am mocking that project from the top-down, starting with the manic CEO who wrote that crap; so, it only trickles down to the hard working people who were conned into giving passion and time to the endeavor, but at least they got paid for being hoodwinked into believing they were "changing the world"... with a lock.
The users who posted those things should be ashamed of defacing HN this way, but the original fault lies with your comment, since had you posted a thoughtful one instead, those other comments wouldn't have followed.
Your post was upvoted, predictably to the top, but that doesn't mean it was good. It's because of the fact that rage activates the Jerry Springer Show impulse in most of us. This is a weakness of the upvoting system and something that amplifies the worst in online communities. As a result, we need all HN users, including you, to exercise a bit of self restraint and not go straight to the bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean you have to change your views, just post thoughtfully and with an orientation to good conversation rather than venting.
And I didn't post from the bottom of the barrel, FYVM, I posted from the bottom of my heart.
It doesn't work, though, to invoke such noble categories as standing-against-oppression to justify ordinary internet flamebait. There's far too much flamebait out there and it's all largely interchangeable. It all leads to the QED of online fora, "fuck you". We're trying, against long odds, to have something more interesting.
If you're saying you didn't intend to post ordinary internet flamebait, I believe you. In that case it would be good to distinguish your comments from that more clearly. We only have your words to go by, not the intention behind them. If the words fit the flamebait genre, that's the effect they're going to have whether you mean them to or not. This effect is destructive on the container here, so we have no choice but to moderate it.
HN is more fragile than most people realize. Some people seem to think of it as a corridor of power, which it's a blow against oppression to trash, but that's definitely not what HN is. I think of it more as a city square or park, and when people throw garbage in it (or appear to), they're just spoiling the opportunity for others to enjoy it and maybe meet and create together. If you're trying to express something for principled reasons, as your comment seems to suggest, that's fine. There are ways of doing so that make this place more interesting and that don't require you to compromise or mute your views. Scorched earth is not interesting.
You're welcome to post from the heart here. I wish more of us would. In my experience, doing so involves taking a certain risk of vulnerability. If all you do is heap scorn on something that pisses you off on the internet—which is how your comment read to me—that doesn't feel like a heart connection. It feels like the same war most people in online forums seem captured by, and which we're hoping to find a small corner of shelter from in this community.
While it does sound like costs/scope got out of control, please remember that price is oftentimes determined fairly far down the development path, and that the ending price may not reflect the initial plans. They may have just pushed scope too far and then backed themselves into a corner. Once the money is spent on R&D it's not like you can get the money back just by developing a simpler product.
Startups are hard. Hardware is hard. Products are hard. Security is hard. This is a site for people who want to build things. Please stop pissing on the grave of a failed attempt to build something new, especially when your information is limited to a Medium post by the CEO who just had to fire all of his employees days before Christmas. That hardly counts as an objective or substantial source of information.