Most likely not a good pay day, definitely a significant haircut for some of the investors to say the least.
It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation.
I guess Google is no longer as generous with the acquisitions.
This glorifies failure quite a bit. One major objective of tech companies is to produce products that customers value and like. Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!
Having complicated science underlying a product certainly doesn't excuse a company from producing products that people want.
That's not the biggest obstacle, actually. The biggest obstacle that the sales strategy has no case studies to work with.
What market does the new tech appeal to? Should it be B2C or B2B? (In their case, they tried both IIRC.)
You may hold the collective entity responsible, if you wish, but in this case, they required both sharp and inventive techies (which they had), and a business leader with a vision (which they didn't have). It's not easy to put together, especially if the investors make the call for the CEO's replacement.
An analogy from a different area, Siri could be another dead curio if Steve Jobs didn't decide to make it a centerpiece of their new iPhone.
As we speaking abstractly? What theoretically could be if we didn't know anything about the tech?
Because otherwise this specific tech is very much an "ahead of its time" technology, whether consumers adopted it or not.
Besides, consumer adoption is a BS test for a technology being ahead of its time.
Failure in the market can simply be because the implementation was not good, or the marketing wasn't, or the support was lacking, or the price too high, or 200 other reasons, that don't depend on the technology not being ahead of its time.
Update: hardware cost about $400 interesting analysis of their strategy here http://hc25.web.rice.edu/files/projects/LytroMarketingPlan.p...
I'm reminded every day that the adoption curve can be brutal for those at the sharp end of the stick.
VC puts in 1 dollar, you sell at 1.2, VC will take the first dollar and MAY take the next 20 cents. That could mean a liquidity preference of 1.2x. If you sold at 1.4, it COULD mean VC takes 1.2 and you split the next 20cents according to your share split with the VC.
It may be easier to think of a VC as a bank that doesn't ask you to pay back a loan every month BUT if a liquidity event occurs (i.e. someone buys your company), they absolutely want all their money back first (i.e. "senior" in debt to equity holders (you)) before you get to dip your hands in.
In a "liquidity event", and especially in a "down round" where the company is bought at a lower price per share than previous investors paid, those shares are not treated the same. Preferred shares may get something from the new investment round (perhaps less than they invested), while common shares may have their value wiped out to zero.
(Source: I have been a "commoner" in a company that was bought in a down round where my stock was zeroed but the preferred shares were still worth something.)