UBeam CEO Meredith Perry steps aside amidst B2B pivot | Hacker News Reader

UBeam CEO Meredith Perry steps aside amidst B2B pivot

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1) This is the blog by the former VP of Engineering that the article references: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/search/label/ubeam

2) Does anyone know if she ever apologized for this awful speech? https://youtu.be/ukgnU2aXM2c?t=240

3) This uBeam shit is literally one of the reasons why I created a beginner's course in wireless power. It drives me nuts that investors have gotten ripped off so many times in this industry and the degree to which the media has been complicit in the hype train. If Mark Cuban or any other VCs happen to be reading this, please watch this course before putting any more money into wireless power. I created a coupon so you can watch it for free.

https://www.udemy.com/wireless-power-to-the-people-wireless-...

No joke, that's a terrible speech archived for posterity and it will follow her for the rest of her life.

I strongly recommend that blog. It's so very rare that an insider after leaving will publicly point out the bullshit. So rare and so valuable.

Anybody new to the tech industry should carefully study that blog. It's far easy to spend years of your life on something that sounds good but couldn't possibly work.

> I was not an engineer, and I did not have Asperger's.

Yuck. Seems like she thought that was going to be a laugh line.

Some people just don’t have comedic sensibilities or timing, and that’s fine. But sometimes on stage jokes let you see what the speaker considers to be funny, which can occasionally be horrifying.

These are interesting data points; thanks for sharing. It makes me wonder then how board/investors/etc understand the companies, their technology and when to step in. There seemed to be less-informed-more-hype-associated investing for this situation). It then seems to becomes an economic game of understanding which companies in your portfolio to let die, to patch up with intention of selling soon, and to patch up with intention of getting the "train-back-on-track", all while managing perception of the business and any success or associated hype with downplayed failure (?).

It makes sense with pump and dump schemes, but less so, to me, for investments you need to hold on to for a long time.

I think about Warren Buffet's IBM investment. Anyone who talked to IBM engineers or perhaps read Robert Cringely's blog knew that IBM was facing a steep decline. However Warren Buffet applied the lens of finance to IBM's stock and it looked like a good deal. It wasn't.

Probably what is happening is that VCs/tech investors in general have had success in one area and then take it as a positive reinforcement of their own skills. Sometimes the investor is looking at other signals, which worked for them in another project. In this case, there was probably total ignorance of physics combined with the unwillingness to just ask some basic questions from people with knowledge in the area.

Perhaps the lesson for everyone is the VCs who did really well in the past decade or two -- if they fail to learn about the areas they are investing in -- may not be capable of distinguishing the next wave of great companies from intellectual fraud.

The now-four-year-old comments on that video are just... mwah.

Throwback to the original 2014 post Putting $10M into UBeam illustrates what is wrong with tech investing which pointed out the basic physics impossibilities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542091

A lot of very relevant comments at the top of that discussion

Aren’t there theoretical methods for columnarly focusing sound waves? I’m not saying uBeam has that. Just that there’s a middle ground between “it’s impossible” and “uBeam pitched crap.”

Sure you can focus sound waves. But they're still subject to the inverse square law. And the tightness of the beam is proportional to the size of the emitter: you need a huge array to maintain focus over any reasonable distance. Plus there's no theoretical way to entirely get around the efficiency or safety concerns.

So not literally impossible, but totally impractical as a commercial product.

This is a broader case of all wave phenomena. As a VERY coarse guide, the equation is :

R = Lambda/D

Where R is the angular 'resolution' of the device, Lambda is the wavelength of the wave used, and D is the diameter of the device.

This means that as the 'resolution' gets smaller (ie. better), the diameter becomes bigger. For example, if you have a 20kHz sound source (~1.7 cm wavelength) and want an angular resolution of ~ 1 arc-second, then you'd need a ~3.5km diameter array. Actual equations will vary GREATLY from this, but it's a good 'sniff test' starting guide.

Thanks for the interesting read. I think this ties into a wider problem of basic reasoning and bullshit checks that applies even on tech forums, where people don't do at least minimal differentiation between physics-hard (or chem hard or bio hard), tech/industrial-base hard, and information-hard problems. One of the most classic examples that comes up in discussions about the future of tech is some variation of "yeah but where is my flying car?" as an example of how "the future is hard to predict". But this is also a great example of a fundamental error of reasoning: completely ignoring any tech developments, a flying car is a physics hard problem. No matter what bottom line is it represents lifting hundreds to thousands of lbs/kg into the air (potential energy E = mgh) then maintaining that against the acceleration of gravity for as long as it's not on the ground. That represents a lot of energy, and there is no way to get around that. Increases in energy storage density might ultimately create enough to play with, but it will always inherently take a lot, which also illustrates another property of physics hard problems in that any tech developed towards them tends to be multi-use and thus affect the competitiveness of everything else at the same time. Some energy storage tech that made flying cars feasible could be equally applied to regular cars, except the regular cars would have the inherent benefit of all that energy not spent on actively countering gravity and thus be a lot cheaper no matter what.

Theranos was another example of this: even if you were totally ignorant about any specifics of tech or research there, fundamentally what they were proposing was gathering highly accurate life-critical population stats based off of a tiny non-random sample with an inherently biased gathering route to boot. That should have raised harsh questions immediately.

Yes the future can be surprising, but the ways in which it can be surprising are not equal. There are clearly lots of problems, incredibly important problems, that are information hard, as-in if only we knew a technique or information we could make use of it right now but we don't so we have to stumble around in the dark for it. But when a route is found it can be a huge deal. But that doesn't mean thermodynamics or whatever might just cease to exist in 50 years because "the future is impossible to predict!"

https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2018/09/end-of-era-tho...

> One meeting in particular pushed me over the edge, and I told the CEO that I was extremely unhappy, and we should discuss a way to amicably separate. I knew the transducer and acoustics side better than anyone, and would give the company as much time as needed to transition and pass over my knowledge. It was a tense meeting, and I went home after, and there were then a series of ... interesting ... emails and phone calls with Perry, that ended with no conclusion. Ironically, among the demands from the company was a statement for the press about how I still believed in uBeam's goals and the technology, but I declined. I got a text the next morning to come to the downstairs company conference room, and to bring my laptop, lab-book, and any company property - it was clear what was about to happen.

>I arrived and the room had CFO Hushen and CEO Perry. It was tense, and Perry sat at the head of the table in her position that she used when about to be CEO-like and give a prepared speech - straight back, leaning slighty forward, hands together. She looked at me and said:

>"Today will be your last day with the company. But before we go on to that, it is important that you understand that you are a quitter. You have quit on me, you have quit on yourself, you have quit on the company, you have quit on your team, you have quit on.... wait what are you doing?"

>At this point the speech was so ridiculous I had picked up my phone to start taking notes because this was too good not to write down. I looked up and she seemed shocked and demanded "Are you texting someone? I'm talking." and I looked at her and said "Just taking some notes." Sadly, this seemed to throw her off, and I never did hear the rest of that prepared speech. She simply mumbled then moved to telling me that I would now give an exit interview, and was again perturbed when I declined. She insisted and the CFO, acting as HR, had to step in and say that wasn't necessary. I handed over my laptop and the few items I had, and made a clear instruction that the company was not to make any statements or quotes that were to be attributed to me - I heard from the team that about ten minutes later they were all told in a company meeting by the CEO that "I wanted them to know that I wished them all the best and success for the company, and still believed in the company mission" or something similar.

This is a disgusting look at Perry, the ex-CEO. She is as self-assured and voluntarily ignorant of the impossibility of the technology as the perpetual machine inventors of yore. But they've got millions of dollars this time around.

Fortune called her the next Elon Musk:

http://fortune.com/2015/07/29/ubeam-meredith-perry-wireless-...

I wonder where she got such ideas as "fake it 'til you make it" and "if you have self doubt, it must be Impostor Syndrome, because That's A Thing", "no one knows what they're doing lol".

What crankish sites were promoting that garbage?

Whenever a CEO starts to behave as if the success of their company/idea is a personal battle as opposed to an actual business, time to get out.

Back in 2015, the uBeam CEO ended a combative twitter rant with "peace out, bitches." Yeah, it was very personal.

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Ameredithperry%20since%3A...

> Whenever a CEO starts to behave as if the success of their company/idea is a personal battle as opposed to an actual business, time to get out

Casting strategic battles as personal fights is fine. What is also necessary is someone who can wage a personally-meaningful battle without losing touch of reality. That duality produces a motivating and insightful personality.

Moving people with the charismatic power of a personal mission is simultaneously empowering and intoxicating. Like storybook mythical objects, it must be carefully wielded.

The most dangerous founders are those that believe their own bs and that peddle an idea that would be so nice if it were true. Investors tend to push each other out of the way for opportunities to invest in such companies and lose all capability for rational thought.

Her TEDx video [0] makes it clear, she just believes she knows better and within an hour of any subject matter that has experts she could revolutionize their field by just thinking outside the box. The experts too limited in their thinking to see how awesome it could work lol

[0] https://youtu.be/ukgnU2aXM2c

Her condescending attitude towards engineers and scientists, especially the bit at the end saying she can't wait to "give them the middle finger" is appalling. If she has zero charisma and zero smarts, how did she convince so many people? That's what's worrying about VC culture.

TEDx talks are mostly just feel-good nonsense. It's really disappointing how many people take them seriously.

Clever move, get out before the indictments land when investors figure out they've been had. uBeam's been completely full of shit from day one, and Perry is every bit as deceptive and deluded as Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes.

Dave from EEVBlog has a couple of great videos about the uBeam scam, they're well worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8dqzVlhFkA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLly4WdRAjY

My immediate thought was always “oh boy do I not want to be in the same room as that thing”.

[insert scene from Oceans 11 with Basher covering his testicles in fear before triggering an EMP].

> Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, CrunchFund, Marissa Mayer and Mark Cuban

how were these people so easily bamboozled? this is some pretty dubious tech straight from the get go.

From Michael Arrington: https://web.archive.org/web/20170819183727/https://uncrunche...

> I’m sitting backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’m introduced to (let’s call her) Mary, a 22 year old recent college grad. She spends ten minutes setting up a science experiment on my desk. There are jokes about how she managed to get this thing through airport security. She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time.

> Stuff like that is what makes my job so much fun. In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary.

> She spends ten minutes setting up a science experiment on my desk. There are jokes about how she managed to get this thing through airport security. She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time.

Maybe he should go to Las Vegas instead of making decisions about technological investments.

It's not complete snake oil, it does work it just isn't practical. I'd guess those investors were betting that they could over come the issues of practicality.

You can't overcome basic physics. And this chick is a nutter. Her TEDx was cringey as hell, spending the majority of the time claiming she'd figured out solutions to problems in minutes that PhDs spent years on.

The fact that you'd need a power plant to charge a room full of people's phones isn't some practicality issue. This was absolute nonsense from day 1.

This woman, not “this chick”

chick, dude, guy, gal

Getting off into the weeds here, but I doubt you would have been offended if he was referring to a man and used "dude".

VCs are usually not as smart as they and others think, they're very susceptible to emotional presentations and hype, and portfolio theory means that serious due diligence isn't worth the effort.

> portfolio theory means that serious due diligence isn't worth the effort.

Could you expand on this?

I actually wrote a whole blog post on this if you're curious: https://medium.com/startup-grind/technology-due-diligence-or...

VCs have an investment fund that is divided amongst X startups. A small percentage will break even, and a very tiny percentage will return more than the entire fund (this is where profits come from). The vast majority of companies will lose money, and in this scenario it's better to move quickly to get into the startups that will succeed rather than do the proper due diligence for every investment.

Basically, speed and quantity is better than deep investigation. It's just how the numbers work out, but it's also why you'll see some crazy startups get funded even if others have more solid financials.

In addition, people are much better at disqualifying then qualifying. It's easier to say "no" then to say "yes" to something, so it could be argued that you should say no very quickly to these kind of startups. But history shows that wilder ideas are more likely to lead to the outsized returns so VCs will say yes to the things that other investment classes would always say no to. Then again, it's called "venture capital" for a reason.

so due diligence for infotech startups maybe doesn't make sense but wouldn't at least a "first pass no phebotonium" filter mean better likelihood of returns for hard sciences?

I have been closely watching indie bio do their accelerator and I'd say a full 60% of their startups are phlebotonium, or at least "this is not a crazy idea, but the choices you have made are totally crazy".

Let's say fund of size X divided by N companies = Z amount invested per startup. 0.1% of them will return 5X.

So while you might disqualify some poor companies in the 99%, what are the odds you don't just get another poor company? The odds that the money you didn't spend will now go to a successful company doesn't really change since the hyped companies would already have the money and the rest are a complete crapshoot.

Meanwhile, how much does that diligence cost? If it's more than Z across your portfolio then you're actually down a shot and have lowered odds for the whole fund. If 99% are going to fail anyway, why spend more money just investing in a different 99%? Remember the entire fund has to be invested, you can't return or rollover the money so this is actually the optimal strategy. It's strange math but it works.

Wall Street Journal has a series in CIO Journal about how to talk the board. It hinged on not presenting data but instead creating and appealing to feelings. This is probably good advice for pitching VCs.

Yes, all people like a good story. That's why so much of formal presentation skills is all about "storytelling" and appealing to your audience in various ways. Facts can help, but that's not what people really remember.

Unfortunate perhaps that VCs are so susceptible to this, but it is what it is.

how were these people so easily bamboozled?

The simplest answer is the most likely: they weren’t.

Then how has uBeam raised so much money? Napkin math pretty much sticks a fork in their ideas.

> Then how has uBeam raised so much money?

They were good at selling a product that cannot work. Imagine how much better they'd do with something that does work.

So these VCs are at least technically ignorant and stupid enough to fail to perform due diligence. What's the difference?

Imagine you are a Dutchman in 1636. You know perfectly well that tulip bulbs are worthless. But you also know that any tulip bulbs you can buy now you can sell at a vast profit later. What do you do?

That presumes you know for a fact that the price will go up. You can hardly make that claim for uBeam. Maybe I'm just ignorant/naive of the VC world.

Right. You just don’t want to be holding the bag when the wheels come off. It was the same with CDS’s in 2007. People who got out at the right time made fortunes. Theranos was another example of experienced investors hoping the bubble would last just a little longer than it actually did.

This is a false dichotomy. Unlike tulips or public company equity, startup equity is highly illiquid. It's hard or impossible to sell it an attractive price as an investor. Sure, later investors may invest at a higher valuation thus increasing the value of your holdings on paper but it's exceedingly rare for later investors to purchase equity from earlier ones.

In order to get liquidity, you need to have your portfolio company have an exit, either by IPOing or being acquired. Good luck having either of those two events with an entirely worthless company. Even if you do, it's fraud and people will sue you and government investigators will kick down your door.

I think most of the other commenters here are on the right track. VCs just don't do that much diligence for early stage companies, especially if they have a compelling emotional pitch. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if someone flagged that their technology was impossible and a partner pushed ahead with the deal just in case of a miracle. There's so much money chasing returns now that $10MM is a pittance for venture funding.

I remember going to a StartupGrind event, and the VC they were interviewing flat-out said "VC's are dumb and stupid". I'm not kidding. Initially, I was glad that he was upfront about the situation. But the more I thought about it, I realized VC's have so much money they can literally afford to be uneducated. They can afford to "spray and pray" with their investments.

There is no reason to think there will be indictments. They raised a relatively small amount of money from sophisticated investors.

Unlike Theranos which had a lot of non-VC investors uBeam had some of the best. Sound travels in a wave and energy would dissipates exponentially with distance. It made no sense to me how this would work or why these investors got behind this. Insight would be appreciated.

Back when this first started Meredith built a "prototype" in a couple of days which, to a layperson, would appear impressive. There was a function generator with an amplifier sending out ultrasound via an array of transmitters and about a meter away there was an array of receiving transducers that picked up the utlrasound. Then the output from those receiving transducers was rectified with a few diodes to get DC. In this demonstration she had a multimeter showing the voltage at the receiving side, and when she tweaked things just right, she received 5 volts on the receiving side. 5 volts is the standard voltage you'd use to charge a phone, or any other USB powered device, so it was reasoned that she had created a viable system that could charge phones wirelessly.

The problem is that any idiot can get 5 volts out of thin air. You can literally hang up a long bare wire and rectify ambient radio waves and get 5 volts. The trick is getting 5 volts and being able to supply significant amounts of current at the same time i.e. receiving useful amounts of _power_. Power = Volts x Amps and Meredith and her investors simply did not understand the importance of this equation that a freshman in engineering would understand. FOMO kicked in and they threw millions of dollars at her thinking it was going to be the next big thing.

> a freshman in engineering would understand

I don't even think that as a freshman, I would have gotten it. On the other hand, I was pretty loosy on the EM side of things, that's why I then went into software quickly afterward .

Wow, so she generated a shitload of charged air and used a child's science experiment to woo some VCs? I think I'm in love. I cannot stop laughing. She could get rich many times over pulling this trick.

> a shitload of charged air

No, the air isn't holding a charge in Meredith's setup. The setup is essentially a speaker and a microphone, but optimized (somewhat) for energy transmission.

> Sound travels in a wave and energy would dissipates exponentially with distance

It's actually possible to transmit sound waves without the exponential decay with "directional sound" [1]. It is produced using a "phased array" [2] of speakers, where each speaker has a different a phase. The point is to create constructive interference in the direction you want the sound beam. Directional speakers have existed for a while and that's probably how uBeam emitters work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_sound

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

Repeat after me: directional radiation is still subject to inverse square law.

Agreed in the general case, but what about a laser?

Only in the far field.

1. The size of the phased array is directly related to the distance over which you want to maintain focus. In order to focus a beam across a room, you need a hilariously large array.

2. Ultrasound transducers are very inefficient, so you’ll lose a lot of power.

3. Ultrasound transmission will be blocked by a person, or even by a sheet of paper in the way.

4. Even if you do achieve a tight beam, then you either have to actively steer it around, or it’s only good for transmitting power to something sitting still in a specific spot.

5. We don’t really know much about the effects of having watts of ultrasound present in a space with humans 24/7/365.

(And these are just the easy ones)

Decent efficiency seems possible. These people report 53% efficiency at 1 meter:

Roes, M.G.L.; Hendrix, M.A.M.; Duarte, J.L., "Contactless energy transfer through air by means of ultrasound," IECON 2011 - 37th Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics Society , vol., no., pp.1238,1243, 7-10 Nov. 2011

Abstract: An alternative approach to the wireless transfer of energy is proposed, employing acoustic waves in air. Unlike conventional methods, acoustic energy transfer is able to achieve energy transfer at high efficiencies over distances that are large in comparison to the dimensions of the transmitter and the receiver. This paper gives an overview of the principle and explains the different loss mechanisms that come into play. A theoretically limit on the achievable efficiency is calculated. It exceeds that of a comparable inductively coupled system by an order of magnitude. First preliminary measurements indicate that AET is feasible, although the measured efficiency is lower than the predicted theoretical limit.

They were using small low-power transceivers as their focus (no pun intended) was on large distances compared to transceiver size, and so were only dealing with a few dozen uW power.

Looking at a few of the things that cite them, it seems that low power is where most of the work in ultrasonic power transmission is, aiming for environments where you need to power something small in a location that makes the usual methods problematic, such as implanted biomedical devices. Example: "MEMS Based Broadband Piezoelectric Ultrasonic Energy Harvester (PUEH) for Enabling Self-Powered Implantable Biomedical Devices", https://www.nature.com/articles/srep24946

This doesn’t invalidate the important claim here. In your example you are focusing sound not by concentrating it along a beam but by phasing out the signal that is not on the path.

How long will it be until Energous is also revealed as a fraud?

https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2018/08/mailbag-questi...

Honestly ubeam makes me kind of mad, it makes it much harder for other non-PhD/"outsiders" who are working in hard tech fields but who are legit to convince others.

Does it? It should be hard to convince anyone of something that goes against accepted and proven constraints. They don't and never have had the data/science to back up their claims. That should be the bar.

Whenever the concept of wireless charging pops up, people always helpfully suggest the use of phased arrays or other beamforming methods.

Directional waves are still subject to inverse square law, just like lasers.

Last time I looked at phased array technology it seemed like you need large number of elements to get real gain. At the same time you either need phase control and PA for each element, expensive. Or high power phase control which is inefficient. And still not cheap.

One gets dubious real quick considering the incentive there is to develop affordable beam steering technology. And the lack of examples outside of a few niche area's.

You need lots of antennae to get high directivity with phased arrays.

A millimeter wave (very small lambda) wafer scale (giant chip = super expensive) phased array integrated onto a chip achieves a half power beamwidth of around 6 degrees.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7747488

For good millimeter wave RF you usually need either III-Vs or SOI. Those wafers are expensive.

How are lasers subject to inverse square law?

> Laser light travels as a parallel beam spreading very little, so the inverse square law does not apply.

https://www.reed.edu/ehs/laser-safety/1laser_basics.html

Is the above wrong?

It seems to be a perennial point of confusion, but as far as I can make out from googling, it's not strictly true that lasers follow the inverse square law. Why is the parent being downvoted?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.optics/P-8VmDlY4...

Thank you. Not sure why I was downvoted above. I was asking a genuine question politely.

The point being made there is also incorrect. This is only true for divergence = 0 which doesn't exist.

Also, the point made that "if I go 10x further away then my received power won't be 100x less" is misleading since inverse square law is talking about intensity.

It's an oversimplification. The idea is that laser beams are extremely collimated, with divergences well under 1 degree in many cases, so over 200 meters the beam might only expand a tiny amount. But not to worry, the beam still spreads. Calculate the beam spot size of a laser, where the area increases as the square of the distance. Meanwhile, intensity is the inverse of the area. At sufficiently long distances, this will become apparent.

Isn't that only true of the far field?

Hah. It's incredible it took this long tbh. So much for the market allocating capital efficiently.

Yup. uBeam is probably the longest joke in SV, and given this article, we're still not getting near the punchline. Apparently they want to license this nonsense now...

It makes sense. Continuing in Tesla's footsteps was doomed to failure. You end up wasting 90% or more energy being transmitted. And it significantly raises noise floor for 'power'. This just seems like a bad ideal all around, so no surprise they're "pivoting".

A way this could have worked, is if it could tell where the charging devices were, and then beam-form in that direction. Then you'd be limited to by how many beams you could initiate.

Also you'd get energy beams being fired around your living space. Seems a bit iffy to me that you could do this without frying random things, biological and otherwise.

“Please remove all iron from your house before activating the device”.

There actually is another company doing something similar to that called Wi-Charge, except they use an IR laser beam. It's still got quite a few fundamental physical limitations on safety and efficiency, but it's more practical than uBeam at least.

Dave Jones also did a video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bXjn3wwM8o

This idea didn't make sense from a physics point of view. Tesla tried to do wireless power a hundred years ago. It left him broke. Sound would seem to be less efficient than EM waves. I mean how did she get this much money?

It's actually possible to have long range wireless power transmission using beams of EM waves with the thanks to phased arrays of antennas:

https://newatlas.com/cota-ossia-wireless-charging-microwave-...

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/intellectual-ventures-microwav...

Wi-charge uses lasers. Wanna guess how efficient and cheap high power IR lasers and GaAs solar panels are?

Sure it's possible. It's just not efficient, practical, reliable, or safe (at high power levels).

Might not be very efficient but it's practical if you need a 24/7 flying drone.

Airbus has a patent on that: https://patents.google.com/patent/FR3012923A1/en

Jesus, how come such things can be patentable?

Tethered aerostats or solar power are better solutions than beamed power if you need something flying for a long time.

Just to be clear most of the directional wireless power transfer techniques rely upon a large receiving "aperture" so that the inverse square law's "spread-ened" radiation can be more fully captured. Acceptable RF exposures are far too low for this to work in smartphones and in ultrasonics it's quite dangerous even at MPE of 100dB (OSHA 145dB is for max 15 minutes a day iirc)

I used to have friends that worked here and told me horror stories about the CEO. I hope this technology works in the future in a reasonable amount of time without such a horrendous leader because it is quite an awesome concept if done properly.

I wouldn't doubt that this post was written by her: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543220

Might not be, actually that commenter has stopped commenting and the last comments are a bit worrying (though not in a personal level)

Mmm... when you step down to get someone more suited for the new path a company is going to take, you have someone lined up to replace you - to ease transition and alleviate concerns.

You don't put an interim CEO from HR and finance while your are searching for a "seasoned executive in the electronics field", that's what you do if the current CEO is hurting the business and needs to be pushed out quickly.

Reading the article sounds a little like what I read in the book about Theranos. Seems they "invented" something that in theory would be very useful but had really no technology to make this happen but went out anyway to get investment money. Then for years they desperately tried to make it work while lying left and right .

The difference between Theranos and uBeam was that uBeam's technology worked...

...in a highly controlled environment with specs making it unsuitable for practical consumer use.

Another Elizabeth Holmes in the making. Isn't there some legal proceeding to sue her for lying/cheating/deceiving? It has been proved uBeam isn't possible by the scientific community well before. We should not let people get away with fraud and deceiving the public so easily.

Mark Suster's blog post on her is not aging well:

https://bothsidesofthetable.com/what-is-it-like-to-wake-up-a...

In what way did uBeam deceive the public? They never raised money or sold the public any products.

It's still deception, there's just no injury.

It’s pretty depressing that two of the higher profile SV scams in recent years involved woman founder/CEOs

Dont worry. There are plenty of scammy vaporware startups founded by men. Just look at pretty much the whole cryptocurrency field for starters.

Agreed. I have now been asking this question for nearly a decade: what economic value does cryptocurrency deliver today? So far, I have found no good answer to that.

(Note that speculation does not create value; it at best transfers it from bet-winners to bet-losers. Crime seems to be the next-most-popular use case, and that is also generally net negative economically. And not also that the future isn't today. Which seems obvious, but every time I ask this I get a lot of fantasies about the future.)

That hasn't stopped an awful lot of people from raising money and launching ICOs for products that haven't worked and often couldn't possibly work. For example, see David Gerard's excellent ongoing dissection of Kodakcoin: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/tag/kodakcoin/

No, its pretty predictable and preventable. People clamor over themselves to prove how "woke" they are when a woman CEO comes along and prove how totally not sexist they are.

When Theranos was first starting there was lots of solid critiques of why it was all a scam, and so much of that was deflected as "sexism" [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Theranos was bound to fail, and was bound to implode - not just because Holmes was a fraud, but because the wokeness of Silicon Valley was complicit in her fraud, but letting her deflect any and all criticism as sexism.

Criticising a fraud who happens to be a woman isn't sexist and we shouldn't let people get away with suggesting otherwise. Thats the only way to prevent this exact same scenario from happening again.

[1] https://www.bustle.com/articles/117841-is-criticism-of-billi... [2] http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/elizabeth-holmes-sexism-theran... [3] https://medium.com/@abyah.wynn/elizabeth-holmes-and-the-stru... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/15/theranos-ceo-elizabeth-holme... [5] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/08/03/48... [6] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=theranos+sexism

Was "wokeness" a factor in Juicero? Clinkle? There are dozens of these.

The common denominator is charisma and hubris on the part of the founder(s). Lots of investors go for that. I'd put the blame on the cult of the charismatic leader in business.

Theranos seems to have lasted quite a bit longer than Juicero, and I'm not aware of any criminal charges for Juciero's founders. (Never heard of Clinkle) So perhaps comparing the two isn't entirely fair.

Also, Juicero failed because of poor product/market fit and excessive price. Theranos had fantastic product market fit, it's just their product didn't function properly and relied on lying to their investors, their customers and the FDA.

Juicero wasn't a fraud, just a really bad idea.

UBeam is a really bad idea too. It "works" under controlled conditions, but it's horribly inefficient and would not be practical under regular conditions. It's more like Juicero than Theranos.

Juicero was an overpriced juicer. The people who bought it still got the machine and the juice - albeit DRM juice that could be squeezed by hand. There is zero fraud, just an overhyped product.

Theranos made fraudulent claims about their product, pressured themselves into the health care market, and violated hundreds of ethical guidelines. Not only were investors defrauded (oh well, its only money) - people used them in clinical scenarios and impacted actual healthcare patients. When people questioned these claims, the CEO publicly claimed criticism of her was sexist, and the media was complicit.

These two scenarios are vastly different.

Sure Juicero was a fraud. The founder claimed (to the public, investors, employees, board members) that the pulp had to be cold pressed with thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, so they developed a juicer to do that. Except it turned out you could "juice" the packets with your bare hands, and the results would not be that different. Why did he do that? Because if all users needed was a $20 manual roller press to juice the packets, there would be no specialized "DRM" juicer device, and no business model.

Yeah. I don't think it was as big a fraud as Theranos. But the amount of money spent, the level of self-promotion, the utter uselessness of their solution, and the suddenness of the collapse all make me think that they at best acted with utter disregard for the sort of concerns that keep sane entrepreneurs up at night. Did the CEO know it was a fraud? Hard to say. But that's not a question we ask of other frauds like anti-vaxxers, spirit mediums, and snake oil salesmen. Since we can't crack open people's minds and look, for me a standard of "knows or should have known" is generally good enough for me to call something a fraud.

It's not of the same magnitude of Theranos to be sure. And there is no consumer fraud now as they offered to fully refund all the juicers. I think the investors have a significant fraud claim against senior management who solicited them but:

a) Juicero is broke, and "piercing the corporate veil" is difficult and expensive.

b) It would show exactly how credulous the investors were, as well as their outstanding lack of initial and ongoing due diligence and oversight.

Definitely. I think B is why we don't see many fraud cases brought here. I doubt Theranos would have been exposed like this if they weren't working in a regulated space. Although doing big fraudulent deals with Walgreens and Safeway didn't help; as non-investors and publicly traded companies, they had less reason to just slink away quietly.

Juicero definitely didn't commit fraud or mislead their investors. I'm not familiar with Clinkle, but it doesn't sound like blatant fraud either. Theranos and UBeam are scams like BitConnect.

Clinkle was CEO inexperience and character flaws. Example coverage: https://pando.com/2015/05/19/it-wasnt-youth-that-doomed-clin...

> Criticising a fraud who happens to be a woman isn't sexist

None of your linked articles say that it is.

What? The first article is literally titled "Is Criticism Of Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes Sexist? Yes & No", implying at the least that some criticism is sexist.

The next article:

> While Holmes doesn’t go so far as to label it sexism, her message is clear: The story would have played out differently if she were a man.

The next article:

> "Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked,"

Every linked article says or implies that Holmes wouldn't have been criticised as harshly if she were a man. Which is pure whataboutism, especially given her fraud risked lived by being pushed into clinical settings when the she and the company knew that their claims were bunk.

implying at the least that some criticism is sexist.

And some has been, as the article pretty much demonstrates. That doesn't mean that any criticism of her as a fraud is sexist, as you implied people were saying in those articles.

The next article:

That's paraphrasing Holmes herself! Reporting on what she says does not mean the journalist agrees.

The next article:

He's a family friend of hers and an investor in the company; he has both a personal and a financial stake in it. That's not an example of "wokeness" from SV, but of someone trying to protect their investment.

Every linked article says or implies that Holmes wouldn't have been criticised as harshly if she were a man. Which is pure whataboutism

It's only whataboutism if used as a tactic to discredit all criticism, but from those articles, only Holmes herself and the investor/family friend seem to do that.

It's not whataboutism if pondered as issue in itself; Holmes is a fraud and deserving of criticism, and yet she can also be victim of sexism, and that can be worth talking about too.

> The first article is literally titled "Is Criticism Of Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes Sexist? Yes & No", implying at the least that some criticism is sexist

If you read the article, you would have seen that criticism of how she ran the company is not sexist. Criticism that incidentally says sexist things is.

> The story would have played out differently if she were a man.

Holmes isn't a journalist and has made many fraudulent claims. This doesn't support your claim.

> Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked,"

Again, this quote is from a Theranos investor, who has also made many fraudulent statements, not a journalist.

I note with interest how you don't justify your other links at all, which don't even obliquely support your claim.

You want to be successful and quickly so? Throw out your morales and do whatever it takes (cheat, lie, steal, etc) to smash all others big and small.

Business can be and or is flat out ruthless!

It is, and I suspect the whole "let's help make her successful because she's a woman, that's a good rolemodel for STEM, etc." contributed to this mess.

As it turns out, in the real world your gender does not change your abilities to break the laws of physics.

Honesty there are tons of dumb SV scams but people tend to focus on the founders more if they are a woman in my experience.

From 2014:

> The Audacious Plan to Make Electricity as Easy as WiFi > https://bothsidesofthetable.com/the-audacious-plan-to-make-e...

Isn't this, like Theranos, a company where if the product works, it prints money?

Yes, but unlike Theranos, it was known from day one that the product is bullshit, as the physics part doesn't add up.

One of the most ironic parts is Meredith Perry's TEDx talk, where she's proud about not having any education in the field. "I was not an engineer, and I did not have Asperger's(!!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgnU2aXM2c&feature=youtu.be...

Yeah, well. It shows.

Also, I'm proud of my self-diagnosed aspie. I don't know of an engineer who isn't.

LOL @ Mark Suster still in denial mode in the Techcrunch comments.

He's trying to unload the company and save a bit of his reputation. Of course he'll still hype it.

I've often thought about this predicament. The original inventor made a demo and raised a lot of money. It's clear that after they went ahead, they didn't quite get it working due to the physics involved. (It's not viable.)

Around the time that this was becoming super clear to everyone (around three years ago), I wrote them this (not sure if they got it):

https://imgur.com/a/WQicmGS

Since then I've thought about this so much. Here's Suster's glowing praise when handing them a huge check, a year earlier:

https://imgur.com/a/i2zIslW

What I concluded in the past 4 years of lightly watching this is that you must retain total, like, totalitarian power over your company, to do whatever you want to do. Because uBeam did the hard part: getting the cash. It's practically impossible to fund a company. Really, go ahead and try it. I'll wait. See you when you're 45 and have been trying for 15 years across ten companies, and finally said fuck it and built your own organic revenues of half a million a month with 90% margin, and still aren't getting the checks. The hard part is the Series A.

But the problem is signing paperwork that gives investors (such as Suster), any amount of control whatsoever.

It's clear that Perry was smart enough to figure out the tech wasn't working. But she wasn't powerful enough to pivot to something that was.

Her lesson, at least to me, is that you must retain almost total power to do whatever you want at the company.

I'll never sign anything that gives investors any amount of power whatsoever. If they want to be along for the ride, go ahead. But you don't get to be Steve Jobs without negotiating enough power to be Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs has gone down a lot of rabbit holes that, uh, didn't lead anywhere. He could do that because he negotiated for it.

If you're founding CEO, you need to negotiate for total power at your company. Or you will end up like Meredith Perry.

The problem isn't with the tech. It's that she just wasn't powerful enough to keep doing whatever the fuck she wanted. Her lesson to me is: "Get more power."

If you're the visionary CEO of a tech company, and aren't powerful enough to do whatever the fuck you want to do, including pivoting out of what you just sold to investors - then you didn't get the negotiations and the paperwork right. Be more powerful.

-----

EDIT: downvoter, I'm happy to engage in a conversation about your opinion on this matter.

This makes zero sense.

If you prove that your tech won’t work, and you have a better idea, go back to your board. Because of the way venture investing works, they’d almost certainly rather bankroll you to pivot, than take their money back and shut you down.

In any case, the board usually has no control over how you operate the company. Their only choice, if they don’t like it, is to fire you - and a majority of them would have to agree to do so.

I see no evidence that the founder is somehow trapped inside her company, totally aware of her terrible idea and yet unable to pivot. All evidence points to the fact that she is still a believer. If anything, she’s now being pushed aside by her board, who are putting an adult in charge and looking for some kind of licensing deal or IP buy-out as a last-ditch exit.

> IP buy-out as a last-ditch exit

IP of what? of a trivial circuit?

If there were really some kind of new beamforming tech it could find use in sonar, defense, imaging etc. If it can do milliwatts in air without radiating painfully loud harmonics in every direction that's something too

There is no evidence that any of this exists.

It doesn't make zero sense. Here is what she sold Suster to get a $10 million check from him (pay close attention to the date on that post):

https://bothsidesofthetable.com/the-audacious-plan-to-make-e...

And here is the control he said he exerted at the time (same link):

"It’s true the some VCs have started writing so many checks that they resemble stock pickers but the majority of us still have less than 10 board seats at any time and tend to go pretty deep so the result is that we care deeply about where we commit our time."

In my personal estimation, Perry saw the limitations of the technology years ago, but was not in any position to pivot her company single-handedly.

You can disagree with me if you want. But have you built a prototype that demonstrated functionality that got a VC to write you a check for $10 million?

You can go grovel to your board about a pivot they didn't sign up for. Or you can be Steve Jobs and lead, letting others follow or be left behind. The time to do that was three-four years ago (when Perry would have clearly seen the limitations of the technology at scale, and still had loads of money in the bank.)

I understand you disagree with this sentiment.

> the problem is signing paperwork that gives investors (such as Suster), any amount of control whatsoever.

The problem is that I could write the equal and opposite rant that you'd be absolutely mad to invest money in a company that you don't control.

Well, there is still the possibility of removal, it should just kind of be all or nothing.

>I could write the equal and opposite rant that you'd be absolutely mad to invest money in a company that you don't control.

It's hard to reply to a hypothetical rant, but I've imagined one (I think charitably) -- can you then further imagine, if I wrote a reply, that you'd be mad to invest in a CEO who was a pushover, that you could just push around and get to do whatever? Because if you can push them around, how about people whose interests aren't even as strongly aligned as yours and theirs? Therefore anyone you can control, you'd be mad to invest in. J:D

Nikola Tesla, where are you when we really, really need you?

I'm not sure the criticism at UBeam (especially at the CEO) is all that fair. Shouldn't we be encouraging moon-shoots that look impossible? Isn't that the point of VC funds? I'd rather see 100 UBeams than one more social media network or adtech company getting funding.

VCs tend to invest in the team over the tech. In this case you have a young woman leading the team, which (sadly) looks great for your portfolio and makes it easier to raise the capital needed to make progress on tough engineering issues. Despite what she says, she isn't an engineer so she's not solving the hard problem. Actually she did quite a good job to raise 30m USD on basically nothing, it's not really her fault the physics doesn't work out.

The problem is that they haven't built up any useful IP here to pivot with, it's fine if they said hey we failed at wireless charging at 10 feet, but we made 50% gains in improved efficiency of Qi chargers and we're going to still build the next gen of wireless chargers. But they haven't managed that.

There's physically impossible and there's "impossible".

I remember people saying capacitive touch display is impossible on mobile devices because "physics". Not everyone and not always is right when they cite physics. Ubeam seems like a more clear case of physical impossibility, but who knows maybe someone improves this tech at some point. That probably won't be Ubeam though, the DNA of this company already seems to be broken.

it's not really her fault the physics doesn't work

That is an excuse on a par with “the black hole ate my homework”

Well at least that would generate some power... - although making it practical for mobile devices might require significant investment.

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