Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics for nearly $1B
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
> In early November, Bloomberg first reported that Hyundai was in talks to acquire Boston Dynamics from Tokyo-based SoftBank Group. The Japanese conglomerate is selling off non-core business assets after it was hit hard by a series of soured bets, including WeWork and Uber. In September 2020, Softbank sold Arm to NVIDIA for $40 billion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363981
[2] https://www.therobotreport.com/hyundai-acquires-boston-dynam...
[1] https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5f719cf9f44...
IMO, this is more about Hyundai's autonomous vehicle efforts. A BD robot is almost completely different than an industrial automation robot, the former attempts to use 3D mapping to dynamically generate an unpredictable path around obstacles between two points, while the latter is designed to always follow exactly the same kinematics between hard-coded points. A car with a steering wheel and forward/reverse electric motors is a lot more comparable to a Boston Dynamics robot than a 6-axis industrial arm is.
I disagree. As the article points out:
..., why not just buy an autonomous car startup instead? Boston Dynamics is more about “robots,” which happens to be dead last on the list above. ...
https://www.roboticstomorrow.com/story/2019/09/hyundai-motor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR-A1
Soon they may not only have sentry guns, but frickin' bots with frickin lasers attached to their back patrolling the DMZ.
(Edit: this story was Dec 11th, so clearly not.)
Interesting that it was Hyundai and not a domestic partner. Still has to pass trade scrutiny. But the subtext here is that American Manufacturing is slow to adopt robotics vs Asia. This could be a wake up call to a sea change in the culture
Manufacturing in America - A View From The Field
https://workofthefuture.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2...
Perhaps companies are leery of accepting Tesla's inflated shares as currency in any deal. SpaceX is still continuously raising cash, so I doubt they have a billion dollars to spend willy-nilly.
I say sexrobots.
Overall, I’d say it’s a play to make them more attractive to Apple as a tech company.
Also it's most likely that Apple will use Hyundai as they did use Intel for some time, until they make their own.
If they continue chugging along I can see them generating many, many more billions of dollars of value.
If I had $10 million to make something new, I might well build a hospital. I don’t claim deep knowledge of either industry, but I suspect that survivorship bias colors the lucrative casino examples we are thinking of. In contrast, a few hours with Google maps could probably turn up a reasonably profitable site for a new hospital, just based on ballpark supply and demand
I can imagine Boston Dynamics stepping into arbitrary dangerous situations ranging from construction to rescue to military to mining to anything else.
Slack's tech moat is minor, network effects are not considerable (not enough companies using slack to connect to third parties) and Microsoft is destroying them.
The number of active users is one of the most enticing metric a VC firm can lay its eyes on.
Edit: For context, the parent comment is talking about Salesforces' acquisition of Slack [0]
The concept of how moats work in the context of a social app vs how to monetize it is well understood.
Also I'm not saying that the price of Slack was fair. It's entirely possible that the purchase will be a regretful one for salesforce, similar to the regrets that Tumblr's buyer must have felt.
This is a problem solved since late 1990s and is now well into extracting the diminishing returns phase. The market for chat applications is nearly zero sum game for a while.
In case of Slack, its continued losses every year is a good indicator of its zero value.
There are lots of ways to determine value. I do not think that we are ever going to come to a consensus on the best one, but at least we can strive to understand and be understood.
What's the balance sheet of the company? What's its profit? What's its potential for growth and rise in profit? How desperate are the current owners?
There are definitely some exceptions, but most web devs I have met are glorified technicians stringing together apis while reading medium posts.
I’m not even sure just how much IP BD actually has that is truly unique, this doesn’t seem to be something very easy to patent in an enforceable manner.
BD isn’t something that’s easy to scale and dump on someone else this isn’t the type of company that VCs are really interested in these days.
To put a more positive spin on it: for roughly 1/26th the cost of another chat client we could have twice the scary robots.
There are a lot of similar things that we spend a relatively large amount of time talking about but don't actually cost that much in the grand scheme of things (fundamental science, alternative energy, and presidential elections, to name a few).
Just to give some numbers:
- SpaceX in 2019: 46 billion
- ITER: 22-65 billion
- LHC: around 20 billion
- ISS: 150 billion
(with the caveat that numbers for publicly funded projects are very difficult to pin down given the diversity of funding)
Basically all the projects that are slowly pushing us toward the future we read read about in science fiction are on the order of the cost of a chat client (the ISS being the outlier as one of the most expensive public projects in history). To me that's cause for optimism.
a) Slack has 5x as many employees, global market share, consumer ubiquity, etc. It’s simply a bigger entity (in the same way that Home Depot is a more ‘boring’ business than slack but 15x larger in valuation)
b) Boston Dynamics is in many ways a research lab rather than a for-profit company. In research and the arts, things might be nominally inexpensive but their real value is priceless.
Being bought for the users (as with Salesforce buying Slack) vs being bought for the knowledge and tooling (many of Apple’s acquihires come to mind).
Value for WhatsApp comes from the fact that it threatened Facebook's business model. If people use other than their products they have an issue. There is also an option for revenue growth (not only ads, but also payment processing etc.) Question is how that will play out with current outcry regarding Terms of service changes ... whether that will have an impact. But for Facebook certainly valuable decision.
Slack and Salesforce is more interesting. There is of course the market - others tried to acquire Slack as well, driving the price up. How much it will bring Salesforce (also in Cross-Sales "hey, want some CRM which integrates well with Slack? We have something!") is to be seen ...
Corporate M&A seems especially affected by misperception and bad incentives. Executives often want to expand their kingdoms, even at the expense of shareholders. They also suffer from "shiny new object" syndrome - buying whatever's sexy.
Potentially worse, there's the "winner's curse" in auctions. About 7 years ago, Joseph A. Bank tried to buy its larger competitor, Men's Wearhouse. Men's Wearhouse then surprised Bank's execs by making a counter-offer. They got into a bidding war against each other, neither side wanting to "lose," with Men's Wearhouse "winning" by buying its smaller competitor for $1.8B. And we know, even pre-pandemic, how that story turned out!
Point is: don't weigh too heavily what other people will pay for a company today... weigh more what your analysis suggests the company will produce in the future (not what other people will pay in the future).
Ouch.
Why would Darpa pour so much money in for this outcome?
DARPA gave up on Boston Dynamics in 2015 - BigDog and it’s like were just too noisy and finicky for use in a combat situation. I believe all the BD robots they purchased are in storage. And it’s not like Boston Dynamics was ever an extension of DARPA. The DARPA collaboration (along with the rise of YouTube!) made Boston Dynamics famous around 2007-2008, but the company has been around since the 90s and always had other projects and clients.
In general, robotics technology does not belong to the US, and as Boston Dynamics’s technology has applications in medicine, manufacturing, and humanitarian aid, this nativist greed is particularly inappropriate.
That's presumptive of you.
Do you really think Hyundai is going to use this tech for humanitarian aid, or are you just fishing here?
I want a strong US to counter the fact that the number one economy in the world is a fascist state. A state with more engineers than us and that can quickly duplicate our tech sector.
I'm happy that it's our ally buying this tech, but the US needs to be building more of this technology, not less. If we let our lead be in technology like stupid chat apps, that's a frivolous market with no moat.
No, but like Ford or Mercedes or any other company like then, I believe they would sell this tech to humanitarian aid organizations that might use it.
> I want a strong US to counter the fact that the number one economy in the world is a fascist state.
If you don’t want people to say you’re motivated by nativist greed, maybe try having ideas that aren’t nakedly greedy and nativist? At the very least your nihilistic zero-sum America-first attitude is morally indistinguishable from Trumpism, even if in your head it sounds more noble and strategic.
First of all, China has the largest population in the world. They should be the biggest economy in the world, regardless of how evil their government is.
Second of all, if you were truly motivated by a noble desire to stop global fascism, you should be glad that South Korea has this technology instead of the US! The point should be that democratic countries counter China’s power, not that it should be US v. China. In particular, not only is South Korea more directly threatened by Chinese authoritarianism, but their government is far more stable and democratic than the US. The US has only been a democracy since 1965 and, unlike South Korea, our democracy is rapidly decaying.
But it seems that your nativism is leading you to greedily assert the US should be the most powerful country in the world because something something China fascists, despite the fact that we just saw an attempted fascist takeover of Congress by US citizens. It’s deeply hypocritical and indefensible.
I voted for Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff. Just because you're left of me doesn't make it okay to apply the "Trump" label so broadly. It's not Trumpism to have some degree of nationalism (reverence for our demoratic institutions, multiculturalism, values, economy). Nor is it to worry we went too far with globalism and created a system that gave rise to today's CCP.
We should want for a better, more equitable America. We should want the same for the world. I think we agree on this.
> If you don’t want people to say you’re motivated by nativist greed, maybe try having ideas that aren’t nakedly greedy and nativist? At the very least your nihilistic zero-sum America-first attitude is morally indistinguishable from Trumpism, even if in your head it sounds more noble and strategic.
I live in America and I want growth. Are we not allowed disappointment over the fact we're hemorrhaging technologies and capabilities?
If you believe this is a zero-sum game, then do you want America's lead to be averaged out over the rest of the world?
I believe all people are equal. I want democratic nations to grow. India, in particular, is poised for great growth. But that doesn't mean I want our engines to stall or level out.
I do not believe all nations or systems of government are equal. China, Russia, and our ally Saudi Arabia are detriments to their people and peace worldwide. These players shouldn't be equals. I would love for their citizens to emigrate and gain freedom.
> The point should be that democratic countries counter China’s power, not that it should be US v. China.
I would agree with you if we had a global democratic union. The moment all nations sign up to protect personal liberty, create a strong worldwide economy with ample opportunity, upward mobility, and commit to defending this in unison -- sign me up. But that isn't going to happen.
Japan and Vietnam have the correct ideas about China. We need to sell them lots of weapons. Europe, on the other hand, doesn't know where its allegiances lie. And the rest of the world is willing to partner with China to get a better deal.
Nationalism isn't Trumpism. The world still needs a strong America.
> despite the fact that we just saw an attempted fascist takeover of Congress by US citizens.
I shuddered at this too.
We need to punish Trump, the enablers in law enforcement and positions of power, and all other parties that made last week's events possible. But to think a bunch of hillbillies stood any chance of destroying our democratic institutions is a bit much.
I agree that this should be called out as an example for now and forever, but do not use this as evidence that America is a fascist state. The results of the election prove otherwise.
> First of all, China has the largest population in the world. They should be the biggest economy in the world, regardless of how evil their government is.
This is the root of our disagreement. Totalitarian regimes should not prosper.
If there was only one government in the world, I'd want it to be democratic. But democracy won't win unless we fight for it. Democracy isn't the default. It doesn't get to exist just because we hope for it. So far, it's just been a blip on the radar. It could disappear in a moment if we don't defend it.
Europe exists because of America. If America stops protecting it, Russia's influence will take it over.
China is the next great enemy. Same story.
why? What do you mean?
Outdoors, or even indoors with random flights of stairs thrown in, they make sense as a robust and effective solution.
I just hope we're not all agoraphobic at the end of this.
I should’ve said that most of the current solutions are useless
There will probably be good ones in the future