Dead Startup Toys

For those unware, this is the same people behind those Lil Nas X shoes with blood in them that made the news a few months back. While they do sell products, they seem to be less of a traditional startup with the goal of making money and more of a mix of satirists, artists, and trolls.

Is it astroturf, though? I think this is genuinely hilarious. Elizabeth Holmes as the patron saint of the website is the cherry on top.

The best part is when you go to mschf.xyz there are a bunch of links, and when you click one it logs `TypeError: n.setAttribute is not a function` to the console and then doesn't do anything.

millions of dollars to build a homepage with some links on it that spit out JS errors is the ultimate commentary. i think it's genius.

Who's the target audience for this crap? A bunch of Hacker News-esque weekend projects that get a bunch of PR from Vice, WSJ, Verge, etc. every time they release something. Just seems like a team of copycats stealing hackathon ideas, giving them a slight twist, then calls it art and journalists fall all over themselves for it.

You won't see these publications writing about similar projects on HN, because they're not called "drops" (lol) and doesn't have an edgy site. Maybe I'm just jealous of their success, I just don't think it's noteworthy at all.

from going to their website, it seems like they try to use clever web design and limited-time deals to sell weirdo and off-kilter failed products. I clicked on a link to a 'chair simulator' which ended up as a steam game a-la-goat simulator.

It seems like they are a factory to sprinkle some clever web design and marketing to create demand for failed products, making something out of nothing. With time as an incentive. Reminds me of the early days of Groupon.

Clever.

> This is a product from MSCHF which is a $100M+ startup [1]

Where do you see a $100M+ startup?

On the page linked, I see a $12.5M Series B...

I would call them a small contraversial ultra-modern art company. A caricature more so than a startup.

Every child in the Uruguayan public system got his/her laptop, I don't know at a global scale but it gave access to the internet/technology to thousands of children that would otherwise wouldn't have. So calling it a total failure seems off to me.

>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup?

I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well).

It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.

Arguably OLPC's approach has - in hindsight - been discredited, but yeah, it seems overly cruel to lump it in with Juicero or Theranos.

We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc.

The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach:

- insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down.

- insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction.

The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.

It did fall short of what they wanted to deliver as a device probably because it was far too ambitious... but they accomplished quite a bit due to that ambition. Consider that it was conceived of in a time before inexpensive laptops were available. In 2005, a low-end laptop still cost well over $1000. Things like a Chromebook, netbook, Raspberry Pi etc. didn't exist yet. If anything, the OLPC probably got companies thinking sooner and more seriously about the low cost portable computing space than they would have otherwise.

The trackpad had terrible bugs that pinned the cursor to the side of the screen. That's as far as I got using it. I'm sad that some kid probably ended up with one on account of me.

I was given an OLPC laptop as a gift, and learned that their CMOS battery (If I remember correctly) was hardwired, and when the battery died the laptop was useless. I sent my OLPC to someone on a forum who claimed to fix them, along with a fee, and never heard back. The only time I’ve been screwed by someone on a niche forum like that.

Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.

A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students.

The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!

The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.

OLPC straddles the line between startup and social program. Given that it wasn't actively harmful [citation needed], it actually managed to produce the laptops, and they had some non-zero if modest utility, we'd have to place it in the upper ranks of the latter category. Even if it had zero impact, that would merely place it in the modal group [0], nothing to be ashamed of!

[0]: see the Iron Law of Evaluation.

Chromebooks simply took over the netbook market which was already established by the time OLPC got some publicity. I think OLPC failed because it became more about proving that tech and "bold ideas" from silicon valley could change the world, instead of seriously addressing issues in the third world – it reminds me of the PlayPump.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-wh...

Agreed. This site is laden with cynicism.

I've had a 200$ eeepc long before that. Not sure if they actually changed the market in any way

Might I add...don't buy this. Why? Because you can literally buy an ACTUAL OLPC for $20 more.

right, didn't really 'fail' as a 'startup' - it just took a very long time to develop and tech continued to move/struggles to be independent and stable with manufacturer messes and giant competing companies, various interests slowing things down all while user needs changed rapidly and capabilities of platforms increased. This was really a long time ago early 00s things were very different and nowhere near mobile device era and so at the time was very noble and promising.

I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed

One Thousand Laptops per Warlord

Even 8+ years ago, OLPC was taught as a case study in business school. It was a largely failed project.

It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality.

In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems.

Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.

I always appreciated CueCat because years after they failed I bought one on ebay for $2 and used it as a barcode scanner to categorize all my books. Worked great for that. :)

I got one! It still works pretty good as a standard bar code reader. I have it integrated into my library cataloguing software

If you ever find one, here is how to make it work properly (but why would you need it?):

http://zteo.com/posts/sunday-hacking-cuecat-delicious-librar...

That was a neat one.

I never thought it would go anywhere because who would buy hardware just for that? But I did kinda admire that they tried.

One of those 'oh man great idea ... oh no I don't think it will ever work' kinda situations.

It was very much a fun early mass consumer days of the internet kinda shot in the dark / fun to me.

Looks like the creator is one that brought idea to look for bamboo fibers in 2020 ballots. One genius idea after another.

Is this the one by the Cyber Ninjas guy?

It kinda lives on, Elliq is very similar, but aimed at old people.

https://elliq.com/

There's actually quite a few of these that I never knew about, aimed at old people. Not quite sure why.

https://roboticsbiz.com/top-seven-companion-and-social-robot...

There was a great little video on twitter I can't find where someone took one of those little robots with big on screen eyes and had it reading output from gpt-3.

It was cool since you could basically ask it anything - I'd buy one of those.

> I feel like Amazon realized that they didn't need the screen or the character movement to accomplish 95% of what consumers were interested in

Or did they?

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/24/amazons-new-echo-show-10-f...

Not by any means a Jibo replacement, but Peeqo may be of interest for some of the social aspects. https://peeqo.com

My mind is blown by the effort that has gone into a product (even if it is only a mock-up) that celebrates failed products.

I just went on a very enjoyable rant about this which included the phrases, “what’s wrong with people?!” And “just create something of value!”

Thanks for posting this! I wanted to get a feel for the size and movability of the toys. They look pretty fun :)

atrium was really bad my dude.

Did you press 'F' to pay your respects though?

Calling end-stage capitalism ventures a stunningly dumb joke seems a bit harsh. The fewer people have surplus cash, the more idiotic-exotic the devices & services peddled to them have to become. Mind the gap!

If you only drink when you're feeling thirsty, you're probably not drinking enough. Not saying this product is the way to go though.

> You know, just in case you lose the sense of thirst for some bizarre reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipsia

The thing about Juicero's story that makes it amusing is the fact the company managed to get several brand name VC's to pour in a metric ton of money. I mean in an ideal world, Juicero should have been something you'd have seen on Shark Tank right after somebody's pitch about socks with pockets or something.

The funnest piece of information (and a notable one) is the amount of money these "smartest folks on the planet" put into all of these bullshit projects. And the list doesn't even include the photo-sharing apps that met Bay Area's standard of innovation for rest of the world to follow.

Ha!

I'm not too familiar with OLPC (perhaps they were indeed a money grab), but I feel there is a difference between "oops..my startup that would have made me rich AF failed" and "oops.. my startup that would have made the internet more accessible for african kids failed"

Speaking off the cuff, without knowing the insider details, but I would say OLPC helped pave the way for Raspberry Pi; Theranos helped paved the way for a lot of future blood testing companies (and let's hope discourage people from pursuing a secrets and patents strategy), et cetera.

Dead trees feed the next generation.

As I said elsewhere, it was pretty successfully implemented in Uruguay, where every child received one.

I had a related thought: this was going to be a collection of dead startup tchotchke. The t-shirts, pens, light-up pens, etc. with long forgotten logos. That would be a fun and depressing collection.

The thought made me a little sad because there's a box in my closet with precisely those items emblazoned with the dead logo of my dead startup.

The animated Elizabeth Holmes cherubs have a real 90s internet feel to them. Totally the stuff of nightmares too.

Yeah, the Coolest Cooler seems like a great product if you're into making blender cocktails at parties. A single unified battery for a Peltier and speaker and blender seems like a sensible idea, although it doesn't add that much value over a separate battery-powered blender, Peltier cooler, and speaker. But realistically every place you're going to want a battery-powered blender you're also going to want a good cooler, so that kind of makes sense, and you can get a pretty good bluetooth speaker from a cereal box-top these days so that's a cheap bolt-on to make this the all-singing all-dancing party machine.

edit: Googling, I can't seem to find out - does it actually provide electric cooling? Or is it just a big high-quality insulated cooler with some electronic doodads attached?

I mean, they had to somehow procure stock from startups that are long out of business. Items nobody actually wants, so what's the point of having _more_ items nobody actually wants?

(EDIT: oh. whoops. they're miniatures haha)

Great recommendation, I learned a lot when I first watched that video. I learned bits and pieces about product design, material science, the nature of startups and venture capital, some introspection occurred, I learned to love again, and a whole bunch of new slang I will neither remember nor understand.

My only exposure to that was my roommate at the time backing it. I must say I did enjoy his months of complaining about all the issues they had.

It was a rare case where breaking the interface segregation principle IRL causes product failure.

They are selling miniature replicas of the products as "toys" for 40$.

They are actually selling the toys, yes.

I'm wondering it too. If so, it appears that they do not support international shipping. :(

No need for anything super elaborate if you want to generate electricity from kids. Just shove 'em in a big hamster wheel with a large can of red bull and a bag of sweets. I mean, sure, some of them will probably die but if we carry on the way we are with the environment they'll all die anyway, so swings and roundabouts. /s

I say "my". I mean my daughters'. ahem

A friend of mine got hers and loves it. She uses it multiple times per year, it is a staple at her parties.

I understand not all backers were so lucky, but it seems to be more a situation of the company not being able to execute on something that a lot of people actually did want (judging by the # of backers they had).

I thought so too, but after months of occasional research I ended up buying (what I consider) an absurdly expensive pelican cooler.

I looked at it based on some main criteria, like:

1. Is it durable

2. How long will it keep stuff cold?

3. What’s the warranty like?

The pelican was 2-3x the cost of alternatives (but the same as a few competitors like Yeti), but ultimately scored best on each. Based on the material it’s made from and the experience I have with their other products (particularly cases, which the cooler essentially is) I felt confident the cooler would be effectively bomb proof and last ages in harsh conditions. It has a lifetime warranty, but I don’t want to have to use those. I want something to really last.

After a few years it still looks brand new and still keeps ice a ridiculously long time.

It’s kind of funny - I put fish in it when spear fishing remotely, which seems ridiculous because I’m putting gnarly stuff in a really nice cooler. Somehow though the plastic doesn’t retain the smell, and it’s still perfectly usable for regular camping trips. Having insurance that fish I catch will stay fresh is incredible though. If I stay somewhere three nights and get my limit each day, I can bring fish/crab/etc home.

Combined with our rooftop tent it means we can camp really comfortably for a long time. It was well worth the cost so far.

Edit: I should add that I don’t work for pelican or anything, I just like my cooler and have become conditioned to justify why I bought it, haha. So many people give me shit for it, it’s programmed in now. I swear it’s worth it - if you’ll actually use it. Something 1/3 the price is fine for plenty of people’s needs too.

When you go camping, "cooler management" is a pain in the ass. Ice becomes one of your biggest limiting factors in the duration of you trip. Anything that can make keeping cold stuff cold for long periods of time is a worthy investment.

I was just about to post Little Printer. Because we need a machine to make receipt-paper printouts of all the stuff we can take three seconds to look at on our phones.

It was a cute design, though.

ETA: Of course, as this is a limited-edition marketing thing, they can't actually make toys for more than a half-dozen or so models.

The plethora of strange and weird homebrew games on ouya was great, part of what made the platform so great.

got to learn*

Well, if you think OLPC was a deliberate grift—I don't—then it's like the moral difference between scamming buyers looking for an Internet-connected juicer and scamming donors looking to help the world.

As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education.

Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors.

Which, like, yeah, that's an argument, I guess?

Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together:

1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC)

2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest)

However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them.

- OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However...

- OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped.

- OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators.

Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.

I'd feel bad having a $40 toy for a failed make-the-world-better $100 product. Wasn't there even a 2-for special where I buy one, and one gets sent abroad?

I knew a girl in school who had one of these. It was a neat little gadget at a cheap cost, but was criticized for not solving more pressing issues (water, schools) and there was no training provided for teachers. The laptops also weren't sustainable and difficult to repair.

It seems the initiative is still kicking since their website is still alive (albeit without an HTTPS certificate).

It looks like they are still around though, and at least seem to be active. The specific laptop itself, probably not, olpc does not seem to fit this list. I agree.

Yeah… that one kinda makes me sad. I agree it’s different from the others.

I contributed to the OLPC project.

They had a lot of cool tech, but all the poor integration of a bunch of unrelated open source projects and a lack of people with the ability to design something to fit their market.

The end result was a cool product that nobody wanted that didn't work awfully well. I now use my OLPC as a sunlight visible status board - and I still need to reboot it once a month because the kernel has some memory leak somewhere.

It's not. Chromebooks just came along and made their goals obsolete.

the ultimate irony is that they are funded by top-tier VCs. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/09/mschfs-push-party-raises-a...

I don't think counting products that never made it to production really counts, through...

I backed the Peachy Printer and was sad to see it fail (and definitely assume that large parts of the creator's explanations were not entirely true), but a failed $600k Kickstarter is not in the same league as an eight- or nine-figure company producing something that turns out to be completely stupid.

If they included failed 3D printer startups the Elizacherubs would grow old by the time you reached the bottom of the page.