I don't think the founders need any more money.
So I'll say that I get where you're coming from, but also, I believe him and Brad!
Everything else came out of their pockets or from the super early customers who paid before launch, before they started offering their service for free.
In case you're unaware, these folks made Pebble. Their finances are probably fine.
Some people said it was 4D chess, a brilliant marketing ploy, but after 3-4 iterations I think we can all agree that was not the case. They genuinely believed that Beeper Mini would fly.
There is nothing sinister about being deluded, as a startup founder you might say it's a prerequisite. But nonetheless, they are.
I agree that they believed in Beeper Mini being a reasonable strategy, I'm not contesting that. It definitely wasn't just marketing, they really wanted to bring iMessage to everyone.
But I don't see how Beeper (or the other parts of Beeper Mini) are a delusion. Having a close-enough interface to all of the relevant chat networks is great. It works well and is relatively sustainable, especially if you're targeting the least common denominator of features plus a couple additional things.
iMessage isn't the reason I use Beeper. It's a very cool feature, but I paid for Beeper before I figured out how to register my phone number with iMessage, and I'd still have done so even if I never used iMessage at all.
A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan discusses this a bit, not Musk and Bezos, but the cost of exploring space and his hope that space exploration was finally what would bring various nation states and humanity together. The irony is not lost on me that instead of bringing humanity and democracy to space, we instead brought back kings.
There’s less people in poverty than there ever has been in human history. Even with ongoing global conflicts, the world is still existing in one of the most peaceful times in human history. Could we do better? Of course. Are some people left out? Definitely. Humans as a whole are relatively young however, and we’re still figuring things out.
> Space represents new territory to conquer.
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”
~ Carl Sagan
What is there to conquer in infinity..? The idea that space is new territory to conquer is more of a reflection of the state of humanity than actual reality.
> Smartphones aren't being used as the windows into global enlightenment, but more so as a means to spread hate and misinformation in manners that benefit the powers that be.
This is true, that said, smartphones have also empowered people to learn new languages, collaborate on Wikipedia, and share lives across space and time. It’s easy to get lost in the noise of everything humanity does wrong. That’s only because no one is talking about what humanity does right.
> Any of these things are relatively agnostic and still hold promise for the optimistic, but humanity needs a lot of growth for those dreams to be realized.
It is my hope that humanity never stops growing and learning how to better itself.
~ William Gibson (The Economist, December 4, 2003)