Portable battery startup Moxion is bankrupt. What happened?
latitudemedia.com
latitudemedia.com
I worked there from Nov 2023 through June 2024. Loved everything when I first joined, and I think things started going south when we moved to the 100k sq ft office next door. Nothing about that move felt right, we were hiring a bunch of people left and right but it seemed unclear what people were going to work on. Everything was big picture and future focused, while the day to day had much to be wanted.
Our web app was never fully utilized by customers. Product decisions were slow and as a result implementations were even slower. Some things shipped and were well received but overall it felt like everything took too long.
Perhaps even more alarming was the fact that the batteries commonly had issue such as faulting and not discharging. Not UL certified. Customers complained and at on point at least a third of the inventory was sitting in Richmond, CA behind our office, pending repairs or updates.
The employee structure was incredibly hierarchical. Every department had a VP and director(s), followed by middle managers, and finally ICs.
I'm going to come right out and say that the founders deserved this failure. The balance sheet was sitting right in front of their faces but they chose to delude themselves. Even amongst employees none of us wanted to acknowledge the fact that the company was in really bad shape. Looking back, after in-office lunch was canceled to "save money and extend runway", it's really interesting that nobody felt truly alarmed. I guess that was an exhibit of group think. We tried to not talk about it and people said the company was going to pull through, etc. To my knowledge, nobody chose to leap off of the sinking ship.
I know Paul cried on the last day and I felt bad for him but no one failed the company except the owners. Building a new factory to produce units at scale as our existing product was actively being rejected, what amount of hubris does that take? There's a lot of advice on how to build a startup out there i.e. "do things that don't scale", "default alive", but I guess every year there will be many companies choosing to ignore it, believing that somehow they will be the exception.