How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear | Hacker News Reader

How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear

sfgate.com

286 pointsStratoscope227 comments

I really think that the resellers should offer a provenance. "This aeron has been through both the early twenties cryptocurrency bubble and the mid-twenties AI bubble!"

There _has_ to be a collectors' market for this sort of thing. This beanbag was at Theranos!

heh - I bought a 17-year old Aeron in 2020 - 2nd best office purchase I ever made. (First was a Brother MFC office-class laser printer in 2016... still going strong, still gets driver updates for new OS's - and still allows me to use 3rd-party or refilled toner carts)

My Brother from 2004 is still going strong

My HP B210 inkjet from 2010 works just as well as it did the day I got it 15 years ago.

Which means it takes about 3 minutes to warm up and make its Willy Wonka-like noises before spitting out a perfectly fine document.

Believe it or not, wireless printing works just fine!

I call that trickle-down ergonomics.

Didn't theranos have a "no killing bugs" policy? I say let them keep the beanbag chairs.

The PawnStars show had a great bit about valuing a hypothetical "Bill Clinton's lawn mower". Famous names dont necessarily make everything more valuable.

It might get difficult to acquire lots if they start doing that. I doubt an in-bankrupt-proceedings company wants the provenance of their office gear on the internet. Maybe they can agree to a time delay of X years or months, and only with permission. If they start doing it across the board they could lose significant business. I like the idea though!

If they're getting liquidated via bankruptcy, do they have the right to deny having it advertised in a way that would improve the item sale price?

That's an excellent point. I don't know. I guess it would depend on the creditors.

It Depends(TM), but likely not.

This should obviously use blockchain!

(jk)

"This coffee machine was at a startup that tried to build a blockchain for tracing the provenance of auction items."

Has a certain Ozymandias ring to it

Put small ID stamps on everything (or many things). It will start to acquire a history, like a passport or guitar case.

"This aeron offered through a liquidation sale by a company that once resold furniture from defunct dot-com startups, but is now itself going bankrupt"

There's always a lot of real (additionally to non-authentic) merchandise sold on Ebay from defunct startups.

Theranos: https://www.ebay.com/itm/146096029198?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

If you can overlook tech company logo embroidering, this is a great way to get really nice soft shell jackets for cheap. Like a Patagonia jacket that retailed for $200 will be $30 on eBay because of a small logo.

I recall the hosts joking about this on Oxide and Friends, as they worked at Sun in the 90s up through the Sun acquisition. Some of their finds are hilarious. I think Brian had found a "Windows on MIPS" shirt at a thrift store?

Yes -- it was in fact an SGI t-shirt with the top ten reasons to run NT on MIPS (!!). It was even cringier than you might imagine, and included reasons like "SPARC shmark" (?) -- with the number one reason being "it's so fast it hertz."

I would like to believe that this awful shirt was in fact an extraordinary act of subversion from within a once-great SGI, but no one is that good. Anyway, very much worth the twenty five cents I paid for it at the Palo Alto Goodwill!

In 2018, I was in a datacenter 1.5 hours outside of Saigon, Vietnam and they had a Sun Microsystems rack wrapped in plastic just sitting there unused... probably worth at least 1M VND now...

https://imgur.com/a/sun-rack-DOdq2Uc

So, about US$40 you're thinking? Good racks can be pretty expensive... ;)

Might spawn a new occupation: sniff sommelier!

There is (a collector's market) of course, the provenance can be hard to come by though. There has always been a joke in the Bay Area about buying the product you helped design and ship at the "DeAnza Flea Market" (which is actually the AVSRO flea market[1] but was held in the DeAnza community college for many years).

There is some nostalgia there, especially from former employees. But generally the 'premium' is limited[2]. Mostly because collectibles have to 'connect' with the collector in some way, and outside of a relatively small community a lot of startup stuff doesn't really make that connection.

[1] https://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/

[2] I have a super rare jacket from "First Person Inc" the wholly owned subsidiary Sun created for Project Green/Oak/Java that has an embroidered 'Fang' (the Java mascot) and the product name 'WebRunner'. Only given out to the original Java team. WebRunner was the name of the Hotjava browser before Sun's lawyers chickened out because Taligent had a similar trademark. I expect it is worth over 10 times what Bryan paid for the logowear t-shirt at Goodwill (0.25) :-). It would probably be worth more if was Gosling's jacket instead of mine.

> an embroidered 'Fang' (the Java mascot)

I thought Duke was the mascot. Is this some earlier mascot?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duke_(Java_mascot)_w...

Joe Palrang (the guy who drew him) and the Java team called him 'Fang' (he looks like a tooth right?) Somebody didn't like that name (I don't recall if it was corporate or Kim Polese) and at some point the word went out that his name was "Duke".

Cool! Thanks for the history :) I genuinely never liked the name. Fang is much better.

it's ASVARO. the SV is silicon valley.

You are correct of course, I mangled the name. At least I got the web site link right :-).

Hope the beanbag wasn't at FTX :P

don't give them ideas

I miss the times when stuff went to Weird Stuff for fun browsing.

Great idea. Going to stencil "Property of Sun Microsystems" on some Aerons to instantly increase their resale value!

I have a stapler from Microsoft with Microsoft written on it!

A bunch of random stuff in my apartment came from an old dating startup that listed all their office stuff on craigslist. Went down on a weekend and made silly offers on whatever seemed useful.

This Aeron has an authentic Jeff Bezos head sweat stain.

I remember seeing a shop near Old Street in London that I thought was definitely just selling the office chairs of failed businesses. You'd walk past and there would be some fancy chairs and desks, from yet another dream that died.

Vital part of the economy, a bit like fungus in ecology.

There’s a place in London Bridge called something like ‘London office furniture’ that regularly sells Aeron chairs for about 100 quid

I think that's where my Aeron came from, or somewhere similiar, but it was more like 300ish quid and via eBay.

Apaprently there's an "Office Furniture in London" that might be it: https://www.officefurnitureinlondon.co.uk/product-category/s...

Their online listings for Aeron chairs are for more like £400, but that's still less than a third of the price when new.

Bought a Mirra from there about 15 years ago for £115 including delivery, sitting on it right now, still going strong!

Would you sit in such a "haunted" chair if you're just launching your own startup though?

I'm not superstitious. Well, maybe I'm a bit stitious.

I'm not either, if only because being superstitious brings bad luck.

But still. There's this inexplicable feeling that "failure is contagious"

You can look at it another way - the chair's bad luck is all used up!

I don't want to be the one getting the dregs of someone's chair's bad luck.

I want it completely clean of bad luck, or I want my own fresh bad luck!

I bought Aeron chairs for an agency I joined after the 2008 financial crash. They were from Bank of America. Six months later I found a hole in our agency's finances and we went bust.

A bit stitious too.

On the etymology of "superstitious":

* https://oxfordre.com/classics/display/10.1093/acrefore/97801...

imagine that same chair is recycled over and over again that chair has fineprint of killstreak of how many bussiness failling like how pilot cross their cockpit to signify how many plane he shootdown

Sounds like something Netflix would make into a two season show with a cliffhanger that the chair makes it into the Oval Office but Netflix cancels the show without resolution.

House of Chairs

Was the hole in the agency's finances due to high spending on very expensive chairs, tho?

Yeah because I got it effectively on discount. Sitting in it would be a reminder of how to prioritize business and spending.

Both a trophy and a reminder of our financial mortality.

You learn more from your failures than your successes. Those chairs have experience.

Yes. It's not contagious through sitting on surfaces.

Some cultures believe in objects absorbing negative energy. Tons of Asian films are about homes harboring souls who faced injustice.

Very famously, US cabinet member Donald Rumsfeld purchased Mount Misery to live in. Even in the west this shook a lot of heads https://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/22/rumsfelds_mount_mise...

I'm aware. I have not been given convincing evidence that there is any real effect.

I would need more data on how many businesses failed based on ownership of the chair.

If you told me that chair had been used by n successive failed businesses, there is a value of n where I would reject the null hypothesis that the chair has no association with the business failing.

I don't think n=1 is sufficiently large.

You will never get to n sufficiently large - chairs don't last that long. Even if a chair really is that haunted, it will have to be in a startup for 6 months before the money runs out (it will take that long to run out of money after the chair forces it on the bad track - if the startup runs out sooner it wasn't the chair at fault).

But when it breaks, they take the roller wheel and put it on another chair.

Give "Facebook signboard with SUN on the back of it" vibes.

Yeah! I don't know if it's still there but I kitted out my first company's office with chairs from there! It was a cool place.

There's also a junk shop, for want it a better phrase, just off the top of Brick Lane that is similar, it has office stuff but also way more general stuff too.

It doesn't even have a GM listing but it's here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CWDZ3goLKXeJb3eAA?g_st=ac

The mural on the wall is of the guy who used to own the shop. He'd sit outside all day in his car. I can't remember his name now but he was famous locally.

Do you think it's still there? I wouldn't mind getting a fancy office chair at discount.

Andrews Office Furniture, next to inmarsat?

I got my current chair nearby, possibly where OP is talking about. I wanted to be able to sit and adjust chairs and needed one that would tilt forward. Their selection is a bit chaotic and didn't have the chair I really wanted, but I liked being able to try out a few.

I think you'll have similar success watching Gumtree, craigslist, etc.

---

Andrews Office Furniture - Old Street & The City 250 - 254 Old St, London EC1V 9DD

Yo that's the one!

Haha small world! I went to the kebab shop across the street on a regular basis when I lived nearby for Techstars in 2015

Nearly every city has one. Every office needs some form of desk and almost always a chair. These are also worth repairing in enough cases that it is worthwhile for some small local company to deal with that, but they are not worth repairing often enough that any company would keep that repair person on staff (most chairs are scrap when they break). So nearly everyone contracts with a local company to buy office furniture and keep it repaired. (where I work there are 10 extra chairs in a back room, when your chair breaks you trade it for one in that room, if you hire someone you grab a chair. Then they come once a week and count chairs, replacing any broken ones, and adjusting our chair lease if there are more/less than 10 chairs.)

Finding this company shouldn't be too hard, but they don't have a nice retail location since most of the business is they bring chairs to you for an extra fee. However they always have a location and generally they have used chairs for cheap they are happy to sell you.

The failed startups are a vital part of the Aeron economy, putting these back-savers into circulation at 1/3 of MSRP

I always called 2.0 the "Steelcase Employment Project"

I don't know what company died so I could get a Steelcase Leap for $5 but it's worked out well for me. Over a decade with a used chair and it still feels new. The only problem I've encountered is a screw in one of the armrests falls out from time to time. Whatever it is meant to bite into seems to be stripped out. Might glue it in the next time it falls out.

I live in Stockholm and there are _tons_ of stores like that here, Stockholm is one of the big startup centers of Europe. The difference is that most them just sell IKEA furniture because that is what all the offices buy...

Although to be honest the IKEA standing tables are quite good, I own one myself (bought from one of those stores). Some of the ikea chairs are good but not top-notch.

Ikea is nice design, but from what I've seen it doesn't last. You still get what you pay for. That makes it perfect for young adults, who aren't buying for the next 20 years, but it's not a vote of confidence in the startup.

Ikea has different quality levels. You probably default to thinking about the MDF furniture which can never be successfully moved to a new place and is cheapish and breaks. That's what most people think of, and I believe how they started. But they also have 100% wood or steel framed furniture that while not fancy is durable and has a nice design.

I dunno if they have different designs in different regions, but even the "cheap" stuff on ikea feel a lot better than equivalent price cheap stuff from other stores.

Like their MDF stuff feels more solid/denser? I don't know how to explain it.

It's possible their MDF is really HDF, which is literally the same thing but denser.

I kin the US at least, IKEA’s cheapest stuff is usually particle board, not MDF (which would probably actually be a step up). They also have this weird cardboard honeycomb with a very thin layer of mdf on top that they use for their cheapest desktops and the infamous Lack side tables.

As much as people joke about breaking up over building ikea furniture, it's almost always easier to assemble than other furniture at a similar price point

That's fascinating because I have the complete opposite experience. Flat pack stuff from eg Wayfair or Target is way more annoying to assemble compared to the Ikea versions of the same, which just feels like it has more thought put it into it on how to assemble it.

You’re in agreement with the parent comment; I lean furniture is comparatively easy to assemble.

MDF is considered premium now, when they even substitute screws with plastic.

> But they also have 100% wood

Yeah, the bed I'm sleeping in is something like 20 years old, has gone through 3 moves (plus one where it wasn't dismantled) and is from Ikea. It's a full wood and is quite sturdy. I guess my parents paid what was needed for quality stuff.

Very little is 100% wood, mostly because it doesn’t need to be. The best mid century furniture is typically veneered. That said the Stockholm range from IKEA comes with a 20 year guarantee and is vastly better than almost anything sold by supposedly “proper” chain furniture stores. IKEA know a lot about how and why things break and wear.

> but it's not a vote of confidence in the startup.

I'll take a startup that doesn't waste its money on overvalued furniture over the opposite any day of the week. Shows they're not stupid about spending money. I've seen the opposite too often to count.

You can get the Aeron after the money starts really flowing in.

Well, it doesn't have to be an Aeron, but if a startup wants someone to gamble half their compensation or more and fuck up their back with long hours in cheap and painful office chairs, they may not be able to get good employees.

I think in the US a company could be subject to legal action for not providing ergonomic equipment

https://www.osha.gov/news/newsreleases/osha-national-news-re...

You'll sing a very different tune once you reach an age where parts of your body start sending you twinges that they didn't before. Workplace ergonomics matter. I'm not going to sacrifice my health for any kind of employer, startup or not.

I am at that age. And I stand by my point; you can have ergonomics with Ikea products.

The main problem with those Aeron chairs is that most people don't have fixed sitting arrangements in the office anymore. With hybrid remote work people just take the first chair available and people don't bother tuning those every single day. So all those knobs on those chairs are not only useless, but harmful.

My office uses the "Markus" IKEA chair and those are great, fit well with most people and only has two adjustments possible: height and inclination.

Can you name drop some examples?

This is the one I bought my table from:

BBS Used Furniture Group AB Fridensborgsvägen 57, 170 60 Solna

Tack!

Wish I could post a pic of my Ferrari-red, "high end" Ikea KLAPPE office chair I'm sitting on right now, purchased 15 some years ago, still going strong holding me up. The floor demo, however, that had reached EOL, lol!

Okay, okay, it's not Ferrari-red but it is a nice red that has not faded in 15+ years.

Congratulations on getting the KLAPPE!

We have office liquidation companies here as well, but unfortunately when I checked them out they basically just had Aeron chairs which I find incredibly uncomfortable. So it's a great deal but on something I won't enjoy using.

I only buy used high-quality office chairs. I have two Aerons that were essentially brand new, and seemingly fart free (maybe the mesh just let the farts pass through). One char I've had for over 10 years it is still good as new, though with far more farts.

> Startups burn through cash as they skyrocket in size and ambition, accumulating outrageous perks and office equipment along the way. Then they crash to Earth, with nothing but their private planes or massive 3D printers to pad the impact.

This does not sound healthy.

Almost sounds intentional by its common knowledge usual occurance. Taking the money of some clueless holder of money - optimistically calling themselves as investors, never as suckers for sure - and fraud away. Having a good life while doing it. Putting it proudly into the CV to repeat. Like if this is the original intent to begin with. To fail and skim the money while losing bad. Not really doing/attempting something beneficial and lasting in the end. That might sound scary - meaning they have to worry about being permanently successfull, balancing the sheet, react to adverse changing, for long, long, long. 'Starting up' (and fall) is easy, 'keep on going' is too hard?

Yep, I think it's an open secret that many startups are known to be doomed from the beginning. That's one reason that founders tell such outrageous stories. Maybe it arises from the fact that tech changed and grew so fast that the non-technical asset class was unable to separate fact from fiction. You see that today with many of the AI startups that clearly have almost no meat on their bones but a really good pitch deck.

Nobody is going through the significant work of raising VC and then TRYING to fail. All for the sake of temporarily using some fancy office furniture.

OP's not suggesting they're trying to fail, OP is suggesting they're not trying very hard to succeed.

A typical bootstrapped business wouldn't dream of spending money on equipment that wasn't absolutely essential because it pointlessly burns valuable runway. But when you're spending someone else's money and don't see this startup as your one shot—when you can always start again with a new VC when this one fails, and the new VC will be totally understanding of your past failures because that's just how the dice roll—the need to be careful isn't there, creating an incentive to live it up while you're flush with cash.

High spending on office furniture etc is _not_ a common behaviour for early-stage startups, tho. It's really something that you see more from mid-stage, and generally at a point where it doesn't _really_ matter; the amounts just aren't significant enough to make more than a few days' difference to the startup's lifespan if the next raise doesn't work out.

Given that most employees are underpaid at very-early stage startups with stock options it seems deliberate fraud is not common at all. Besides monetary compensation the "have a failed startup in the CV" argument doesn't seem a big draw either.

I don't see how VC funding is being syphoned away by fraudsters at all. Syphoned away by incompetence yes, not deliberate fraud.

> wouldn't dream of spending money on equipment that wasn't absolutely essential

The issue is if they don't create a desirable work place, they will have trouble attracting and keeping talent. Further most of the luxury items pale in comparison to a single engineer's salary. E.g. 10 engineers with cushy job setup, or 11 engineers with a very lean one. The former may be more attractive to the kinds of engineers you want. The trick of course is identifying the talent, IMHO and IME this is why most startups don't make it.

These days, just offering WFH would be more than enough to attract the right kind of talent, with the benefit of not only not needing to pay for a cushy office but not needing to pay for an office at all.

I will take WFH offer anything, especially forced "team" exercises.

Pay me competitive salary. Allow me to WFH. Spare me all the cheap benefits.

Some talent is going to be more attracted to sensible cost controls than lots of cushy perks.

But up to you what kind of talent you want to attract.

Often, one of those cost controls will be penny-pinching on salary. Don't get me wrong, I'd love a place that pays a generous salary and then buys knockoff/used aerons instead of brand new / brand name.

But often the company is either stingy or generous, and they view the chairs and the engineer comp as both things to invest in, or neither.

You know your salary before accepting the offer, so if they're that kind of cost control you should have advance warning when they lowball you.

I think the big reason why this is so common is because the type of talent a lot of these startups want to attract is explicitly immature talent. People who are drawn to fluffy perks without realizing that they (a) don't actually benefit from them in any real way and (b) are actually a warning sign of what's to come financially.

Amusing office perks (and any other benefits down to the Mr. Coffee) are a branding and recruiting exercise. They are essential.

It's just a matter of budget and efficiency.

> Nobody is going through the significant work of raising VC and then TRYING to fail.

Unfortunately there are individuals who do almost this. Their names do travel in the VC circles. Their goal is to get VC money, enjoy the funds and preferably fail within a year or so; rinse and repeat.

Spend 3 to 9 months securing the funds, be boss, leading lavish lifestyle for 12 to 18 months, while getting paid and have lots of perks.

edit: @lolinder wrote it better "..they're not trying very hard to succeed."

I mean does it surprise you at this point that it’s hard to find integrity in Silicon Valley? My current theory is that it’s a side effect of easy wins since the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no competition and only the US knew how to build software startups. It’s interesting where the next decades will go. I’m not saying the US will surely loose, but based on the products I see coming out of China, it’s going to be interesting. For example, in my local MediaMarkt, the most high-tech section is the drone section and these are all Chinese. Also, if you purely look at the specs, Chinese electric cars outperform all European and American brands (charging rate, battery capacity, and performance). Not only in the budget segment but in the performance segment as well.

Nah. There has been legitimate progress in Semiconductors (EUV!) and basic research (JWST!), including healthcare (mRNA, CRISPR). This theory that living in a world on the brink of world war somehow makes societies more productive seems like an incorrect narrative.

That’s not what I meant to say. I think many in Silicon Valley underestimate how much right place and right time has played a role in the success. With that in mind, I think too many ideas from Silicon Valley are blindly copied as a theory of how things should go.

As a contrast for example, Buffett is known for high integrity. A lot of current startups on the other hand assume that integrity is not really necessary in business, based on the contradictory statements that are often made. I think that getting away with low integrity was/is only possible due to the tailwinds.

I cannot picture a future where software avoids becoming another low margin commodity.

This has been the way since the first internet boom in the early 2000s. The successes make too much money for it to be any other way.

Overt fraud (sometimes known as "long firm" fraud) is rarer than you think, but there are the Theranos companies out there. Then things with very questionable payment structures like WeWork.

This is also why "qualified investor" rules exist in the US. People briefly got into cryptocurrency (ICOs) as a way round this, which really is an all scam all the time economy.

It feels the frauds are at least using non-traditional funding strategies, Theranos funding setup was kinda crazy.

I have a theory that extreme levels of VC investment mean, relative to whatever ownership shares the employees doing the actual work get, the original VCs have extreme ownership over whatever profits the business might generate (including from an IPO/sale).

Well, that’s just a fact. But my theory is that this ultimately incentivizes the employees to invest in their own skills and maximizing their salary-earning potential, rather than making the business succeed - the behavior you’ve described here.

If the market were sane, I think VCs would be averse to investing in already-highly-invested-in companies that don’t have clear paths to profitability. But, well… our markets aren’t really sane or sensible in that way. Many VCs and managerial types would rather crack whips or institute OKRs/other MBA-type nonsense than simply make sure employees are both adequately salaried and adequately invested in the success of the company.

> Taking the money of some clueless holder of money - optimistically calling themselves as investors, never as suckers for sure - and fraud away.

Generally, investors in early-ish-stage startups, that is those which are most likely to unexpectedly implode, scattering office furniture all over the place, know very well what they're getting into; they're specialist VCs who invest in, say, 50 startups in the hope that two or three will be worth something.

Though, the nature of the game is that sometimes, one of these will have a truly massive breakout success, by accident, and it will totally screw up their view of risk from then on, leading them to put vast amounts of money into things which could not possibly work. Looking at you, Softbank.

Right. So it sounds like rolling the dice with unknown numbers (both negatives and gigantic ones) on the faces as many times as the vallet bears in the hope of a lucky jackpot kind of unsophisticated cluelessnes to me then. National lottery for the wealthy. Likely this is not their money, and not hard earn money then but some easy come easy go furtune perhaps? Otherwise I'd expect a bit more cautious sophistication arond wealth generated by an intelligent body of people rather than the '2-3 out of 50' kind of strategy those VC specialists represent. Success is a conscious journey for only those eventually succeed and always retrospectively - to serv as a sellable recipe then for the hungry aspirings seeking foolproof methods - so a lot of luck is involved in the birth of great things, any great things, but come on! This level of fortuitous attitude is a crime, huge distortion, misuse, and disrespect of the funds representing the value created by someone else elsewhere. Is this all there is about VC professionals? This apparently open secret of lavish games, seemingly by overgrown greedy children whose talent is in puffery?

There's a lot of due diligence and background checks and other things that happen, that this framing glosses over, but given due diligence let FTX and Theranos through, it's easy to see why some would choose to see it that way. Still, thats just how the numbers work out. If you have $1,000,000 to blow, and you invest $100,000 at a time, and one pays off 100x, you're up $9 million. But if they all fail you're down to zero. If they all hit 100x, you'd be up $100 million!

So there is actually a lot of effort put in to try and only pick only the winners. It's just the fact of the matter is that there's just so much luck involved, on top of being good at business and sales and product development, that, as an investor, there's no such thing as a sure bet.

Theranos in particular didn't have many _proper_ VCs involved; it was a lot of, essentially, individual dumb rich people (and/or their family offices). IIRC a proper VC turned them down at some point because they couldn't produce audited accounts. At all. Not even from a dodgy auditor. It was a weirdly amateur fraud, when you look at it; an awful lot of it came down to "trust me, bro". FTX was a far more professional fraud, granted.

Haha of course they know what they're doing. Their money is from the California pension funds. But they have returned well. So no hate.

I wonder how well CDOs performed for pensions before the bottom dropped.

They did well but that loss was bad because of knock-on effects to the market. CalPERS lost some half of its value back then. But exposure to VC is very small (1-2% of fund size). They've marked down a lot of investments by more than the GFC losses but it barely affects CalPERS because <15% is in private markets and a small fraction of that is in venture.

That fund alone is over half a trillion so that's still a lot of money to allocate.

Investors are usually the ones that push you to spend as fast as possible. The goal is to find out the good company sooner and not having to dedicate time and effort on businesses that won't become outliers. You're either Facebook or dead, those two outcomes are preferable to a good mid size company that generates steady revenues (they call that a lifestyle business).

The "private planes" were liquidated from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Hydrogen - "The company's main product was intended to be a conversion kit to be retrofitted to existing aircraft to allow them to run on hydrogen fuel."

The "massive 3D printer" was liquidated from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Motors - "was an American manufacturing company focused on low-volume production of open-source vehicles and other products using multiple microfactories."

If an investor accepted the premise of the companies, these don't sound like outrageous assets to own.

Those two sound - phrased that way - noble goals.

I assume the opening of the article quoted with that hint of a judgemental tone was born on the corpses of the others then. Those may have catchy promises too perhaps, without any hint of parasitic smell leaking out even if the hidden agenda was precisely that.

> This does not sound healthy.

Its not - the entire Silicon Valley / VC thing was enabled by the free cash created by the zero-interest economy. Now that went away, and everything is coming crashing down back to reality.

A former tenant of mine was an office furniture and moving company. His business was pretty interesting as he was big into buying and selling Aeron chairs. He even gave me a top of the line Aeron for free. All of his inventory just circulated through NYC: he'd furnish an office with chairs he refurbished from another that was closing or moving. My favorite part about his business was how he charged for cleaning out the office of furniture he would turn around and resell making money on both ends.

He even tried making Aeron parts overseas to bypass Herman Miller but got caught by customs and had to surrender the shipment. When Covid hit he tried pivoting to home service to try and build a WFH office furnishing company but struggled to get it going (the scale was beyond his ability.) His business in shambles he quickly shut it down and liquidated his inventory in a week.

A dynamic career condensed into 2 cracking paragraphs. Well done!

We bought our Aeron chairs during Covid. Went for about $100, although the bored guy selling them sold for a bit less for cash. We didn’t ask any questions. The warehouse had hundreds of them, mostly new and mostly in decent shape.

5 years later, a few repair kits ($35) have been needed, and a few backrests have cracked, but mostly been an excellent value.

so funny I'm like wtf is an Aeron chair, I look it up I'm sitting on one now

Same, lol.

If you're in a major city, I suspect those chairs came out of a renegotiated/cancelled WeWork type building.

In my city, one of the WeWork copycats cancelled a brand new lease at short notice in May 2020. The building owner sold a lot of the furniture at the front door.

Where do you find Herman Miller repair parts? I need an armrest for my Celle (20+ years, going strong except for a worn arm pad).

At any official distributor.

Something I've learned in present and past jobs, serving as a de facto millwright in R&D and small factories: If someone is offering something on the used market, it's because it really exists, and they want to get rid of it quickly. Next day shipping on some giant machine? No problem.

Some things, it's dumb to buy them new, like optics benches and some equipment that's expensive to make but easy to qualify and calibrate.

In contrast, even "catalog" items from mainstream suppliers might have long waiting times if the supplier is a build-to-order outfit.

Example:

VitroLabs raises $46 million to build and scale the world's first pilot production of cell cultivated leather (2022)

https://svdisposition.com/auction-detail?id=698

Featuring Late-Model Research and Development Instruments, 3D Printers, Laser Cutters: Phenom Pro Desktop SEM, Sartorius Stedim and Eppendorf Benchtop Bioreactor Systems, Perkin-Elmer Operetta CLS (High Content Analysis System), Molecular Devices SpectraMax iD3, and much more! Milpitas, CA

No cell-cultivated leather office chairs.

Rich Cellinthian Leather anyone?

Previously: The business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42107870

There used to be some killer junk warehouses in San Jose filled with the detritus of electronics industry.

Triangle comes to mind.

In Brazil there were large warehouses in São Paulo near the local “electronics” street, Santa Efigênia (we joked she was the saint patron of electrical engineering).

From those places you could get almost anything, from a tomography machine or a jet engine test stand, all the way to each and every kind of electronic component of every imaginable vintage.

As far as I know, the ecosystem that powered it no longer exists. I got a sizeable chunk of my vintage computer collection there.

> As far as I know, the ecosystem that powered it no longer exists.

I take that back. Going through the place on Google Street View shows it quite vital as late as April 2024. Some of the places that had the most interesting stuff seem closed, but it really depends on the actual day of the week of the photo, as those places had notoriously unreliable opening hours.

I'm getting a weird William Gibson vibe from this comment. Your 1st two paragraphs could be the start of one of his short stories.

Even cooler were the shops near LA filled with the detritus of the aerospace industry. Like, piles of titanium tubing, and big rocket nozzles sitting on the floor.

Example: https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/los-angeles-sci-fi-prop-ho...

for a while back in the early 2000s it felt like Weirdstuff Warehouse was getting pallets of surplus gear from failed dot-coms. along with the office chairs/etc.

The profiled company has a Youtube channel where they occasionally post tours of the facilities of the companies being liquidated:

* https://www.youtube.com/@svdauctions/videos

UCSF had a surplus store in south San Francisco. I worked nearby and we’d make it an office excursion occasionally to go there at lunch. One coworker found a fresnel lens, our company bought a server rack there… they had small auctions for the more expensive items but you could also just buy things… sorry, this was so long ago I can barely remember other than the dusty smell and the comfy feeling of wandering the warehouse.

I just looked it up and it looks like they still use the warehouse but now sell everything online.

During the great recession I went to the Kodak offices that were shutting down. I bought 4 aerons for $25 each, but could only fit 2 in my car. Fortunately, I sold 2 to a guy in the parking lot for $40 so my chairs were almost free.

I've gone to similar industrial auction sites in WA. Sometimes there's gold to be had for pennies on the dollar, other times it's trash. Either way, I've got some good equipment out of them for very cheap.

So in the early 2000 Dot Com crash network equipment was the hot item. We did a new startup and got top of the line Cisco gear for pennies on the dollar. The rub came at license time a few years later, Cisco wanted a fortune. We sold the Cisco gear for about what we paid for it and went to Juniper gear, who at the time let the license transfer for free.

> Carroll remembers a sale from 2022 as one of his favorites. The Arizona car company Local Motors had shut down and was trying to offload one of the world’s largest 3D printers, big enough to print a car.

I guess that finally answers the question, "Would you download a car?"

Nothing like buying 12 TGIFs in the midwest?

https://svdisposition.hibid.com/catalog/607470/tgi-fridays--...

I'm in a similar business. It's fun working with the spoils of corporations in crisis or bankruptcy, one gets to see the insides of them and figure out where they went wrong without having to get employed there.

I really envy the auctioneer featured in the piece.

[√] Gets to learn about real tech economy

[√] Gets to learn about many different unrelated businesses and tech

[√] Gets to interact with people across many industries

What is the square root of "Gets to learn about real tech economy"?

(I think you mean: :) )

EDIT: Why did HN nuke my checkmark (U+2713)? I insert it between the colon and smiley, and it disappears when I click submit/update. !! Now I understand the parent's mathematical expression better.

HN removes most Unicode that isn’t used as part of an actual language. Ever noticed you never see emoji here? Math symbols are an exception, I guess.

Thanks - now I understand the root of the problem! :)

I should have realized usurping an math symbol on HN might not go over well :)

Boom

Is there an equivalent for nyc?

I’d love to find one in Ireland, but people here seem to be far too diligent at recycling stuff.

“Hireland” needs to be a thing.

Please tell me someone’s done this already.

"Hireland"?!

It’s just an auction site, albeit one that specializes.

Search around and you should find similar auction sites for NYC, some will specialize in government sales, some in private liquidation, and some in estates.

NYC doesn't really have the ecosystem. You can definitely find used Aerons on facebook marketplace though.

NY is the centre of the world for fintech and blockchain.

Look around on Bidspotter, there's industrial auctions all the time.

They're extremely user-hostile. No shipping, no weekend hours, so you gotta take off work time to go to the inspection and pickup days. The photos and descriptions are insultingly sparse, and the terms are egregious.

But sometimes you can score a real gem for pennies, and it's all worth it.

For anyone getting started, especially if you just got funded, I highly suggest you personally buy a stack of laptops, chairs or desks from one of these places to provide all your new hires. The experience should leave you humbled and give some foreshadowing of what is likely to come.

So if early Amazon employees built their own desks out of doors, what did they use for chairs?

wooden crates

I've always envied Americans access to offloaded high end gear

In places less blessed, corporate gear is either low end (The good ones get passed around internally), or the nerds go after it so aggresively that it ends up at a high premium

During the dot com bust they had a bunch of these auctions where a ton of equipment was for sale.

I bought a Cisco router (2514 iirc) and a Napster T-shirt when Napster went bankrupt.

The waste of our generation really kills me. We all pay for these things. It’s in the price of everything we buy, all companies pass on costs to the consumers.

The company's out of business. What do you expect them to do?

I mean when they originally went hog wild buying stuff at God knows what prices new. At least this company is recycling the waste.

OK. And why is that a waste? If you need it, you need it.

Because they just go out of business because no one needs all these startups.

Do you have a way of predicting the failures?

> In a 2020 sale for what Silicon Valley Disposition called a “Major Bay Area Wind Energy Kite Company,” the auction site listed a 2016 Magni crane.

I assume this must have been Makani: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makani_(company)

There's a beautiful feature film about the story of Makani. It's a great watch with plenty of technical details that follows the story from beginning to end.

Available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE

As "cool" as the project seems, I completely agree with some of the comments in the video expressing disbelief that they were able to get funding for the project for more than a decade. It seems immediately obvious at the outset that there's no commercial application for the technology, as cool as it is. Way too many moving parts, way too complicated, for something that likely will only ever provide much less energy than a traditional wind turbine.

How do I get me some ex-startup laptops? I'm in the market for a last-year-Macbook Pro.

You can get refurbs from Apple. Generally about 25% off.

They don’t have the same stench of failure and despair, though.

That's true, and I suppose that does add a little something. This Macbook has been associated with the wasting of billions of dollars of VC money etc.

Is there anything like that in WA?

I will take Universal Hydrogen's Piper Dakota for $5.

If only I lived closer, I could get some cheap Macbooks...

Isn't this how Overstock.com made their nut as well?

I think they started off disposing of surplus inventory, which is different. The products are new, just never sold, and now the manufacturer, distributor, or retailer wants them off the books (unsold inventory is an expense).

Any way to buy overseas that is relatively reputable?

None of the auctions seems to offer shipping, so you'd probably need to hire someone to pick up whatever you buy and ship it to you.

If you’re in Europe, Troostwijk (no affiliation) is pretty big in used corporate goods.

https://www.troostwijkauctions.com/

Otherwise, perhaps there are local auction houses/warehouses in your country/region?

I wonder what was in the Juicero auction ;)

Any tech company that thought it a good idea to buy rather than lease a Cessna deserves to be made bankrupt.

Depends on what were they doing with it? If they were just flying with it from A to B then I tend to agree with you. If they were working on tech actually attached to the airplane (like a fly-by-wire system, sensors attached, or something like that) then I can imagine the point of it. Paperwork around test flights are hard enough without also having to convince the lessor to let you do what the FAA lets yo do.

That wasn’t a Cessna, but a Piper Warrior, and depending on the age it might not have been terribly much (even new ones can be had for $250k or so).

Even still in most cases leasing is what you want to do. Preferably in terms where they take care of maintenance (if the crankshaft fails inspection it doesn't increase your costs), and if "yours" is down you get a loaner. You probably want shared plane terms, not a plane that is all yours, and they provide trained pilots. There are lots of tax reasons this is better.

Buying a plane makes sense when it is your personal plane (and leasing your personal plane to the company is done - though the laws/ethics get weird) and you fly a lot. It also makes sense when you have several (though I don't know where the break even is). It make might sense for bragging rights, but generally your customers won't be as impressed as you think.

The particular startup in the article was developing tech to replace regular aircraft engines with those running on Hydrogen. I don't think any lessor would appreciate those extensive modifications on their aircraft.

That is a good reason to own an airplane (or several) then. I missed that detail.

A curious disclaimer on the listing was that they were selling the physical plane with the Hydrogen engine, but not the intellectual property. I suppose the IP was sold separately, and the buyer might need to obtain a license separately before legally operating the aircraft.

Their goal was to convert to a hydrogen fuel source. Moonshot for sure, but hardly deserving to fail, especially since that sort of thing would almost certainly be barred in lease terms

What is your opinion about the full sized airliner (Dehavilland Dash-8) that said "tech company" also bought?

Are you aware that the tech company in question was Universal Hydrogen, who was modifying aircraft to utilize a hydrogen fuel cell power system? Don't you think it would be reasonable for an aircraft development company to own flight test assets?

Besides, the cost of that little puddlejumper is the noise. It's a 1976 Piper Cherokee 235, nearly 50 years old. Fair market value of $150K currently, but they have been appreciating rapidly over the past 5 years or so, and it is likely that they will realize a profit on it's sale. Rather than a loss if they had leased a newer aircraft. But either way, it costs less than hiring a useless new college graduate "full stack" developer.

ah silicon valley disposition, my favorite place to window shop at. If your ever curious just go to hibid.com and put in a Silicon valley zip code.

Yeah, I’ve been waiting for bidding to open on https://hibid.com/lot/214229120/comino-gando-rm-long-fully-l... just see what it gets up to. (5955wx + 4x RTX 4090’s)

not as good as allston christmas, but pretty good

... Okay, how common is it for startups to have _private planes_, even small ones like the one pictured? I've never seen that. You'd think at some point investors would get irritated.

More common than it should be. There is a group that is impressed that you are large enough to afford to own a plane. If you have to travel often a plane at your command saves a lot of time. If you often travel with the same group the size of the plane, it can be cheaper than first class. Generally you should be better off leasing 25% of private jet though for the above needs.

Of course airplanes are always an environmental disaster. That doesn't matter to many people though.

It may have been an aviation-related startup. There are many of those in the area too. Or agriculture, given the size of the plane.

You'd think at some point the investors would read the startup's prospectus, and realize that they have invested in a company that wants to modify airplanes to run off of hydrogen, and that the company has purchased not just a a _private plane_, but a _whole blimey airliner_ and a bunch of _jet turbine parts_ and to try and implement this scheme.

https://svdisposition.com/auction-detail?id=664

This is an ad.

This is a site related to tech startups. While content here is not intended to solely be focused on that, development of good business sense is relevant.

Buying used but functional equipment and saving your start-up money makes for good business.

Certainly feels like a native add...

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

A very interesting one, BTW

My dentist keeps yacht sale and swap magazines in his waiting room, which are all ads, but they're completely irrelevant to me and fascinating. That's how I feel about this ad.

No complaints here. I wasn’t interested and projected that expectation on others. My mistake.

Are you saying it was sponsored? At any rate, it's clear that many people in this thread don't know that this is a type of business that exists—evidently they did experience the first dot com crash, or the second dot com crash. So, there is informational value at least.

PR works by offering interesting stories to journalists whose message is beneficial to the original group.

One mans trash is an another mans treasure !!

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