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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

I'm also a physicist, though not in the world of ultrasound, and had similar concerns when I saw uBeam turn up on HN today. I thought about writing up my concerns (power loss, inadvertent heating of the wrong thing, cranky animals, etc.), but decided to hold my tongue.

If you have $10M to invest in a startup, then you certainly have $10-20k to contract someone knowledgeable in the field for a week to vet an idea for sanity. As a skilled but low-paid academic, I'd jump at that gig, as I'm sure many others would.

If the investor's done their homework, then perhaps there's a clever trick of which uBeam makes use. If not, then perhaps the investor will lose money. Either way, it'll sort itself out.

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To listen to Mark Suster's post, it sounds like they did a very comprehensive vet, so I would presume someone ran the basic math like you were thinking and like the link above runs through. And with just a lay-person's knowledge of physics, my first thought was "Isn't there a lot of energy loss using sound-through-air as a medium of energy transfer?".

On the other hand, all they say is "we talked to these people and those people and those other people over there", so who knows what the actual tests were.

A lot of the discussion here is about Arrington/Crunchfund, and while I find him interesting to read and good at getting information out of people in a blogging context, I don't really have an opinion on his competency as a VC. But A16Z's investment record is pretty solid, and Mark Suster has always struck me as a reasonable guy.

As TechCrunch's post pointed out, Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of better-device-charging startups, but now I just have no clue what to think. :P But if they get it working, it'll be pretty awesome.

10-20k might not sound like much compared to $10million, but remember that was the total amount raised, so any one investment is likely around 500k. Sorry for taking your post a bit too literally, but 10-20k then represents an added cost of 2-4% (or more if your investment isn't that much).

I guess my point is that if you have 100 investments, you would maximize returns by balancing return on investment with cost of investment.

From the skeptical posts here, it sounds like that 10-20k (or whatever sum) may have been worth it in this case, but in general it probably is not.

That's not how Series A rounds work. The lead very likely took at least $5m of the $10m round.

I have a bag of gaussian spheres I could rent out for just such a project.

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