_aarti

They chose to do it their way and not make incremental improvements. It's America - Land of dreams - right?

Right, and I would agree with you - we had outside consultants who worked alongside us, in iOS, in Firmware, in Cloud, in EE, in Security. We all worked as a team to put the last finishes on the product. Also, there were a lot of new employees as well. The whole SW QA team was hired this year.

We did not know about insolvency - no one did - except the leadership team, or many would have raised concerns or left. Maybe this was the fear. Who wants to acquire a company where people are jumping ship.

We wanted the product in people's hands. Heck, it's on my door at home.

I also would say that this employee has the right air his grievances. I disagree with his criticism of the product and the company's mission and vision. I believe - there was no malice. There was mismanagement.

I mean - I don't know - this is the tech mecca of the world. If these VC's and Engineers don't have vision/mission to go all in, what chances does the rest of the world have to bet on hardware startups?

> The whole idea was bullshit from the get-go.

The market says otherwise - Amazon is all over this at the moment, so is Nest.

The product was built in China on the same lines that build the iPhone with the same detail. Manufacturing quality hardware is capital intensive, Finding people who can support that level of engineering is capital intensive, Hiring security engineers is capital intensive, they chose to go all in.

The company was not wasting money. I have worked in Silicon Valley startups with lavish spending. This was not one of them. There was no free food, no wine/beer on tap, no lavish parties, no free memberships to the equinox.

He fought hard to become full time, he came in as a contractor and became full time within a month. He was paid until the last day. The contractors in the engineering team were all given option join full-time from the get go - they chose not to become full-time. No one in engineering knew we were shutting down. We were told 2 days before shutdown. I worked until 11 pm with many team members, including my manager until the night before.

Thank you so much for saying this. The engineering team was literally in tears because they could not ship. We all wanted to ship the product so bad. It hurt.

I mean - think about, would you listen to someone who had given 3+ years of blood/sweat to a company and product vs 3 months.

The shutdown was mishandled, we all felt the pain. Most of all the contractors and I wish I could pay them. I would if I had the money. But I am also looking for a job.

Thank you, Kevin, for everything you did.

Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware

Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.

The employee never worked on the actual product. He joined as a contractor 1 month before launch to work in the IT department on the website. He had been with the company only 3 months.

So, I disagree with his comments about the product. His points about management should be taken into consideration. The shutdown was mismanaged.

The core engineering team had folks with 3+ years working on Mechanical, Electrical, Firmware, iOS, Android and Backend engineering. This was not an easy feat to pull given the small team and that the manufacturing was in China on the same lines that build Apple's iPhone with the same level of quality.

There are startups working in this area in SF. I interviewed at one.

I made a donation anyway with paypal, much appreciate your work. Also checkout funding from Travis foundation and DuckDuckGo. If you need help with traffic to your site, let me know, I work at a CDN. http://foundation.travis-ci.org/grants/

I use it to donate to exercism. It's nice to see other contributions

I have trouble with paypal

I have used iterm for a long time and I would like to donate to your project. I make all my donations with Patreon, would be great if you could add support for that, if it's not too much trouble. https://www.patreon.com/

I use Lua. It's super light-weight, very easy to get started, and not a lot of ceremony( concise language) and has good integration with C libraries

Self-congratulatory and verbose, gratuitous inclusion of algorithm names and references to make it appear more technical than the actual content, plenty of typos and grammar mistakes(stopped counting halfway through at 10 or so).