gautamb0

Here's the thought experiment I'd run.

If you have a device that looks and feels like traditional glasses, but enables you to create and place an unlimited amount of virtual displays of any size and shape you desire, which can follow you around as you walk, why would you ever want to replace those with physical displays?

Everything you’re going through is perfectly normal for a startup founder closing up shop. Everything about it is a painful process, and it can be damaging to your self-worth.

Mourn it, move past it, and treat it as another stint of professional experience. You haven’t wasted time, you don’t have to start over. everyone works on a project that doesn’t live up to expectations at some point in their career. You’ve likely learned a lot and grown professionally.

Leverage what you’ve learned however you see best. Could be another startup, a bigco, academia, etc. The right companies will respect your startup experience. I’d strongly suggest taking 2-4 weeks completely off- no interviewing, no working, just recovery. (It won’t be enough to fully mentally recover- that will take much longer, but should be enough to get you back on track professionally) Lay down your arms so you can fight another day.

I agree fully, though I’d like to add a layer of nuance.

The best engineering leaders I’ve encountered have been hands-off (as you said, at a certain point it’s nigh impossible to scale otherwise) However, they’ve uniformly retained engineering mindsets, and have great spidey senses for when things are being overengineered, or when complexity is being underestimated, and much more. They all have also demonstrated the ability to drill in deep when the situation arises, and tend to have strong understanding of high level architectures and systems. I’ve had “pure people managers” who were non-technical and ended up having myriad weaknesses. The opposite has been even worse. But the best know exactly when and how to put on both their people and technical hats.

I’ve been in the enterprise vr industry for almost 7 years, and you’re correct with your estimate being very close to where I’d put it. The vast majority of revenue is from gaming.

Strivr | Multiple Roles | Remote | Full-Time At the intersection of technology, science, business and sports, Strivr offers an end-to-end, VR-based immersive learning platform that changes the way people around the world train, learn and perform. With a mission to elevate performance through immersive experience, we are redefining an industry in real time and shaping the future of learning, and building the bridge between the enterprise and the Metaverse. Senior Software Engineer - Android https://apply.workable.com/j/B72B5091A9 Senior Software Engineer - Data Platform https://apply.workable.com/j/DB6591AC8B

If you have a vr headset, check out “Becoming Homeless” by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

Strivr | Multiple Roles | Remote | Full-Time

At the intersection of technology, science, business and sports, Strivr offers an end-to-end, VR-based immersive learning platform that changes the way people around the world train, learn and perform. With a mission to elevate performance through immersive experience, we are redefining an industry in real time and shaping the future of learning, and building the bridge between the enterprise and the Metaverse.

Senior Software Engineer - Android https://apply.workable.com/j/B72B5091A9

Senior Software Engineer - Data Platform https://apply.workable.com/j/DB6591AC8B

Very impressive product- I certainly applaud your efforts and agree that the price is competitive for what it is. You can even use ultra wide monitors at similar resolutions as a comparison point. (Though of course they end up way ahead in terms of ppd)

This post resonated very strongly with me. 18 months is what it took me- everything that you listed to a t.

1. Start with a problem, not a solution. And validate that you can reach customers who will pay for your solution to solve their problem, before day 1.

2. Don’t pay attention or compare yourself to other startups/potential competition. No good comes of it.

3. Recognize how large a factor luck is. This means preparing for things to go wrong, but also accepting that factors beyond your control can hugely impact the trajectory of your business.

I went from a 3 person startup doing low 6 figures in annual revenue to a startup in the same space that had just closed its series A.

I interviewed with FAANG’s and startups in nyc and the Bay Area. I felt like my experience was valued by most companies I interviewed with, to my surprise, and many others had similar stories to mine.

It felt like the right the step, like going to a version of my company that’d turned out (a lot) better. It’s been a great experience- went from senior dev to manager, and love doing both. Management allows me to wear a bunch of hats in a similar way I did as a founder, but with a safety net and much more support.

My experience as a founder was extremely valuable. It made me a much better engineer and a much better leader than I could’ve been if I hadn’t done my startup. Overall, my career trajectory is better than it would’ve been otherwise, barring some stroke of luck in the corporate world. I have no regrets.

It wasn’t all roses, though. For the first 18 months or so after we shut our startup down (and through my subsequent return to full time employment), I was hurting pretty bad, constantly thinking of what I could’ve done differently and still had many, many sleepless nights. It took those 18 months to really get it out of my system and move on.

I still itch for the next one.

Like the OP, Roomba i8+. Dramatically improved our weekend chores routine. The automatic dirt disposal is also very convenient.

I went with Roomba over other brands as it seemed the best intersection of quality/reliability, noise and privacy.

Strivr | Multiple Roles | Remote, Palo Alto,CA or Bellevue, WA | Full-Time

At the intersection of technology, science, business and sports, Strivr offers an end-to-end, VR-based immersive learning platform that changes the way people around the world train, learn and perform. With a mission to elevate performance through immersive experience, we are redefining an industry in real time and shaping the future of learning.

Staff Software Engineer, Mobile Unity UI https://apply.workable.com/strivr-1/j/A49C06093F/

Staff Software Engineer, Content https://apply.workable.com/strivr-1/j/C84B006CEB/

Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform https://apply.workable.com/strivr-1/j/652059027E/

Engineering Manager, Core Platform https://apply.workable.com/strivr-1/j/547A39B219/

Strivr | Palo Alto, CA or Seattle, WA | Full-time

Senior Software Engineer - VR https://apply.workable.com/strivr-1/j/40D585FDD1/

Lead Software Engineer - Backend https://apply.workable.com/j/76B37D39E3

Staff Software Engineer - Backend https://apply.workable.com/j/4CB9B6E14A

Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform https://apply.workable.com/j/652059027E

At the intersection of technology, science, business and sports, Strivr offers an end-to-end, VR-based immersive learning platform that changes the way people around the world train, learn and perform. With a mission to elevate performance through immersive experience, we are redefining an industry in real time and shaping the future of learning.

We're looking for folks with expertise in VR/AR, Cloud, Data Engineering and Graphics.

Find out more about us here: https://www.strivr.com/company/careers/

VR ironically might fit the exact definition that he's going for with the iPhone as being a "real trend."

His friends, and many others, definitely have let their headsets catch dust. But there is a core that does use them every day, and probably won't stop any time soon, and it's certainly being put to work in non-gaming use cases.

I think he's being properly cautious, though, using the date as qualifier.

Windows Mobile phones were out for years well before the iPhone was, and were pretty similar in terms of capability and even hardware, but never reached its type of traction.

When it comes down to it, there were only a few key features and a lot of polish (many still argue over how much more polished it really was) which differentiated the iPhone to go on to sell billions, versus competing products from Palm and Microsoft partners to sell a hundredth of that.

Even in retrospect, it's not straightforward to pin the how and why. Back in 2007, it would have been very hard to guess correctly. It's hard to fault people who dismissed the iPhone as being yet another failed mobile project, and also hard to fault people who thought that PocketPC's would revolutionize computing.

Thanks for the quality article. I was going to reply with the same; why not use HLS. The point of poor support, especially in Chrome, is a good one, though.

This is a wonderful project. It looks very sharp and has pretty good components.

However, it's usually significantly better, cheaper and easier to build an "almost" silent system, just by using good heatsinks and very slow fans. A small amount of airflow is usually significantly better than none at all.

I'm on year 2 of my startup, and around month 9, I felt similar to you, so I can relate. Real traction began around month 20, and its still modest. Here are a couple of issues I see:

1. 9 months isn't long enough, as others have said. There are exceptions, but those are the exceptions. I can't think of any startup in recent history truly reaching product/market fit within its first couple of years. Facebook, I guess. It's not abnormal for it to not happen years out. pmarca's material on it suggests this, as well.

2. You not only raised money very early, but you raised it from non-professional investors, as far as I can tell, so you're un-nerved about losing their money, while they want to push you to turn their thousands into millions. Raising more money at this point is only going to exacerbate everything you're going through.

3. High-touch sales are absolutely the norm in B2B. Your efforts are a good thing. If you take a lot of the typical YC advice at face value, you'll be lead to believe that you should be measuring your conversions, etc, and having a nice hockey-stick shaped growth curve. This is absolutely not going to be the case for a B2B company on month 9, unless they've struck platinum. There was a startup school segment where Kevin Hale (IIRC) advised the founders not to measure sales, since they'd likely be in the single digits for the first year and not yield anything meaningful. Instead, you should be measuring your own outreach. Any other metric is going to be close enough to zero to be meaningless at this stage. Your product is going to be crappy, your presentations and pitches are going to be awkward and sloppy.

At the end of the day, you have the best idea of your chances for survival. With what you've mentioned so far, there's promise, but it'll be up to you to make it happen. Even if you stick it out for a year or two longer, the odds, of course, are still against you.

Hoping this reduces used 960 EVO/PRO prices. Not a whopping improvement.

I don’t have a PhD. In my opinion, if you don’t have a decent idea about what you want to get yours in, you probably should be thinking twice about getting one at all. There’s a huge opportunity cost, and the job market will probably change in non-trivial ways by the time you’re done. Only do it if you’re certain you want to become an expert in something specific. Microsoft and Google in particular are doing a lot of work with FPGAs. (Though, admittedly, the most interesting of these are probably research positions where relevant PhD’s are the norm) Apple does the full stack when it comes to hardware, and I’d expect them to have plenty of analog people. The best route might be to tell the right story based on your past experience and pair it with relevant positions at the bigcos. How to get their attention is unfortunately a topic that literally plenty of books have been written on, and I’m as far from an expert at it as possible. :p

My background is slightly higher-level than yours; CPU architecture. I have friends and colleagues with similar backgrounds, and the ones pulling in the most have either pivoted all but entirely to software, or have managed to find hardware roles within the big 4. They do exist. The latter get the best of both worlds, as they pay essentially the same as they do for software roles, and come with the rest of the usual perks. Banks are similar, but my observation which may or may not be completely accurate, is that they are pickier and narrower in scope.

I would be wary about getting a PhD in anything outside of computer science today, though. The roles are out there, but there are far fewer of them.

I've been following your AR/VR coverage for a couple of years now and have enjoyed it and have been enlightened by it since.

Seconded, they look absolutely gorgeous. Photogrammetry scenes are comparable but are still a touch behind these in realism.

Broadly speaking, given a choice between getting on an airplane and traveling a few thousand miles versus strapping a headset on your face, there are plenty of scenarios where one can make a compelling case for doing the latter, even with today's hardware. Meetings, presentations, training, and more. The hardware is a big barrier currently, for sure; expensive and clunky. But that will change pretty quickly. The ability to showcase something without physically being there is very valuable. And yes, naturally, a lot more applications will emerge once the technology becomes easier to digest.

Very interesting. I haven't used GearVR much, but Google Cardboard/Daydream SDK's can be annoyingly bulky and inflexible at times. The new input methods that VR has brought about can be useful in non-VR scenarios as well.

[I had to go back and reread it a couple of times...naturally :)]

I guess part of what bothered me is what makes it well written; there is so much of the discussion spent on background, which felt like stating the obvious to me. It wasn't clear to me how specific the conditions needed to be for the attack. They use GnuPG as an example, and ostensibly rely on knowing the algorithms that the decryption and encryption functions beforehand. With knowledge of the implementation, they're able to trace execution, and subsequently infer each bit of the victim data that they want to probe. They also need to know the victim's cache characteristics; hierarchy and timing.

It's a far cry from arbitrarily reading memory on an arbitrary victim.

I tried reading the flush+reload paper several times, and watching a couple of the author's talks on it as well. I still haven't come out with a halfway decent understanding of how the timing attack works...which seems to be the most difficult and interesting part to me. It seems like its well understood in the security community, so it gets glossed over when referenced. How they actually manage to read data out of an evicted cache line remains a mystery to me.

Have you guys experimented with LeapMotion?

The best bet as of today is an array of GoPros, same as for most 360 solutions. You can get about 60 degrees out of each lens after accounting for stitching overlap, so six of them are sufficient for a 180 degree stereoscopic picture. I've gotten some good results with this, though of course there's a lot of black space, which a 12+ camera rig would alleviate.

Agreed. Really looking forward to the stiching code being made available on GitHub. I wish that Google would at least release some kind of an API for their Cardboard Camera (e.g. allowing you to pass in a bunch of photos and get a stitched 360 out), but if Facebook makes good on this, it could be even better.