TL;DR Theranos, uBeam and Energous have all figured out how to bilk investors by exploiting their well-known tendency to "invest in teams not products". Hired some great engineers? That's good enough for us; we don't need to check whether your science is snake oil or not.
The bosses of Energous are especially slick. They went for IPO early and started paying themselves huge salaries. At the point when the market might have started asking questions like, "Why is there still no product?" they headed off trouble by adding a bunch of reassuringly big names to the board.
Also another fun point- every techcrunch article on ubeam is by Josh Constine
Turns out the VP joined because of Merc Berte - the MIT/Raytheon engineer, who also left right after series A fund raising. Both Merc and this VP guys seems amazingly sharp. But what's surprising is nowhere in the media you see any credit given to these guys.Perry is branded as a sole genius.
The VP writes-
"And the point of this story? In my opinion, don't take the presence of smart engineers as confirmation of a technology's viability (either way), and don't think the engineers at a company you find questionable aren't smart and are fully aware of the technical issues of what they're working on. They just want to play with fun toys."
I commented on this 200 days ago.[1] I pointed out that you could build a demo version with off the shelf components. 4000 piezoelectric transducers in a 1 meter square frame, with enough separate drivers that you could form and steer a beam, ought to do it. It would take several kilowatts of power to get the claimed sound power level. Audio in that power range is used for ultrasonic welding of plastics. It's attenuated with distance, of course, so a few meters out, you're not getting much power.
> Surely the VC's are performing their due-diligence and there are adults minding the store?
They're not. VC's (especially in SV) are notoriously bad at actually understanding any tech and very easy to trick into delivering large checks. This has been seen countless times.
Suster keeps talking about it being safe because they put sound-waves into pregnant women's bellies ... the FDA actually regulates how much power can be sent, and those probes require direct (usually gel coupled) contact with the target.
I used to be puzzled by this, but then I listened to an episode of A16z podcast and realized that these guys use Microsoft Office, Facebook, Twitter, and Medium all day long——in other words, they're typically not people who understand bleeding-edge technology except in a pop-science-article-in-wired-mag sense.
Fair question. On the episode that I listened to, they were proclaiming that the iPad Pro has replaced the need for a desktop/laptop because it does everything that they need to do.
Conspicuously absent from the list of things that an iPad Pro can do is writing code in any sane kind of development workflow. The idea that an iPad Pro could satisfy my everyday work needs is so foreign to me that I was shocked by how cursory and superficial their technology immersion really is. They need 'desktop publishing' tools, at best.
I'm not claiming that a person who spends all day using Excel and Powerpoint and WhatsApp (and not Vim/Emacs/Sublime/IDE) is incapable of having a nuanced understanding of bleeding edge tech. But I am going to claim that they most likely have a "dentist's office waiting room magazine" understanding of hard tech, and I'll proudly declare that to be my not-so-expert opinion.
You're making a lot of assumptions. Just because someone doesn't code on a daily basis doesn't mean that person doesn't know about tech. If I were their LP, I would be worried if the VCs were coding. Lastly, being good at predicting the future in terms of technology has very little to do with those little details you mentioned. I see so many developers just focused on learning the next new technology like react, grunt, es6, etc. but never even think about where this is all going, they're just satisfied that they have great skills. Not saying it's a bad thing, I'm saying being very good at technical details and seeing the trend has very little to do with each other and sometimes even contradictory (If your goal is to become the best developer who knows every single new technology, you won't have time to think about other things)
It's not about seeing where the market is going (which frankly is impossible and is really just trying to catch and ride trends) - but rather about knowing which companies and projects will definitely fail.
Creating a portfolio is getting rid of the NOs and investing in the MAYBEs. And if you can't properly vet the engineering and technology that a company has, you can't tell that it's going to fail. The massive amount of companies that still get checks for an impossible or just bad product clearly shows that these VC firms dont have the right process, talent or method to accurately judge companies.
1. A lot of successful companies started out with super ghetto technology--even the ones that are famous for being very high-tech in the current days.
2. Nobody knows what company will succeed, including the VCs and you and me.
3. It is arrogant to think anyone has any idea what company will be a NO or MAYBE or YES. If you think that's bullshit and it's easy to spot a "NO", it probably means you haven't experienced this before, because I used to think that way too in the past. Then I went to SF and met companies that I thought would surely fail, they were disorganized, founders looked stupid, working on stupid problems, etc., then the next day they become wildly successful. After encountering several of those you become humble.
4. Conclusion: There is no such thing as "process" you're looking for, and that's how it should be because if you're a VC that follows a strict "process", you won't be around in a while. You can't predict anything. VCs are doing whatever they can and I am pretty sure they are statistically better than you and me at it because that's their job. We can say whatever about them but if somebody gave you $100million dollars today and asked you to invest in startups you and me will probably fail much more miserably than any VCs out there. It's not like I'm a VC fanboy, I just don't agree when people criticize others for something that they are not familiar with.
This isn't about tech, if they don't have basic engineering fundamentals then it's not going anywhere. And yes, it's possible to check for NOs. Some companies are easy to see as definite failures. And, if you cant tell... then by definition they become a MAYBE.
I do due diligence for a living and many VCs at the early stage (seed to A) do very little diligence. When you take a portfolio approach, it's usually not economical to do so for every investment.
> Surely the VC's are performing their due-diligence and there are adults minding the store?
If your goal was to run a startup (not necessarily build a product, but just be a CEO of a startup), you just had to find someone with money more stupid than you.
I saw it happen before. Someone came with a silly idea for the company, managed to convince a few non-very technical people to trust them, and off they went playing SV CEO for a while.
If startups weren't hot a few years ago, they'd probably be buying and selling subprime mortgages or other such thing.
Gotta wonder what is next in the pipeline. VC money is drying up I hear but money doesn't like to stay put, wonder what's the next bubble (genetics, robots, self driving cars, medical devices...)?
> Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, claims that her body's cells are 20 years younger after testing her company’s age-reversing gene therapy on herself.
> The 45-year-old Seattle-area woman, who has no scientific or medical training, underwent the experimental treatment last September in an undisclosed clinic in Colombia. The unorthodox, overseas trial, which was designed to skirt US federal regulations, prompted the resignation of one of the company’s scientific advisors. George Martin, of the University of Washington, quit after telling MIT Technology Review, "This is a big problem. I am very upset by what is happening. I would urge lots of preclinical studies.”[0]
Previously if uberfordogs.ly failed dogs didn't make it to the park in time to play with their friends. I am afraid to find out what happens when growanextrabrain.io fails.
In other posts by the OP (the linked post is the first of the blog), they make the same comparisons too. I was suspicious of the OP's credibility, but one of the posts has detailed physics on airborne waves which fits their experience and skills at uBeam: http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2016/05/acoustic-nonlin...
I know this is trite but Madoff got away with his Ponzi scheme for decades despite numerous SEC (and other authorities) investigations. What makes you think uBeam can't get away for a few years with a Ponzi scheme thinly veiled by impossible tech?
"Because decibels are a logarithmic scale, a decrease of
3dB is half the power. With the uBeam system, being just
one meter away from the transmitter will bring the power
down by half... It’s also absolutely insane. For something
that claims to be as easy as WiFi to install, look at the
differences: WiFi merely requires a single router to be
installed anywhere in the store. uBeam would require a
dozen transmitters, each of with include mechanical
steering for their transducers. uBeam would require
everyone to buy an ultrasonic power receiver for each
device."[0]
In no way am I saying uBeam is legit, but there was a time when you had to buy a wireless adapter for each device you wanted to use with your Wi-Fi access point.
"Using the 1 watt as our transmitter power translates to 0.000507 watt (0.507 milliwatts or 507 microwatts) at the receiving end. "
But it's even worse than this! The FCC does not allow you to transmit at the full 1 watt (30 dBm) if you focus the energy with more than 6 dB gain. If you want to use a phase array to get 21 dB antenna gain, you must drop your transmit power to 25 dBm or 0.316 watts. Every 3 dBi of antenna gain must be accompanied by 1 dBm decline in transmit power.
What do you guys think about Lightsail (http://lightsail.com/)? I'm not entirely sure how they can make an economical 500 KW CAES system, but I don't totally understand their tech.
Here's a former uBeam VP of Engineering (the title the author says they had) who left the same month the author says they left: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulreynolds6
You realize of course his name is on the first page of Google results on "VP engineering" ubeam https://www.google.ca/search?complete=0&&gws_rd=ssl&q=%22VP+... and the only result which is not "we are hiring". Then copypasting firstname lastname ubeam back into Google will spit out that LinkedIn page as the first result. It took longer to type this than do two Google searches.
I literally grew up with web searches having started browsing the (very nascent) web in 1993 with a Mosaic beta. I have tried to disseminate my knowledge in this topic via articles, book chapters and speeches. But really, we are on hacker news. This is quintessential hacking: try, change what you did based on the results, try again, repeat rinse. It will eventually work. Given the speed of Google and scanning ten results, you can fire off a search every few seconds and get to the result real quick. (Or just never if the material is not well searchable. Did you know the best or perhaps the only travel VESA monitor stand is a microphone stand? )
Actually, what I meant was the link between person X and the blog. No matter that people reading the blog could find the author (that was obvious), but rather that people googling person X didn't necessarily find the blog (until this thread.)
If he didn't want to be identified as the author, he probably shouldn't have started a blog whose sole purpose was to discuss uBeam, and his past employment there.
There are many other ways of getting your story in the news – there are tons of tech reporters, for example, who would want to write up his story. And then we'd have the benefit of a condensed story, presumably somewhat fact-checked etc.
I wish I could find it - there is a blog post out there about someone meeting with a VC. The VC and the person get to talking - and the convo goes to uBeam.
The VC says something to the effect of, "Yeah, I know the physics don't make sense. But the CEO is so charismatic that more investors will want in down the line."
"Pied Piper's product is its stock. Whatever makes the value of the stock goes up is what we are going to make. Maybe sometime in the future, we can change the world and perform miracles and all of that stuff. I hope we do. But like I told you before, I am not going to mortgage the present for that."
I remember the first time I saw a group of young VCs (in Palo Alto no less) in public. Walking down the street together. They looked like male supermodels. All of them perfectly dressed, tall, good looking, triathlon physiques...
As soon as I saw this, I could sense that this business is driven by "Confirmation Bias" and "Representativeness Bias", the Halo Effect.
These guys are hiring people who look like themselves, who do the same (extreme) sports like themselves, etc. It's a case of Steve Jobs looking for someone who looks like Steve Jobs, instead of the plump, dowdy, disheveled, and genius Steve Wozniak.
Looking at it from another direction, maybe it's because that's why they're good at dealing with founders and LPs? The point is, everyone has biases, and probably one bias results in another. You can't just say "They hire people who look like them" without thinking about why that happens.
This is what happens when companies are expected to sustain themselves on ever-increasing investment money until an IPO, instead of actually making money themselves. It's a Keynesian beauty contest gone wrong.
It's what happens when people are too removed from market forces. The VC is not attempting to invest in a business that will make lots of money. They're investing in a business which they can _sell_ for lots of money.
The market doesn't get a look in until the last greater fool buys it and is holding it when the music stops. Everyone else has been handsomely rewarded for their tomfoolery so when the music starts playing again they'll dance.
I should note that they deleted their account over a controversy over false claims they made about their credentials (massive oversimplification), so take the posts with a grain of salt.
uBeam is working on this since 2011. I wonder at what point uBeam will be considered "Vaporware"? If they don't deliver anything by 2021 (that's a big if), I would consider uBeam a vaporware for sure.
Would anybody fault uBeam if they got to market using stuff Tesla showed in the 19th century? All this story shows is that after selling snake oil you should buckle up and ship aspirin.
What, are investors going to sue them for not being acoustic enough? "these sales are great but this isn't the tech we were promised."?
Who cares. It's called uBeam not uScream. I've never heard anyone complain about someone shipping different tech from what they raised money with. Have you?
okay - but why not pivot to something that could work, as a backup project? why wouldnt the company diversify when they realized their tech probably doesn't work? they had tons of money . . .
Would uBeam have received half its funding if the founder was not a woman?
Between the Theranos case and now the uBeam case, I think the drive for "equality" has gone so far that it is affecting investing decisions. There are people in the Valley so desperate for female CEOs that they are willing to overlook science and commonsense if they can get a marketable female CEO.
It's about the story. An underdog - such as a very young female CEO - always makes for a good story for the press and investors (how Holmes, born into privilege, can be considered an "underdog" is beyond me, but I digress).
An insider's perspective on how really things really are in one of Silicon Valley's next unicorn startup- uBeam. Mark Cuban calls it a "Zillion Dollar Idea". Fortune calls her "Next Elon Musk". Reminded me about Theranos. But then, the author himself has brought up the comparison as well. This post is pretty interesting too- http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2016/04/must-have-preci... which talks about the start of uBeam. Seems like the MIT CTO, VP, and the recent CFO- all left the company. Thoughts?
Am I the only one who thinks the HN reaction to uBeam is pretty gross? Now we're encouraging shit-talking by former employees? It's an innovative hard tech company with an audacious goal that would change the world if successful and was funded by knowledgeable investors using private money. Why is everyone here so eager to trash talk them?
Because their stated goal of wireless phone charging is likely too hard to get to work right? If they "only" figure out short distance beam-formed wireless power at 25% efficiency, is the company a failure?
Look around any apartment in an 'old' city and you'll see dozens of things that would benefit from being able to throw power like WiFi. 60-watt equivalent LEDs are something like 9W -- there are about 100 places in my apartment I'd like to have better light but my landlord has no interest in running new power lines. Smoke detectors trickle charging at even 1W would never run out of power. Modern 40" TVs can use as little as 25W of power -- with a powerful uBeam and a Chromecast, you could attach it to any wall and never see a cable. Those "smart mirrors" that everyone builds then never shows full frame due to the ugly cord running out of it could easily be charged via wireless tech.
There are obviously many obstacles and who knows if they'll make it, but it seems extremely short sighted and against the spirit of HN to actively cheer for a company's failure.
The reason for the negative reaction is that there is a difference between "there are obviously many obstacles," and "they are promising something that is impossible under the laws of physics." Many people here on HN feel that it's the latter. I also personally know people who are legitimate potential uBeam customers, who were approached by uBeam looking for funding, and who were given the brush-off when they asked to see a working demo.
While it's nice to think that we could let uBeam toil along in the minute hopes that they might succeed, the problem is that they don't exist in a vacuum. The impossible specs that they are putting out there are almost certainly preventing legitimate technologies from getting funded, since you'd have to address the elephant in the room in your pitch deck. Additionally, companies like uBeam and Theranos create massive undertows when they go under -- no VC is going to go within a mile of a blood testing or wireless power delivery company for years after.
Finally, there's a simple way that uBeam could silence all the critics -- they could show some data in a public forum that proves that they can overcome even a few of the basic physics challenges that have been posed. Despite the withering criticism, they've refused to take that step. That's very telling.
They are getting shit-talked by their VP of Engineering, you know that person who is actually responsible for creating that hard tech and is saying that it's impossible.
Yes yes, for their phone-sized receiver. If you change the receiver size or transmitter size, you can change the power delivered.. If you fix the distance and take away the requirement to track a moving object, you can reliably send more power as well.. Adding battery capacity to a TV that's used 4 hours per day effectively cuts the power requirement to 1/6th. Lights that are used for a few hours each night are in the same range. Why does everyone's creativity suddenly disappear when the hivemind has decided to attack a company?
I'll run some better numbers tomorrow for a fixed distance / size, but intuitively, eliminating the "tracking a phone from 5M away" requirement dramatically expands the use cases.
Keep in mind that you still need to obey the laws of thermodynamics. Those are rules startups can't ever break.
The writeup I linked has a good argument against the feasibility of wireless power for a TV:
> A typical large, flat-screen TV (eg. [42]) will draw about 60 watts. Since a TV is usually mounted in one place, some of the limitations get easier, but not all - if the TV is two feet (60 cm) from the wall, and the receiver is 40% efficient, that's still about 80% losses. To transmit 300 watts at 0.3 W/cm^2, one has to have a 1,000 cm^2 transmitter, a bit over a foot on each side (31.6 cm). One could make the transmitter smaller (100 cm^2, or 4 inches/10 cm across) by increasing the intensity to 165 dB, a level that causes burns "almost instantly" (from Question #7), but that seems unwise. Since most power outlets are near the floor, and the TV probably isn't, one would still have to run a cord to the transmitter. And uBeam takes 240 watts of electricity, about a dozen light bulbs' worth, and dumps it into the air for no real reason. That's not good for the environment. Or the power bill. Or the air conditioning - all that heat makes the room hotter.
What people often forget is that the second law of thermodynamics only applies to a closed system.
So, a startup in a closed system with no product or source of revenue will dissolve into entropy. But a startup with continual funding from VCs can remain as long as the influx of cash continues.
I'm not moved by that post.. Didn't you know Google wasted $100M by investing in D-Wave which has been proven to be no faster than a laptop?
Anyway, there's nothing about thermodynamic limitations in the section about the TV. The author is making several exaggerated statements that are easily refuted to make the TV suddenly possible... Let's focus on the wasted energy (240W or a dozen light bulbs!) to make the point:
* Assume a 48" LED[1] that uses 31W and suddenly you're only wasting 120W.
* His 80% loss figure is a holdover from his calculations about the phone -- cut this in half and you're at 60W of waste heat. (You should be able to achieve a nearly perfect perpendicular 'connection' between transmitter/receiver for a fixed TV).
So far, we're delivering 30W of power and wasting 60W as heat -- not ideal
* If you plan for a worst-case of 8-hrs straight of watching TV and plan on a battery backup, you could get away with delivering 10W to the TV and only wasting 20W as heat which is eminently reasonable.
The "physically impossible" claims are greatly overstated (for non-phone charging use cases).
Your battery solution for the TV doesn't reduce the energy waste, it just spreads it out in time. It's now 20W wasted 24 hours a day instead of 60W for 8 hours a day. Same difference.
Until our houses are powered by 100% renewable energy, any technology that sacrifices more than half the input energy just so someone doesn't have to see an extension cord should be banned by law.
Additionally -- how big is the room in which you want to mount your TV? The loss coefficient for ultrasound in air varies with frequency, temperature and humidity, but it's about 1dB/meter in this range, give or take. If you have a three meter wide room, and you have the transmitter and receiver mounted on opposite walls as you recommend, then you lose 3dB = HALF of the power through the air, and there's nothing you can do about it. To get to your 33% total efficiency number, all of the other losses, including conversion from DC to ultrasound and back and transducer losses at both ends, would have to amount to another 15% at most -- highly unlikely, though maybe not impossible -- though these are all well known numbers that someone skilled in the field could write down for you.
There's a big difference between 30% efficient now and 90% efficient in the future, and "it's never going to get any better than this"
Those are good ideas, but, and this is quite important, they're not what uBeam are saying they're going to make. There are definitely use cases where wireless power transmission would be brilliant. That alone is not enough to support uBeam - we can only judge them by what they say (and demonstrate), not be what we imagine they might do if they succeed.
Actually, I take it back. That's not fair -- according to their investors they don't have any intention of only making phone chargers;
> And the truth is that Team uBeam doesn’t want to stop at phones. With the explosion of “wearables’ wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to charge your watch, fitness tracker or noise-canceling headphones? What about if elderly people never had to ask a relative or healthcare worker to change the batteries on their hearing aids? The practical uses for uBeam technology is limitless.
Or the company themselves;
> With wires virtually eliminated, TVs can sit in the middle of a room cord-free and light fixtures will become “stick-on” without the need for routed power.
<--Original post-->
That's fair, but it sure seems like the obvious path to getting cell phone charging to work is to get a fixed object charging to work -- at which point, if they'd hired any bizdev people, they'll sell the hell out of the fixed object systems to anyone and everyone.
It's just striking to recollect the many complaints about only easy, derivative ideas being funded when a hard idea with tons of applications is being derided in such an intense fashion.
I'd rather they fund 10 uBeams that could yield useful insights or pivots than 0.
Ambition is great, but it doesn't really mean much unless they can show current, visible results that demonstrate they might actually get there. When Elon Musk says he's launching a rocket to Mars in 2 years time we all get pretty excited because he's already launched a rocket to transfer orbit today. He's demonstrated that he can bring a similar thing to the market. If I had $80m I could pay SpaceX to launch something in to space.
When uBeam say they're going to make wires a thing of the past, I will remain skeptical until they have a product on a shelf that I can buy. Until then I am as excited about their wireless power transmission as I am by any other startup in the same space - it's a great idea, but it needs to be seen.
Agreed, and I have no inside info at all -- they'll probably fail even, but it seems like there's a gulf between cautious optimism and whatever is going on here. As for the SpaceX comparison, if they do indeed send a mission to Mars in 2018, it will have been 16 years since the company was first founded with Elon's intention to go to Mars and 10 years after they first achieved orbit.. Hard things take time!
uBeam has been laughed at from the start by every engineer worth his soldering iron. It was a SCAM, or at the very best a misguided attempt at something by very clueless person.
I dont get that linked blog. This engineer, who apparently is too ashamed to use his real name on the blog, is part of the problem. He was either in on the scam, or is as clueless as the founder.
Want similar magic 'under appreciated' startups? look up solar road scam, or batteriser.
I actually wrote a few blog posts debunking the feasibility of the solar road, so I'm well aware of it and I may not be an engineer but I was a scientist once upon a time and I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron - uBeam seems like something else entirely. There's a very good idea inside of uBeam's probably misguided goal to act as a phone charger, which from what I read, is a big part of their pitch to VCs.
I personally don't at all think spending $10M in solving a challenging problem is the issue at all! I'd say it's more worthwhile than spending money in doing another snapchat! Who knows - there could be many wireless applications where even for short distance, you'd not want to use say inductive charging. National labs spend millions on solving problems the solutions of which aren't used for years. You can almost think of startups trying to push some fundamental engineering - based on a similar model- but at a faster pace than in academia. Even if it doesn't get immediate ROI, I think it's worth investing in them!
What I think is the problem- and there are many parties to blame is---
(1) Press and some new tech founders are so obsessed with selling a good story rather than a good "real" impactful product- that they overhype WAY too much, claim way too many UNREAL things, stomp their feet with arrogance, talk about how the world is against young naive people (not true)- rather than just projecting some realistic expectations and just be enthusiastic about what they want to do(Sure, some level of optimism is needed, but don't go so much overboard!). But I guess, non tech or VC people get demoralized if you don't claim you can be a >$1B company overnight. The unicorn fallacy. May be that's what encourages this.
(2) Problem with overhype is-- when it doesn't work out, it creates skepticism for genuine companies. When a founder of a tech startup says "It can charge faster than wire"- that worries me.
(3)The world/press is obsessed about finding the next Steve Jobs/Tesla/Musk. You listen to Perry's TED talk- she keeps criticizing the PhDs and the engineers, how they cannot think "out of the box". Perry is very good sales person, she can bring in money and you certainly need that in a company. But, you don't need to bring someone down to rise up the ladder. http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxNashville-Meredith-Perry-...
(4)The media wants to find the good story of how a "dropout" or a "non technical" person turns out to be the next Tesla- and solving the hardest physics/bio problem. Worries me, cause I feel this might not be the best picture you want to portray to the young ambitious kids. Inventions and real disruptions involves lots and lots of hard work,and in-depth understanding of how things work, and I think the engineers and scientists who ACTUALLY make it work should be appreciated. Instead it is projected as if all these engineers are dumb ones who Perry has to keep telling what to do.
(5)People want the world to change overnight, and some people want to believe that. People who "actually" work to create that change, know its not true.
And I think at HN many of us are tech people. We don't like to be told - "oh you guys are way too stupid and cannot think out of the box" or "you wasted your time learning engineering, and I can just solve the big problems by just reading up wikipedia"- when obviously she had no clue. Good luck building it with no engineers?
The bosses of Energous are especially slick. They went for IPO early and started paying themselves huge salaries. At the point when the market might have started asking questions like, "Why is there still no product?" they headed off trouble by adding a bunch of reassuringly big names to the board.