Is it ridiculously hard to go to the nearest university and ask a physics professor if an idea is even plausible? If it is, then maybe investors should pass on stuff they don't understand.
Unless the extensive DD reportedly done did not include asking physics people, which would shock me, it appears that there may be some disagreement as to whether this is or isn't plausible. With reports of working POC's already, those disagreements may soon be moot...
Does anybody seriously think, for even a second, that A16Z didn't do massive due diligence with extraordinarily intelligent and experienced individuals before investing?
One thing that A16Z is not lacking is access to tons of Stanford/Berkeley physics PHDs....
Certainly its been vetted and if successful it will have a big impact. Will it work? Who knows, but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that should get investment. In the meantime we should let her do the work.
People make mistakes all the time. Even VCs (sic!) Argument in the form of "it must be true because they are very smart and have access to experts" is not a good one. The real facts and evidence should be evaluated.
Same thing crossed my mind. I can only assume that the company has long pivoted to another technology, left the ultrasound technology behind and just kept the old homepage (the mentioned WSJ article is from Oct 2014). Or the valley VCs might be really desperate to invest the huge amounts of cash Yellen is printing.
All these physics-debunking conversations seem to assume a single source. I naively assumed that UBeam will work sort of like the Gamma Knife (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosurgery#Gamma_Knife), where there are many sources that intersect just at your phone or device. This completely changes all the physics assumptions, and is a good reminder to keep an open mind.
That being said, I'd be highly skeptical of the health risks of this technology, especially given the only benefit is convenience.
> Was it safe? Well … for starters it is just an inaudible soundwave being transferred – as in the kind also used for women during pregnancy. It also happens to be how your car likely tells the distance to objects when you park or if you have a side assist whether you can change lanes safely.
Yeah just like bullets are made of the same metal you use for door knobs. Totally safe!
This is a stupid infeasible idea. One of those things that maybe initially sounds plausible, but when you look at the actual numbers it's off by orders of magnitude.
So what? Those investors are pretty smart accomploshed people[0]. Obviously, clinkle proved that doesn't matter, but the company evidently has a working prototype and the VCs deemed it worth betting on. Funding isn't really zero-sum as there is a ton of capital in the market. Fuck it, it's small money chasing a big impossible goal. Exactly what I want to see in tech investing.
The piece aside - which I won't make a commentary on - I wonder whether this is just the right level of snark and intellectual elitism (founded or not) to be consistently popular on HN. Why it's worth dredging up, with apparently no new or novel updates, is beyond me.
But is there anything wrong with his arguments? I don't understand why people get upset at this kind of thing. Why is it bad to try to critically analyze someone's idea especially when it comes to an area of your expertise?
"He starts with the assumption of 100dB as the max power but OSHA's ultrasonic recommendation[1] is actually 145dB which is 31,000x more power.. Even if you use 130dB, it's still 1,000x more power than he assumes."
It's not bad, it's that this has already been done nine months ago. The linked post isn't updated - in which case I wouldn't have a problem with it - it's just another outlet for HN to vent at the injustices of the VC world.
We're at the end of a cycle, so there's a real sense of pop investing and other characteristics that come with it, such as what happened in 1999. That annoys some people, maybe for the reason you mention, or maybe because they like technology and are ashamed that it makes us look like fools.
We both know that in a year from now (but no more than three) there will be 10% of the current number of startups, and investing will be much more grounded. It happens every 7-10 years. No need to take shots.
My statement was too glib (I edit most of those out, but you got me this time). I do think that one can't understand discussions like this without understanding implicit resentment. Underneath "others are stupid" lies "my intelligence goes unrecognized"; underneath "others are undeservedly rich" lies "I deserve better"; and so on. The drivers, at bottom, are personal, which explains why the discussions aren't intellectually interesting—they're driven by a different kind of interest. It also explains why people are quick to anger and/or show up with guns blazing: these feelings are already in cache. It also, sadly, explains why such posts invariably get many upvotes.
Actually, the discussion might become interesting again if people would speak openly and personally about such feelings. It's the posture of pseudo-critique that's the problem: the format of substantive discussion without the content. The real content there is the emotional charge in the language.
My point here doesn't have to do with VCs or startups or UBeam but with the quality of discussion we want on HN.
Dang I agree with you. I actually think at this point the most important thing that YC has invested in is HN. There is no other forum that has a higher signal to noise.
YC has no interest to me as an incubator, but HN has changed the way I look at the world and is directly responsible for my newest venture. I am sure there are many others out there like me.
Thanks for writing that, Dan. It's important to clarify what we're arguing about.
Underneath "others are stupid" lies "my intelligence goes unrecognized"
Oh, but that's why it's good to check where this is coming from: It is precisely because I know what brilliant minds we have in this industry that I am disappointed. I am blown away by how much smarter others in this industry are than I am -- and that is one of the reasons it stings. Imagine you have a nephew who you know to be a prodigy and, sure enough, he ends up getting his PhD at MIT, and you're so proud of him. Then he tells you his dissertation is called 'Yo' and is 200 pages about sending 'Yo' to your friends, and how he expects will make him rich, rich, rich!
The disappointment stems from the expectation that he can do better.
underneath "others are undeservedly rich" lies "I deserve better"; and so on.
That's a very strange motivation to project on this situation that we're funding foolish endeavours and not funding truly interesting research.
[By the way, projecting jealousy is one of the last tools of defence in the box and one of the lowest. It's easy to use, hard to refute and is rarely germane. Please be careful.]
My comments were made because our industry is a ship driven by greed to foolish ends. We are abundant in potential but are squandering it like spoiled grandchildren. Joe Armstrong opened last year's StrangeLoop with "We can do better." I'm sure you've heard Alan Kay's talks since, what, 1997? He's... jealous? I don't think so. He, like many of us, would just like to see progress. But we've made little-to-no progress in the last 35 years.
So when we also see what projects are funded, it's not hard to frustrated. Can you imagine a time when chemistry is exploding and yet it's hard to get funding to do medical research but there is funding, plenty of it, if you want to create better fireworks? Go to a top conference on the most innovative projects and there's not an investor to be found, but stand near someone who just made Angry Birds and you might get a concussion from the stampede.
A much lighter way of hearing what I'm trying to say is this: try to find a TV show called "That Mitchell and Webb Look", Episode 4.1, wherein a chemist who thinks he finds a cure for a disease is told by the owner, M. Ganier, that this is his laboratoire and he demands new ways to make hair silky! I think you'll find it's hysterical and at the same time -- this is how many of us feel.
You're right that you hear emotion, but it's frustration, because it's not that we can't, it's that we don't.
As your fellow Alan Kay fan I have a lot of sympathy with what you're saying here and I especially appreciate how heartfelt it is. I also partly agree with it—or maybe it would be better to say I fully agree with it, but think it's only a partial picture.
In any case, this is definitely not the ressentiment I was talking about; this is an opposite kind of discussion, one that is thoughtful, not cynically predictable, and opens the conversation further rather than closes it. All of which is just fine for HN.
It's also an example of what I meant by "if people would speak openly and personally about such feelings", and that takes some courage and I admire you for it.
Yes. His sources are a WSJ article and "the loss numbers quoted in UBeam’s patent applications". That's probably not enough information to derive an accurate description of what the company is trying to do, so there's a good chance he's dismissing a straw man.
He claims that this investment took place "without even the slightest sanity check" and that "no one is doing the hour’s worth of basic math". How does he know this? He doesn't; he assumes it. The odds are low that neither A16Z nor anyone else would have asked for a sanity check (Stanford is down the street, after all), so a charitable approach (http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html) would pause to question this assumption. For a nice example of how to think charitably, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542253 from the previous thread.
But the ranting language in the article indicates that he doesn't want to be charitable. His purpose is not to investigate wireless power transmission, it's to confirm the angry worldview he recites at the end, complete with vaccines, yogurt enemas, and clueless VCs. Such articles resonate with others with similar angry worldviews. That's the real dynamic of discussions like this. It has nothing to do with physics; physics was just the kindling this time.
Who knows if UBeam will work or will make it to market. If it doesn't, though, this will likely be for some reason other than an obviously stupid mistake that a throng of internet commenters saw through in a few minutes.
Let's not forget that investors like A16Z and others are supposed to invest in things that don't work in the end. If they don't, they're not doing their job, which is to take enough risk to reach the borderline of what's possible. (Let's also not forget how another common complaint is that VCs never invest in anything hard. Internet commenters get to have it both ways.) If they're doing their job well, the likely outcome is still that this investment will fail, because most do. In that case you can expect these sproutlings of dismissal to yield a full harvest of I-told-you-so's—but they'll still likely be wrong, because the due diligence of any VC doing a good job would include precisely the sanity checks and basic math being wielded here. Are they doing their job? I don't know, and neither does any other commenter here, and in such cases it's the Principle of Charity we should all fall back on.
Wishful thinking about the stupidity of others is a dangerous thing to take pleasure in. It stops up the mind, and makes for mediocre Hacker News threads.
We had a teacher in University that proved to us how bees could not fly, making the assumption of laminar flow of course, that is what we use for flying airplanes.
Ever flying over terrain or water at small heights the physics are completely different than general flight (ground effect).
So If a guy is fool and young enough to actually make a prototype(stay foolish, stay hungry) he could discover specific "special cases" that could make this invention useful enough for something.
For example, probably when you put your telephone over a small 1 millimeter distance of the charger you could get some time of resonance and you could increase the frequency, making the amplitude necessary smaller. I don't know, some times our assumptions(generalizations) are just wrong.
It's at least conceivable, from my amateur physics knowledge, that the safety issue could be worked around by having a very narrow beam that shuts off if anything interrupts it. The issue I haven't seen anyone mention is that you must have a continuous line-of-sight between receiver and transmitter. Realistically, under real world conditions, how often would you have that long enough for your phone to charge? Either you're using your phone, in which case your hand is covering the back, or you aren't, in which case it's in your pocket or bag. (I'm assuming that the receiver would be integrated with the casing, but the alternative is to have a big bulky thing sticking out the top, which carries its own problems.)
I remember this being posted on HN before and many in the tech industry criticising HN's negative reaction and dismissal of the idea.
Marc Andressen tweeted "Hater News" on that day. But still , noone really knows how this thing works but I assume that VCs aren't going to throw 10 million dollars at somebody without doing atleast some due diligence.
Atleast they got a few PhDs to audit this device and its working. So maybe we don't have the full story on how this works.
> I assume that VCs aren't going to throw 10 million dollars at somebody without doing atleast some due diligence.
This is a dangerous assumption.
VCs often trust founders more than they should, especially when it comes to areas the VCs are not knowledgeable. Add in an idea that would obviously be adopted everywhere, and the allure of a billion dollar idea overrides sanity checks.
Because people have been trying to build flying cars for a long time, haven't really had any success, and in the process have exposed most of the problems with the concept. Since most people understand flying cars and have a pretty good idea as to why they can't be built, it's much more difficult to bamboozle someone out of money by telling him you're going to build a flying car. Things that either haven't been attempted (at least publicly) before and/or rely on physics or other underlying behavior that isn't widely understood have a much better chance of getting funded. It's just easier to snow someone with something they don't understand.
People have raised millions for flying cars. It continues to bilk credulous investors. But that one's been going on for 40+ years so at this point most investors are wise to it.
It should be very easy to debunk this article though. Just a single line tweet along the lines of "you discount xxxx". A bit weird to call it hater news without really engaging.
This might be the time to drag out the old quotation "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
In general your point is correct, there is value to secrecy in some instances. And often people who really know whats going on can laugh at naysayers. But, for example, if someone said they have a perpetual motion machine, and laughed at people who questioned it, the laugh would seem more like delusion than informed confidence.
I was making a serious point which is a phd does not make you an expert in an area outside your area of study. I have a phd and I know I don't have the expertise to judge the physics involved.
>>>> Except, here’s the problem. IT’S AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA
While I would agree with the general idea, I do not like the general tone of the post. It is as if this guy knew everything about ultrasound technology. A given idea does not seem to make sense ? Maybe it is just that you don't know enough about it.
Happily concluding that Marc Andreessen, Mark Cuban et al. are just dumb investors pouring their money into impossible products is a bit short sighted.
> In the third grade she invented a pair of reading glasses with lightbulbs on them. In the fourth grade she developed a robot to carry firewood. In the fifth grade she cultured bacteria from her mouth and a dog’s to see which was cleaner.
> I’m no physicist - oh, wait, I am - but I did a little back-of-the-envelope (ok, front of the paper) calculation this morning...
I react very negatively to this sort of catty writing. I find it obnoxious. I understand that I shouldn't necessarily expect more from something from tumblr. On the other hand, I do like that the calculations were included.
For this technology to actually take off, an industry working group will need to be formed to promote and share it in the same way we have working groups for existing wireless charging techniques.
What good is a new wireless charging technique that doesn't come built into my iPhone or Android phone? If it isn't included in every phone and gadget no one is going to bother with it.
In the process of forming such a working group, some extremely smart people are going to take a very close look at this from both an engineering and business standpoint. If it isn't absolutely rock solid it is going to die.
Until a working group is formed to share this technology with the likes of Samsung, Apple, Sony (major hardware device manufacturers), you can pretty much discount it.
Venture capitalists investing in blatantly wrong and scammy pseudoscience is nothing new. Andrea Rossi (a convicted fraudster) got VC money for the E-Cat cold fusion scam.
(Which doesn't really contradict the poster's point: that made-up BS >> tawdry physical reality.)
I don't care if VCs waste their money like idiots. Let them. Plus, the sad part isn't that they wasted $10 million on this worthless "idea", it's that $10 million is probably nothing to them.
Only tangentally mentioned but I'm not sure "yogurt enemas" are the best example of an idea that has no legs on which to stand. That would entail putting bacteria directly into a microbiome. It would be niave and extremely ignorant-reductionist to conclude that that would have no effect. You need a peer-reviewed study before making it a procedure covered by insurance, etc. -- i get that -- but certainly not prior to it making sense.
$10M dollars? That's pocket change for VCs basically. It's the "ok, I believe you, now build me something" (but still cheap enough to risk it and lose 100% in case of failure)
So, how many scientists believed that you couldn't get a train to go faster without suffocating the people inside? (and a load of other things)
I am definitely doubtful of UBeam, but for every sayer that is right there are 10 naysayers.
It doesn't matter, they'll burn most of it up, raise another round and pivot into a B2B client-customer IM app with patented business emoji or something.
No lessons will be learned, nobody will understand physics more because the things they (re)learned about basic science will be lost behind the veil of "stealth mode" and all of society will be a bit poorer in the end.
It doesn't matter because the money will vaporize, nobody will learn anything and we'll get another useless app that nobody will use (unless they do then they'll be lauded for great execution and their investors will be called visionaries, the pivot from ear shattering charge-tech to chat app will be just a footnote in everybody's success story).
Then the whole thing will be acquired by IBM or something and will disappear into history.
Did anyone else think "10M is an absolute drop in the bucket"? I mean seriously, this is such a small amount of money that due diligence could have consisted of 'does the website look good?'. It's not like they can't write it off.
This may sound sobering, but $10M is nothing to VCs that have billions of dollars to throw around. So, they see a young attractive female founder, and may think "what the hell, at the very least we can use uBeam as an example of diversity in the companies we fund" or even more cynically, an attractive face at their annual parties. It's nothing to them.
That's not how it works at least in my experience. Real VCs are investing not just money but time. That's why they dump bad investments so quickly--bad ones take away time from the investments that might work out.
Also, VCs are comp'ed on outcomes. Folks that don't deliver do not last very long.
I know of no long-term successful VC that thinks this way. None. Zero. Few have billion dollar funds to begin with by the way. Only an elite group of top tier VCs command that kind of capital and you should be prepared to be thoroughly grilled in due diligence if you want to raise money from those guys.
This and add disruptive million dollar javascript websites that could've been built with jQuery and some HTML5, stupid shit like an app that sends two characters, and entire businesses built on the back of existing social network that almost always ends up getting the rug pulled under them.
Money is flowing to people who don't need it and shouldn't have it (Because they don't know what they are doing) based on some weird self-fullfilling prophecies of naive investors (I know what I'm doing I rolled a dice a few times and got lucky) combined with idiots (I'll just burn all this cash and look for new ones or I'll get the most unrealistic valuation possible so I get kicked out of my own company).
Quietly, many corners of HN, people are building and making money by bootstrapping. There is no money to burn here, only due dilligence. There is no bail out or connections, only yourself and your employees. There is no chance to make costly mistakes so you focus on making money today.
But everywhere you look it seems like we've reinvented the value of money. Money that will be made in the distant unknown future seems to be more valuable than money made today.
We are in for some major market correction that's going to evaporate a lot of dreams, jobs, and capital. All so they have a chance at another Uber.
It's always worth remembering that it's people who get investment, not companies and certainly not ideas. What we see is the public face, not what's really going on. Yo is a good example of why some people get investment - someone who can take that app and persuade large numbers of people to use it is clearly good at building and marketing things. If they get their idea (not Yo, their actual idea) in front of an investor having proven that they're capable of building a product and taking it to market, then the investor will listen and do the necessary sanity checks and due diligence, and then invest in the next product. The real one, the one that needs investment.
Building something that proves you're someone who can build an engaged community of people that you can market other things to is a very good thing for your investment prospects. The fact the thing you built is stupid is of absolutely no consequence.
Which is the fairy tale that investors tell themselves and it's also impeding innovation. We're not music, we're technology; there's more at stake. Our Mozarts are being left to die in pauper graves while Biebers are inundated in funding to compose their next masterpiece called 'Yo!'.
And what's worse is that people like Andreesen used to be innovators and now they are happy to make this all a circus if it makes them just a little more obscenely rich.
> Our Mozarts are being left to die in pauper graves while Biebers are inundated in funding to compose their next masterpiece called 'Yo!'.
I don't have anything to add to this, because I find it to be the most tragically accurate portrait of both Western and startup culture I've ever come across. I just wanted to thank you for providing the perfect response when someone next tries to convince me, non-sarcastically, that Color was "a phenomenal idea."
I'm not sure that's actually true. There are a few examples of investors putting money in to stupid ideas that eventually fail, but there's also plenty of examples of investments in brilliant, world-changing ideas as well. Take Uber as an example - last September they announced that they're creating 50,000 jobs a month[1]. That's incredible and it'll make a real difference in the world.
Using Yo as an example of investors impeding innovation just highlights the fact you need to look at a sample of more than one investment to see what's going on.
Everyone time i hear that "it's not just the idea, but the people behind it" I feel it more that I should have a con artist in my team to get funded. Most of this highly funded founders can't build things: they are super good at marketing though. That's why I think of them as very good con artists.
Pretty much number one lesson I've learned in startups is that you can have an amazing product that does brilliant things but if no one knows about it you will fail. You may see good marketing as a con (not sure why, there's no need to be deceptive in marketing), but even brilliant products need marketing or an exceptional amount of luck. Anyone investing in a startup that doesn't have someone who can take the product to market (e.g. market it) is trusting their money to luck - and that is stupid.
The thread we are in currently suggests otherwise – the marketing here is extremely deceptive and lead to a startup scamming 10 million US$ out of a VC.
> idiots (I'll just burn all this cash and look for new ones or I'll get the most unrealistic valuation possible so I get kicked out of my own company)
Doesn't sound idiotic to me. So far as anyone has been able to prove, humans live only once. And realistically speaking have about 20 years in which to make money that will determine the level of comfort and luxury they will enjoy for the duration of that single life. If at some point in that 20 years one finds oneself in an environment in which "naive investors" are willing to hand out $10m at a throw on the basis of a physically unworkable idea and a pitch deck, I would strongly advise coming up with physically unworkable ideas and pitch decks. Writing articles about how foolish people are to pursue these ideas does not put money in your wallet, even if it's true.
This naive view that if is someone is silly enough to throw money at your silly idea you should take it isn't just hurting the current industry by setting unrealistic expectations but will also be the driving force behind the collapse of the unhealthy capital market in the valley. Unrealistic salaries (that completely ignore any roi calculations), ideas that aren't grounded, and the need to get it all done super fast are what's going to cause a drought in capital for tech and then both good and bad ideas will suffer.
I urge you to rethink your statement with the future of the industry in mind, not just a single bank account.
Everything you've said is sensible, though I question whether in a cheap money environment investors will stay away if they've been burned. People fall all over themselves to lend money to sovereigns who have defaulted fairly recently, and that at very low interest rates. I would be surprised if people with access to unlimited cheap money will really stay away.
That said, even if I agreed with you 100% (and you're certainly right in principle), I would not change my view. That's why I noted that humans live only once and have a short time frame to accumulate money. In the fullness of time, yes, this behavior is harmful. But humans don't live in the fullness of time; they live when they're born. Secure your own future and to hell with the industry's.
> Secure your own future and the hell with the industry's
This is just not something I can agree with, regardless how it's twisted. Accumulating a sustainable amount of money isn't as easy as raising a few rounds on a weak idea. It takes a real idea, perseverance, and thinking really long term. The mindset quoted above isn't likely to support any of these requirements.
So, really what you'll end up with is a nice house, a pretty car, and a few fake friends while it's all running smoothly. The second you can no longer deliver it all goes away. I might be in the minority here, but I plan to leave my children an empire. Not a house of cards.
Assets don't just "go away" unless they're encumbered by debt. If you're paying yourself a bloated salary, living frugally, and taking advantage of opportunities to sell things that are ridiculously overvalued, you should not have any trouble building durable wealth in a short time.
It's fine to say that you don't like what I'm saying. It's fine to think it's unethical, or that it harms others. But don't suggest that it doesn't work; it very obviously does.
You're right in your approach. However, in the capital market founders don't usually get to dictate their salaries or suck in more of the loot than is absolutely necessary. That's why VCs keep a good portion of the control.
Now this may not be the case always, so yes, a short term plan could work. But I doubt it works reliably enough to be turned into a rule.
I'm inescapably drawn to the idea that selling goofy ideas to cash-heavy investors is a form of short-selling, and every "hot" market has a fair amount of short-selling activity going on. In fact it got me wondering why the typical startup founder isn't primarily engaged in shorting their own stock, given that the majority of startups fail. The answer has to be that the founder has enough of their own skin in the game, and limited access to pocket the cash themselves, that they can't profit from this ploy.
This would be illegal in a public company, for any executive to bet against the company, and in the private case would probably be breaking some part of the contract signed with the investors. They get to hedge your bets, if you want to hedge yours you'll need to find some other vehicle.
As a self funded founder I feel you that the stories about what we do are unheralded and we have different challenges than other businesses (good ones that force us to find the right answer quicker).
There are businesses that are not self fundable, though and will take massive amounts of investment to make happen. Uber is one since they need to get critical mass of drivers/riders in many cities to take over. uBeam is also one of those companies, as a whole lot of R&D has to be done to take it to market. They have a thesis and if correct will have a big impact and can only be done with some real investment (can you imagine self-funding this??). This seems like the perfect thing to invest in.
Its super easy to poke holes in other peoples business but we are also not working with all the information. Let her work!
Money that will be made in the distant unknown future seems to be more valuable than money made today
High political and economic stability has brought us to this point. The more uncertain the world is, the more people prefer money today to money tomorrow. But when people have accumulated more wealth than they could concievably spend, and feel safe enough to let it out of their sight, they want to invest. Hence the flood of cheap money. The capital flight from China helps too.
Investors are also still believing that they can win the Apple lottery: buy an underappreciated tech company at the right time then watch it take over the world, and stay there forever.
I don't think we're in for a 'correction' any time soon. Where else are investors going to put their money? Leave it in a bank earning 0%?
I agree. I think the issue isn't that money is being spent but that it's being spent on the wrong ideas. Split that 10m into 5 and help five different founders who have taken their time to really prove their concept and build a real revenue model...
HN does not need more substanceless, generic discussion.
Such comments invariably sprout up when there isn't enough actual information to discuss anything concrete. They're like fireweed, except fireweed is pretty.
HN does have much of that, but it also has much that is better. Let's be the kind of people who pick up litter (or at least take care of our own) instead of thinking "this place is a dump anyway".
I prefer not to spend my time proving and writing about how something is impossible. Find a way and it will most likely be a solution or path you could have never predicted. This is a fundemental principle held by companies that innovate.
This attitude is exactly the problem. It's magical thinking.
Thinking "outside the box" when it comes to industry standards may be a path to innovation. Thinking "outside the box" when it comes to the laws of physics is a path to nowhere.
Postive attitude does equate to "magical thinking".
Check with Einstein and others on what it takes to make breatkthroughs, discoveries and think outside the box in the context of science. With the attitudes of some, we'd never make discoveries!
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world.” ~Albert Einstein
> “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world.” ~Albert Einstein
Still Einstein did not say that the previous centuries of physics were bullshit. He built on them to further the theory in specific cases (like his work on relativity).
Taking quotes out of context is very hazardous and does not prove anything either.
The article quotes Perls saying (in 1969) "As Albert Einstein said to me". That's not evidence of Einstein saying anything, but of Perls appealing to authority.
When Perls published the quip in the 1940s he said "a famous astronomer", not Einstein. He wouldn't have put it that way if Einstein had been the source, especially since he mentions Einstein elsewhere in the same paragraph.
The Quote Investigator is extremely conservative in refuting bogus quotes; when they say "probably not", they mean "hell freezes over if". The readiest explanation is that Perls, a showman who (unlike Einstein) often made caustic quips like this one, simply optimized his story over time.
Then there was this - http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/kill-the-cord/#.mdch08:KANb
It turns out it's ridiculously hard to evaluate what can and can't work about an idea just from reading the website you guys.