For those of you going through this for the first time, this is what the loss of "loose money" feels like. For some it will feel "sudden" but it started last year. "Big name" startups were getting re-valued downward by their investors and founders trying to raise a series A or B kept getting "we would prefer to follow in this round, rather than lead it."
I feel for the employees. One of my friends in the dot com bust showed up for work to find the doors locked and a line of other employees outside. A security guard was there who would escort the employee inside, they were given a box and supervised while the put their stuff in the box (and it was inventoried by the guard) and then they were allowed to leave and the next person was let in. No linkedin or big social media at the time so they didn't know that the 3 founders were all now at Apple, that Monday had been the founder's first day in their new jobs. The dissonance was huge, it was if the startup had never even existed. It took 3 months but his final paycheck arrived, written out by a legal firm representing an insurance company.
Default dead, or default alive. That is a really important question right now.
The company that nearly acquired Skully before they apparently "messed up" (LeSports) just got $1.2 billion in capital so I don't think you can say easy money has stopped floating around for AR startups. This headline could just have easily been that the company was getting bought out.
Skully just couldn't hit their targets for the 2nd round. Especially with the founder getting dramatically booted out and Intel Capital Partners is quoted in this article as still being actively involved until the very end - they clearly had greater problems than access to capital.
So I'm not sure this story backs up your narrative very well.
Basically LeSports has all the technical know-how now and can respin this concept using cheaper NRE for a lower price point with the pesky Americans out of the picture.
If you're implying that LesPorts looked over their shoulder and got valuable IP for free, that too would be something of a failure on the part of Skully's management.
I don't know how it went down at all, but I can relate a story about a dot com casualty that I helped purchase. The company's assets were bought from the investors, as far as I could tell that transaction happened between the board of directors at the company where I worked, and their board of directors. The "cover story" that their board told their CEO and CTO was that they should consider taking us over, and we went over and talked to everyone and did some technical due diligence. I found both the CEO and CTO fairly annoying with their "why would we want to buy you?" attitude.
Then on Monday the week after that get together our CEO told us they had purchased "certain assets" of that company and we should "hire" anyone who we thought was good, we had a spreadsheet with their time of service and salary info. And a green light to just move them into our org with the same salary. They came right across as a horizontal transfer as far as the employees were concerned.
I know for a fact that it surprised the heck out of the CEO as when we went over there to talk to people his office monitor was sitting on the floor and the CRT tube was broken. And we never saw any of the senior management after that one time. Definitely left a sour taste and it reminded me how "expensive" it was to take bridge funding.
I also feel for the junior developers being minted in droves from the various bootcamps across the country, but particularly in the SF Bay Area. Since we have it the hottest here, the pain will be the most acute as well when the downturn finally arrives in full force. Those who believed in the narrative that a 10 week developer bootcamp was the ticket to a good job in the "new era" will be in for a rude awakening. It'll be akin to the Law School false promises (though not nearly as severe with respect to time and financial commitment and loss).
I hope they have made contingency plans, or have pursued robustness in their skills.
The downturn is in startups. I see these bootcamps graduates being snapped up by large corporations all the time. Including lots of companies that are not as sexy as the big Silicon Valley firms, yet still desperate for tech talent.
Sure not having positions open will suck, but it's not like their knowledge is useless. If you can't find a good company that'll hire you... just make one yourself.
They seem to fare much better, at least that I've seen. I've been in places that've hired freshly minted BS/CSes, but I'm only aware of hiring one bootcamp grad. She was exceptionally brilliant and motivated, and did the bootcamp to round out her otherwise excellent skillset.
I contrast that with some I've seen turned away for being able to make a Rails site, for instance, but with little or no knowledge of CS fundamentals. They too might have been brilliant and motivated, but they didn't come with the underlying knowledge they'd need to succeed in the roles we had available.
Bootcamps seem to teach tech, not theory. That's fine if you're hiring for that specific tech! My employers have been more interested in broad theory, though.
CS is essentially an engineering degree. You can retrain into practically any technical field with that foundation of math and science. Bootcamp grads wont be so lucky.
I would feel for them if their weren't tens of thousands of C.S. graduates who payed north of $80,000 and four years of their lives for the privilege of entering the future job market. We need more STEM right?!
Is there an indicator that large tech companies that have their business model figured out are laying off people or are expected to at this point?
My read on this is that the downturn is limited to funded startups with no clear revenue model or who can't scale large enough to secure future funding. This in turn could lead to a feeding frenzy by the big established players who see talent they can scoop up from people looking for stability.
I'd also love it if you or anyone has numbers on the percentage of people employed by such startups compared against those employed by the large tech companies. My gut says the % employed by the funded, pre-revenue startups is pretty minimal compared to the overall employee count of the large tech giants that are doing just fine.
Plus, given that this fallout would be largely limited to the private markets, I wonder if the outcome will really be that disastrous.
"we would prefer to follow in this round, rather than lead it."
There are some legal reasons for this if it's a down round. If the initial investment is in one fund, and there's a down round in another, they need someone else to drive pricing so that it doesn't look like they're favoring one fund at the expense of the other. (I'm not sure why this isn't an issue during an up round)
Sometimes firms can't follow-on from a different fund even if they're following, up-round or down-round. That's why funds usually reserve money for follow-on investments.
Firms often have to go back to their LPs if they want to invest in the same company across funds.
Anecdotally, it seems that investors (funds, really) are getting more conservative with series A rounds, but the seed money is still quite loose. But bubble-spec is kind of a pointless thing to argue on the internet. Either buy your short positions and laugh all the way to the bank if you're right, or don't, but creating FUD is bad for everyone.
My question is that with 10 trillion dollars in bonds that the lender now has to pay in order to lend to the Swiss / US / Japanese governments, just how good does the likely return on startups have to be to get some of that money re-investing?
Or is it simply that with wars, elections, terrorism and Brexit, everyone is scared?
Wars, elections, terrorism have always existed, and if by "elections" you mean Trump, business in general would not care (of course, some businesses may benefit more from this or that candidate). Business has been and is being done regardless of politics for ages. The guy who organized the already heavily ailing GDR (East Germany) another 5 billion DM credit in 1983 was the most right-wing party head of Germany at the time - the political differences between the players can hardly be any more extreme. Terrorism has in Europe has been much higher in previous decades - Germany, Spain, Britain (and I may forget a few other countries) all had their own very active domestic terrorists.
What's the use of pointing to negative interest rates - if you can't make money with the business you'd always lose even more. Same reason why pointing to tax rates is disingenuous except for special cases - either a business makes sense or it doesn't. If you don't show a profit tax levels there's no need to worry about tax levels. Same goes for your example, if the business does not seem viable what use is it to point to an overall difficult situation, should you continue investing into what you think is a bad business just because of that?
Unless we are seeing the end of VC, then there should always be a new up and coming business. In which case there should always be an investment opportunity - and at expected returns better than negative.
Installation of renewable energy, mobile network roll outs, basic R&D for science, that alone could consume a few hundred billion globally and the returns would be 10% or better. (Sell electricity to 3bn people in india and China at 100usd pa / house - approx 100bn pa marketplace there)
I refuse to believe "well that's it lets stop making new businesses"
I'm a Skully helmet owner. I've had it about six weeks (although only three weeks of usage as I was on a long vacation). I picked up my helmet directly from employees at a Skully HQ BBQ release event for the first batch of non beta testers, so I met a lot of them. They are a good bunch, and obviously put in a lot of effort, and found success, on a difficult and audacious endeavor. I feel sad for them.
I'm still quite happy with my helmet. The battery life seems to not be as good as I hoped (maybe 2-3 hours) but not a big deal as my commute is under 15 minutes.
The software is definitely beta level, but not too surprising, and software is relatively easy to improve. I had very early on figured out a vector to load my own firmware onto the helmet (it's basically request with a response that points to a tarball of an android system that the helmet will download and install). I hadn't actually tried it yet, but I suppose now that's the only way to get improvements.
If any other hackers would like to collaborate on improving the software, or other owners would like to commiserate, I created a face book group Skully Owners:
1,940 backers for $2.44 million, and only 24 comments? For a project with this many backers with this much skin in the game, comments usually number in the hundreds (if not thousands), especially as it becomes apparent that the campaign will miss its estimated delivery dates. Even though Skully seems to have its own website and support forum, the campaign landing page is still where you have "noisy" backers (i.e. people who frequently back products enough that the site becomes a social network for them).
Oh man, sorry to hear that. I was part of that group too, but I got one. I feel like I lucked out getting something at all, even though the long term value is in some question now. What a mess.
Why does management always plant incredibly glowing fake reviews? At least do 3 stars, that would look more plausible than a 5 star review praising the CEO in a sea of 1 star reviews talking about how the CEO is burning investor money.
Pro tip on Glassfoor reviews: if under "advice to management" it says, "keep doing what you're doing" it's an HR-planted review. And given how often I see those exact words, I assume they all went to the same HR conference session.
I agree that this specific case looks pretty damning but as a general rule I've always considered Glassdoor reviews to be a poor proxy for company quality. It suffers from the same problems of all other anonymous review platforms with a few unique kinks thrown in for good measure. IMO, it's a reasonable way to get a pulse but not much more.
As for the fake reviews… People across the org may have wildly divergent experiences working at a company. Even a fairly small company. Often the person who someone reports directly to has an outsized impact on said person's experience. In an early stage company the individuals doing people management tend to be, at best, very new to that specific part of the job. At worst the company grows large-ish before any official "reports-to" structure is put in place.
I've worked at places where my advice to leadership would be "keep doing what you're doing" while other Glassdoor reviews seemed to have had one of the worst experiences of their lives. That doesn't mean that I planted a review. Maybe I had a particularly good manager? I could have worked in the only good part of the org or a negative review may have come from someone who worked in the only bad part of the org.
The single 5 star review had some pretty insincere as the "advice to management":
It's pretty easy to openly communicate with management (all the way up to c-level) in my experience, no need to put it on some website when you could discuss it with them directly.
"management is throwing away investors' money on hot cars, bikes, parties and travels etc (only for themselves of course)"
Can't comment on whether this is true in this case but I've seen it before and I always wonder how, and where are the investors, and aren't they paying attention, and ....?
Investors will look at financial statements (in whatever sad form they exist at most startups), but they don't look at itemized expenses. They also expect lots of money to be spent.
For example, let's say I wanted to take an expensive vacation. I would fly to Europe (1st class, of course), stay in nice hotels, and basically live it up. I would mark this down as a "recruiting expense", or "customer acquisition cost". If the investor cared to drill down to this level, all they would see is a $75,000 trip to Europe for recruiting. They wouldn't know how many people went, or how successful it was. $75k is nothing next to an engineer's salary, and a recruiter would take a fee on the same order of magnitude, so I doubt they would bat an eye, but a 20-something founder could take a pretty sweet vacay for $75k.
Want a new motorcycle? Its for product testing, of course. New $80k Tesla? We're exploring how our tech could be expanded to used in cars, not just with motorcycles. Hookers and blow? Team building.
I'm not sure if you're being tongue in cheek, but if not, honest question: aren't those examples of actual fraud rather than "just" frivolous spending?
Like everything it's a spectrum. Those are incidents of outright fraud, but most of it is far more gray. It's the boyfriend/girlfriend hired onto staff as an assistant who only actually comes into the office 3 days a week. It's the trip that's an extra day for no good reason.
That being said, I think much of the grayness is for a reason. Brutal frugality will choke a business nearly as much as overspending.
In my facetious examples, the European vacation actually would be for customer acquisition. There would be a meeting or two with potential customers, but they would still fly first class and stay in top hotels, plus have a few extra "fun" days.
The motorcycle really would be for testing, but they may think what's the harm in taking it home for personal use in between testing sessions?
Conspicuous consumption has a legit role in a company's marketing - whether it's a status-symbol impressive office building, helicopter transfers for execs, or luxury cars for senior staff, it's about sending the message "We're successful, and well-funded". Whether that's true or not, sometimes the appearance of success is enough to win the investment necessary to achieve success.
Kim Dotcom in 2000, posing with his model girlfriend in front of a superyacht…a year later he had multimillion euro investments from TÜV and BMP.
Want the company to buy a motorbike or car for "Product testing"? Totally legit - but it belongs to the company. Use it for personal use, and in most countries you'll be hit with a tax bill.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's generally categorized as either Bizdev or Teambuilding, and thus prevalidated as a run-of-the-mill expenditure (not a technical term). Holiday party type stuff.
"Weller ... and his brother were forced out of the company after investors disagreed with the LeSports deal he brought to the table, opting instead for an inside round. Another source familiar with the matter confirms his story that he brought in the LeSports deal but said Skully was rapidly running out of cash and it was down to the eleventh hour determining if the numbers added up.
Adding to that, we’ve been told the board thought Weller has been so difficult to deal with since leaving, they now don’t see the point in salvaging the company he started.
We’re told by a source inside the company that as of Monday, investors ... determined it was better to just shut the whole company down instead."
In what world is shutting down, a superior alternative to selling the company to LeSports for some cold hard cash?
A pissing match costing 50+ people their livelihoods is disgusting to me. The fact that every player in the startup game so readily screws each other over is a big part of why I'm not in it.
> In what world is shutting down, a superior alternative to selling the company to LeSports for some cold hard cash?
In a world with lots of cash where a companny like Skully is just pocket change and they'd rather not deal with as they have bigger fish to fry.
So you are in the business of buying and selling houses and you do $1M transactions every month. This is like finding a lawn mower in a garage, and yeah you could sell it for $200 on Cragslist, but in the big scheme of things it is not worth your time.
Any company IP would be cheaper to pick-up in a post shutdown sale. It isn't the VCs personal money they invested, but they do have a lot of personal relationships which could pay off in the future for strategic reasons. You don't need all the investors on board to pull off such a thing. I've seen it before.
I actually turned down an offer from Skully a little over a year ago. They flew me in and had me spend a week with the team. Their offer was on the low side but I was super excited about the technology, an augmented reality helmet is something I had been dreaming of since I started riding a motorcycle.
However, after spending a week there it was pretty clear to me that they were in a bad place managerially, so I ran away as fast as I could. I highly doubt that the issue is the bubble bursting in this case, it's the investors having no confidence in the leadership.
It's a shame for the employees, I met some really awesome and talented people, although I'm sure they'll have no trouble finding something else; one of them I saw is at Tesla now.
Anyway, my experience was pretty terrible, they dropped the ball in every way possible in terms of my experience being recruited, and left me with the strong impression that they did not have their act togethe at all, from failing to buy my ticket until the absolute last minute to not giving the manager I would be working under any heads up about my arrival, to Mitch repeatedly making inappropriate remarks about women, Maxim magazines in the office bathroom, etc. On top of that the product has some major design flaws that they were punting on, not even trying to address them and instead scrambling to get things ready for the CEO to go on a world tour showing off the helmet and apologizing for it being late.
I understand that consumer electronics is always kind of a shit show and there's usually lots of last minute scrambling and crises, but their situation seemed insane even given that. They were already thinking about version 2, deciding to use a crappier display than was originally planned and then the better display could be a huge reason for people to upgrade to the next version. Meanwhile, the non-replacable helmet battery could only last a few minutes per charge, and didn't even have deep discharge protection in place yet. The night before the world tour kickoff, all the employees pulled an all nighter to get things ready and then someone forgot to plug a few of the helmets in, or plugged them into the wrong charger so the helmets were worthless after that, cutting the number of helmets they had for the tour in half...
After that experience with them I was pretty sure they would not be successful, but then I saw a few months ago that BMW was working on basically the same thing and I knew they were doomed for sure.
Do you think BMW will ever truly productize their AR helmet though?
I always thought of that as a fun research project, and that's it. I know that I, as a fellow rider, would never use an AR helmet - too much distraction.
While I'm a rider and I agree distractions on a motorcycle are not what you want, just being able to do the following without having to loose sight of what's in front of me would be great:
- get my speed (for a traffic cam for instance)
- have an almost 180 degrees view of what's behind me: no blind spot
- get directions (I usually do it from memory, I don't use a GPS on my bike just because of the distraction reason)
Keep in mind we ride between traffic lanes here so the more I can look ahead, the better.
Really sad to hear this. I was rooting for them and thought the helmet could save lives, in addition to making it way easier to navigate turn-by-turn on a motorcycle. True, not many would pay $1500 for a motorcycle, but like any other hardware technology, that cost would have come down with scale. I already invested half that in a normal Shoei helmet. I had planned to purchase one to support the product and future scale once they started delivering pre-orders. I hope someone picks up on this idea and starts it again with better investors and culture.
So having used the recon line of products (which this is a spiritual cousin of) I can only say that these kinds of displays are kinda dodgy.
When skiing anything resembling challenging terrain, the stuff is bouncing around and my ability to focus universally across on the then 2nd gen recon displays was simply not possible. I'm a decent skier, but not that crazy and I ended up returning the smith io/x using the recon screen.
On a motorbike it'd be pretty intolerable, way more bumps and stuff, I'd think. Then you layer on the safety concerns... the very real question of what happens when someone crashes wearing one of these helmets (Will the display impact your eye? Will it stay far enough away to not do so? Will the battery cause any problems when wet or exposed to impact/air etc..) probably made insuring the company difficult, too.
I bet the other helmet makers are cutting/have cut deals with recon to repackage their stuff anyhow, so those that want this kind of crap in their FOV can get it.
Crash safety is a concern I have as well, I attend track days (for bikes) and some of the organisers near here banned Go Pro's on helmets after one punched through the shell in a collision.
That said there are flip down visors in plenty of helmets that do just fine, and built in bluetooth headphones in others. So I guess it's a question of how miniaturised and well designed it is.
I tried Recon's skiing goggles and found their HUD awful.
A true HUD doesn't need you to look away, or refocus your eyes. The Recon screen's position (near the bottom of the goggles) means you have to almost go cross-eyed to read it, and focus on short-distance…absolutely not what you want when you're skiing!
Their handbook says it should only be looked at when stationary.
BMW's HUD looks like the way forward : a sunken dash-mounted display, which projects the data onto the windscreen. In other words a true HUD: directly in your line of sight, no need to refocus your eyes.
I'd be interested to understand if there's some technical limitation preventing this approach with goggles/helmets.
I really don't think the HMD would be a problem in a crash. If it somehow came into contact with my face, it would basically mean the helmet caved in, in which case I already am in plenty of trouble so who cares about the HMD.
I saw this helmet for the first time about 3 years ago at a hardware meetup in SF. I thought it was a sure thing at the time, pretty surprised that it's gone belly up. It's unfortunate.
The Skully design is neat, but I don't see a big enough market for it.
How much of a market could there possibly be for a $1500 helmet? I shudder at the thought of a $700 Shuberth hitting the ground. I consider a helmet to be disposable as well. How disposable is a $1500 helmet? And are you a Shoei head or an Arai? IOW, will this helmet even fit my style of head, or is it going to leave hotspots after a few hours?
Cool tech, no argument. But it needs to come down to something like a $200 add-on like the Bluetooth unit for my Nolan.
As to the ultimate reason for their demise, I have no idea. From what little I've paid attention, I'm guessing a combination of way overpriced and, yeah, hardware is hard.
The article says that there were 3000 units pre-ordered. That's a fair amount of cash, but spinning up a hardware line where there are real safety and fit questions at hand is not trivial. Maybe they would have been better off making something that would replace the visor on a popular model of helmet like a shoei.
So, 3.5 million to develop safety equipment with electronics that have to endure wind, rain (at 90mph), shock, and general misuse (I don't treat my helmets with nearly the care I do my iPhone)...and still make a profit. My napkin scribbles say that would be a tall order.
EDIT: oh, yeah, and DOT/Snell testing. Don't know how much that is.
I don't treat my helmets with nearly the care I do my iPhone
Just as a note to everyone: If you drop your helmet, you should throw it away. You can't tell if the foam has been cracked, which reduces its protection.
This is a pretty common misconception. Info from Snell Foundation: http://www.smf.org/helmetfaq#aDroppedHelmet
Most manufacturers also offer a free inspection service where you can ship them your helmet and they'll check on the internals/foam.
Why was actually wrong with the company? I did not understand what caused them to stop operations. Also, the HUD seems to be a very useful thing for GPS navigation (IDK if the rear view is all that useful, but GPS certainly is).
Hardware startups are incredibly challenging and capital intensive. It seems they ran into the classic cash flow problem and didn't have a coherent enough leadership situation to follow through with the next round/acquisition.
The idea of buying a helmet with the tech built in, from a no-name startup is ridiculous when there are so many other factors in play.
I think the folks over at NUVIZ came up with a better stand alone solution, as its just an external attachment that projects the HUD for any normal full face helmet. That said, its been awhile since I've heard any updates so I'm not exactly hopeful.
Yeah I think that's the thing that doesn't make sense to many motorcyclists including myself. A helmet is a personal item and you want the fit, noise level, airflow, and features that suit you exactly, especially if you ride daily. Skully could have had interesting standalone technology (could have had, but actually didn't) but it's nuts to marry that to a helmet since that dramatically narrows the market only to people who want that exact kind of helmet. An add-on makes so much more sense.
People who are willing to spend a lot of money on helmets would never have gone for Skully's "meh" helmet with expensive tech inside.
That and it's a stupid idea. Honestly who wants to sysadmin their helmet?
I was inventing the smartphone when most of the people on this site were still in second grade, so that's definitely not me. However, good taste is a key to success. It has always been true and remains true that people do not want everyday objects turning into software hassles. Nobody ever wanted to upgrade Flash Player on their "smart" TV. Ever. Nobody wants to have to charge their car keys. Nobody wants to charge their motorcycle helmet every 2 hours of riding.
Here I am using a definition of "nobody" which means "a number of people so close to zero that it will be virtually impossible to create a successful company serving this tiny or non-existent market."
I know the founder, Marcus Weller. I've had business dealings with him at the time Skully was just an idea, in the very formative stages.
I wanted to tell him "look dude, anything hardware-related will be copied in China like tomorrow, and your price point per helmet is what?"
Being an entrepreneur myself, I thought "most founders have to fail a bunch, so let him fail" and I said nothing. He also reneged on a commitment he made and in my opinion thinks too highly of himself. Good luck Marcus, try again, but stay away from high-end hardware.
Well that's a lot of sad. I was following the helmet project and thought it was a great idea ... should I ever (be foolish enough to) buy another motorbike.
Some rear view mirrors are just ludicrously small. Having the rear view projected inside the helmet's AR display would be a massive boost to safety and confidence, as any rider who has ever waited at lights should be able to tell you.
I feel sorry for the engineers working on this, who will not be able to bring it to the light of day, and for all those who already paid for theirs should chargeback not be available.
Contrast with the UK where 'filtering' is legal [0] and I have never heard anything negative about it. Riders filtering won't cause me as a driver any delay.
I've always found the American 'no-filtering' rule incredibly strange. Whenever I'm stuck in traffic in the UK (in a car), it's a completely normal sight to see bikers and cyclists filtering to the front of the line.
I've seen large motorbikes fitting through gaps that simply don't look big enough, but I've never actually seen anyone get a wing mirror knocked off. (I guess bikers develop a very accurate mental picture of how wide their bike is).
Nobody considers it rude, as it doesn't slow down the cars in the slightest. The bikes simply fit through the gaps. Can anyone explain the American take on this?
Very sad. I pre-ordered this a while back. I don't mind startups dying but the way they handled the whole thing is disappointing. Absolute no communication whatsoever about the impending disaster. In fact, I am yet to receive any notification thus far that my order won't be fulfilled.
How did payments work for this? In the UK - I don't know about the US where this was presumably 'on sale' - you can issue a chargeback against the credit card company if a sale falls through in this manner.
Anyone who actually and seriously (more than 30min per day in diffetrnt conditions) knows this is a gimmick. Visual focus on your enviornment is priority one, the HUD is distracting unless done very carefully. I was thnking of getting one to test but after meeting some of their exec team and senior management decided against it. Honestlly not surprised but sad to hear it for the rank and file enginner who genuinely believed in creating this product.
The helmet is actually very nice. The HUD (actually technically a HMD not a HUD) is not distracting at all. it's the size and position of a typical right hand rear view mirror, and hardly anything visual happens on it except the rear camera display, which is has been a fantastic enhancement to my riding safety, although it does take some getting used to.
Really unfortunate for everyone involved. In these cases, does the company legally owe anything to the crowdfunding backers? The campaign was on indiegogo, which I believe has much looser requirements than kickstarter for ensuring project creators fulfill their rewards.
While people do buy helmets over the internet, they almost always test one beforehand to see if it fits them properly. More so on a 1500 USD purchase. Did Skully even had a single international order?
Perhaps not so bad my employment application with them in May didn't work out.. nonetheless, my sympathies are with those now abruptly finding themselves needing to secure new gigs.
I feel for the employees. One of my friends in the dot com bust showed up for work to find the doors locked and a line of other employees outside. A security guard was there who would escort the employee inside, they were given a box and supervised while the put their stuff in the box (and it was inventoried by the guard) and then they were allowed to leave and the next person was let in. No linkedin or big social media at the time so they didn't know that the 3 founders were all now at Apple, that Monday had been the founder's first day in their new jobs. The dissonance was huge, it was if the startup had never even existed. It took 3 months but his final paycheck arrived, written out by a legal firm representing an insurance company.
Default dead, or default alive. That is a really important question right now.