[mindgam3]

I mean, I’m not arguing that there is no plausible explanation for Magic Leap’s inability to ship a product with only $1B in funding. The plausible explanation is that they are running a tech startup like a drug development company, to use your analogy, which is just a terrible way to do startups.

AR/smartglasses is not a market where you will have “generics” any time soon. You’re going to have the iPhone of smartglasses which will dominate, and then everyone else will try and fail to copy. Like Facebook dominating social, then google+ failing. Or iPhone vs Android, although Android did finally manage to achieve market share thanks to googles muscle.

Tl;dr: successful startups don’t raise billions of dollars before shipping a product as mediocre as ML’s v1.