[majia]

Lessons learned from Magic Leap: don’t sign a non-compete agreement with your employee; you have to pay and it’s legally not enforceable in California. Ask your employee to sign a board confidentiality agreement and sue him if he works for a competitor.

Also, I wonder if people would think differently if this case is about a Facebook employee left to work on a social media App like google+.

[elamje]

Possibly, but copying a web app is substantially simpler than copying AR tech. Considering magic leap was stealth with hundreds of millions in R&D, I would put it in a different category than making a similar web app.

[majia]

I’m pretty sure Facebook backend is a lot more sophisticated than Magic Leap. I’m using Facebook as an example so that our judgements won’t be biased by the current sino-US tech climate.

[tastroder]

> stealth with hundreds of millions in R&D

Wow. That number sounded high since I'm very unfamiliar with the space but according to crunchbase [1] they took in 2.6B in funding overall. Before this headset they mainly put out a few iterations of that gesture input device, right?

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap

[SahAssar]

Leap Motion and Magic Leap are two different companies. The only thing Magic Leap seem to be doing is the headset, and that took them 2.6B funding and turned out to be at about the same level of tech as already existing products.

Leap Motion (which did the gesture recognition input stuff) was recently sold at about a 10th of their peak valuation ($30M price from $300M valuation about 2 years ago).

[diveanon]

I interviewed at Magic Leap a few years ago and it was never explained to me how they were differentiating themselves from competitors or what their valuation was based on.

I declined the position based on the fact that their options were already diluted without a product or revenue stream.

Maybe one day I will regret that decision when they get bought by Apple, but I just don't see it happening.

[SahAssar]

I think their hope currently is to get bought for a boatload of money, but even if they are, it's hard to see they would keep their valuation. Personally I think of Magic Leap sorta like Juicero: overfunded, overpromised, and thought the market would magically appear at launch.