Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eyo2019 2454 days ago
Looks really cool, something I've been waiting for at this price level for years since I saw the Microsoft Hololens. I'll never fund another Kickstarter, however, due to the time I funded a 3D printer that was almost as complete a product as this and it was still 1 year late and never worked right. If a product like this is seriously awesome, they should get proper funding to produce it as a sellable product rather than take this Kickstarter shortcut and, as is the usual case, fuck over the customers for some time before getting it right. I predict they will come up with a decent finished product in the next few years, but before that happens some other company will come out with a similar but better working alternative that I don't have to take the Kickstarter risk for. I'm not trying to be a dickhead, but a Kickstarter is nothing but a red flag for me and a ton of other people at this point.
1 comments

Jeri already delivered pretty much the very same Kickstarter 4-6 years ago https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/cast... but company was lured by no other than Andy Rubin into a VC circus https://www.roadtovr.com/ar-glasses-company-castar-lands-15-... and the rest is rather predictable - your product is worth more unreleased, and whole purpose of the company is finding a bigger fool to buy you out. Board fired technical staff, bought few game studios, ran out of VC money and moved on to pillage something else.

You can listen to the whole story straight from horses mouth in this podcast https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-...

Yeah, Jeri's Amphour talk is one of the things I make people I know who are trying to get into tech startups listen to. It's a great insight into what happens when a sucessful startup gets the wrong kind of VC help.

For what it's worth, the original glasses set worked wonderfully years ago when I used them and I'll back this one again. I'm still determined to have my floating CAD solidworks demo with it. Customers will freaking love it.

p.s. The games were fun too. Try it with Alien Swarm.

>wrong kind of VC help

But it was the very best kind of VC you could hope for. Andy Rubin, former Apple/General Magic employee, founder of two companies with very successful exits (danger, android).

Thanks for the information, this colors the Kickstarter choice a lot differently and actually makes me trust it a bit more, so I'm going to "edit" my original comment (I can't actually edit it, so consider this the edit/retraction) to mention that, in this instance, I've changed my mind.