| > But is there anything wrong with his arguments? 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. |