
Meta, the AR Startup That Had Its Assets Sold to a Mystery Buyer - smacktoward
https://variety.com/2019/digital/features/meta-ar-startup-asset-sale-1203111585/
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mindgam3
I give credit to Meta for having made so much progress as an “indie” player in
AR hardware. They shipped a device comparable to Hololens or Magic Leap with a
fraction of the budget.

That said, the main narrative around their shutting down (blaming the US-China
trade war for spooking their Chinese investors) seems a little too convenient.
The real problem with the Meta, as the founder alludes to at the end, is that
it had no clear use case or killer app. If they had a successful consumer
device, or even a dev kit that looked like it had a chance to one day be that
device, I suspect the trade war would be a non issue.

For any other ambitious startups dreaming of AR glory, the CEO’s advice here
is good. Find killer app first, _then_ raise big money to ship hardware. Not
the other way around.

Note that HoloLens and Magic Leap have the same problem. But they can get away
with failing for a lot longer due to massive amounts of funding.

I was at CES this year and saw a few upstarts with promising tech. I predict
something truly groundbreaking will launch by next year CES.

