
Lily Drone Files for Bankruptcy - samfisher83
http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/01/lily-file-bankruptcy-whilst-customers-remain-apprehensive-refunds/
======
tyleo
Whenever I see companies like this with a spectacular demo but no product to
show, I always think of the Richard Feynman quote, "For a successful
technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature
cannot be fooled."

~~~
neduma
Meh.. what about NeXT/BlackBox/SteveJobs? There was actually none of it exists
and he did awesome PR and made it work.

~~~
tim333
Feynman's quote was more in terms of the product obeying the laws of physics.
Most of Jobs' products did.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Right. Feynman's quote is much more applicable to Theranos, Magic Leap, and
uBeam.

------
vkou
So, their demonstration videos were completely fabricated.

"Are you sure that the GoPro lens does not create a unique deformation/pattern
on the image? I am worried that a lens geek could study our images up close
and detect the unique GoPro lens footprint. But I am just speculating here: I
don’t know much about lenses but I think we should be extremely careful if we
decide to lie publicly." \- an except from an e-mail by a Lily founder. [1]

There's optimism, there's prototyping, there's proof-of-concept demos... And
there's plain, old deception.

[1] [http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-
lily.h...](http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/01/consider-lily.html)

~~~
Balgair
Now that is a quote that has every HS physics teacher shaking their heads.

------
microtherion
"Lily, whom despite raising millions in dollars to build their highly
anticipated consumer drone, have just filed for bankrupcy."

On an entirely unrelated note, this is an early contender for "most
ungrammatical sentence I hope to read today".

~~~
theoh
Isn't it just missing one comma? (I suppose "whom" should be "who")

~~~
microtherion
"whom" is wrong in 3 different ways in my opinion:

(1) It should be "who", not "whom". I find that hypercorrection immensely
annoying.

(2) But actually, since Lily is a company, it should be "which", not "who".

(3) But even "which despite raising […] has filed" is wrong. It actually
should just be "Lily, despite raising […], has filed" or "Lily, which raised
[…], has filed". "which despite raising" subordinates "has filed […]", so the
whole sentence turns into a noun phrase missing its verb phrase.

~~~
theoh
I'll accept the who/whom complaint.

As another poster has said, your point 2 is not a universally agreed rule. See
[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.html)

Your point 3 is totally valid, I assumed you were quoting a wannabe noun
phrase. I wasn't paying enough attention.

~~~
microtherion
Point 2 to me was not about singular/plural, but about companies being
animate/inanimate. It turns out that there used to be a very clear preference
for "which", but by now, "who" is winning out in US usage:
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=company+which%...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=company+which%2Ccompany+who&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=5&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccompany%20which%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccompany%20who%3B%2Cc0)

------
mikikian
Here's the court filing [1] describing the circumstances that led up to the
bankruptcy.

[1]
[https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0...](https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/debke/167122/dockets/2/1-A0D229D2-FCF6-11E6-9996-3326DBA93163)

~~~
mikikian
Looks like the IP will be for sale soon.

"68\. Second, the Debtor will pursue a competitive auction and work to close a
sale transaction. The Debtor intends to file a sale procedures motion shortly
after the Petition Date to initiate that process. The Debtor has received
indications of interest from a number of potential buyers of its intellectual
property portfolio and believes that its planned 363 sale will realize value
from the portfolio. Due to the potential loss of value to the IP if it goes
stale, the Debtor hopes to expedite the closing of any transaction. "

~~~
duskwuff
The real question is whether there's any real IP to be had. Their demo video
was faked, after all -- was there any work "behind the scenes" on a functional
prototype, or is the portfolio limited to the (now worthless) brand?

~~~
wmf
Check out the filing; reportedly they spent about 18 months refining the
prototypes.

------
laurent123456
$35 millions for doing nothing is quite impressive. I was watching the South
Park episode "Go Fund Yourself" [0] just last night, and as often they are
pretty much spot on.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Fund_Yourself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Fund_Yourself)

------
DroningON
SelFly is next, 8,000 backers, $1m and yet an impossible specification...
[http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/09/selfly-1m-funding-next-
za...](http://www.droningon.co/2017/03/09/selfly-1m-funding-next-zano-
failure/)

------
bane
Man, one of these days I need to go get $35 mil in funding and produce nothing
but a vision video.

~~~
alekratz
...and then file for bankruptcy?

~~~
dahdum
Are the founders going bankrupt, or just the company? I'm guessing only the
latter.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
I'm consistently surprised there is no jailtime involved.

~~~
wmf
Yeah, after you spend 18 months developing a product and then refund all your
customers you _should_ go to... wait, what?

~~~
mikeyouse
In Lily's case, it seems there was potentially fraud occurring too.. If that's
the case, I wouldn't mind seeing some jail sentences:

[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dron...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dronemaker-
lily-robotics.html)

------
minimaxir
HN discussion of the Lily Drone when it was first announced:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532777)

> That is one of the first videos I've seen in a long time where I've thought
> "wow we can do that now?"

~~~
ww520
There are lies, damn lies, and commercials.

~~~
sleepybrett
The DJI Mavick does most of the things that video claims the lily can do.

~~~
bootlooped
I read a while back (did not independently confirm) that they used a DJI
Inspire for most of the promo video footage. I think the Inspire can do a lot
of the same stuff too.

I thought it was funny they were using an existing product from a competitor
to simulate what they claimed their future product could do.

~~~
tim333
I just watched the DJI video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1d_ptE6yrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1d_ptE6yrc)

It seems the Mavick tracks objects by image recognition from the camera. I'm
not sure the stuff shown on the Lily video where you track a presumably radio
transmitter from a small device is actually a thing that exists. I was trying
to figure out how to do it for tracking kids if they run off in stores etc and
it's not easy. You could probably do it with a several feet across receiver so
you could detect the timing differences.

In the Lily faked video the Inspire was flown by a human operator.

Guess it the tracker and drone both had gps receivers and communicated that
could work although it still might be hard to get the altitude right.

~~~
GVIrish
> I'm not sure the stuff shown on the Lily video where you track a presumably
> radio transmitter from a small device is actually a thing that exists.

There are a couple of companies with a camera tracking system like this,
Soloshot is one I've seen in the press a couple of times:

[https://shop.soloshot.com/](https://shop.soloshot.com/)

That said, it looks like they're not shipping the second version anymore and
are taking preorder money for the 3rd version so this company could be under
duress as well. But the tech exists and is at least somwhat commercially
viable.

~~~
tim333
Ta. The soloshot seems to be a tracker and camera both have gps receivers
solution. The tracker has to sit with a view of the sky for 8 mins presumably
acquiring sattelites
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtTwWtlYO4&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtTwWtlYO4&feature=youtu.be&t=20s)

Also it seems to just rotate a camera tripod mount and so doesn't have the
altitude problem. Having mucked about with gps the lat and long are fairly
accurate - typically off by 10m whereas gps altitude is often off by 200m
which is easily enough to send your drone into the ground. I guess if it did
differential timing between the two gps's that could work or they could
measure ground altitude some other way. Dunno if Lily cracked that.
Conventional aircraft in fog use barometric altimeters corrected for weather
conditions. And that's only accurate to ~100ft.

I didn't quite crack the finding kids in a shop problem. Satellite gps
wouldn't do it but I was thinking maybe ultrasonics - radio signal makes the
tracker beep then you could use loudness / timing to a few microphones a few
inches apart like human hearing locating sounds. Not sure if anyone's built
something like that.

Update:

Googling, it seems cheapish full differential gps is becoming available from
Reach gps [http://www.directionsmag.com/entry/finally-affordable-
high-p...](http://www.directionsmag.com/entry/finally-affordable-high-
precision-gps-for-drones/470208)

and has been used in a one off island mapping with a fixed base station
[http://gpsworld.com/l1-receiver-uav-help-discreet-survey-
of-...](http://gpsworld.com/l1-receiver-uav-help-discreet-survey-of-private-
island/)

dunno if that sort of thing has been got working in a Lily type setup though.
And it's still $600+

~~~
joshu
You cannot use gps alone. You use gps + IMU + a Kalman filter for fusion. But
this is a great deal better.

------
neotek
What amuses me about Kickstarter is that the stuff that's actually going to
work, that's 100% definitely going to ship - that is to say, Alibaba resales,
existing product repackaging, etc - are the one thing that Kickstarter doesn't
allow.

But if you want to create a project that literally breaks the laws of physics,
something which a high-school science student could demonstrate is physically
impossible, Kickstarter will proudly slap their editor's recommendation on
your project and help you pimp it to the media so you can widen your net and
catch more suckers to siphon money from.

Stuff like Water Seer, Fontus, Solar Roadways, Triton Artificial Gills -
that's all I think of when I think about Kickstarter now. Their brand is
utterly toxic to me, and don't even get me started on Indiegogo!

------
iamleppert
I know someone who worked for Lily. Apparently, they hadn't progressed based
the vicon stage in terms of actually getting their drone to fly indoors, let
alone outdoors.

Expect the IP, if any, to be near worthless.

Who knows the reason(s) why, but it doesn't seem like they had very good
engineers or leadership if they burned through all that time and money and
couldn't even get basic flight working.

------
coverband
At least they seem to be shutting down in an orderly fashion (maybe because of
the State intervention) and attempting to refund most customers. The
bankruptcy court documents also talk about some potentially valuable IP and
patents.

------
DrNuke
lol they raised so much with nothing in hand but a few cad files while we have
a worldwide original test bench for drones made&done and can't raise a penny?
deeper line being can you startup a single-model drone in an already
populated, very competitive market?

~~~
rboyd
That looks like awesome tech, but it also looks like your only major customers
would be drone manufacturers or hardcore hobbyists/racers? Maybe perceived
market size is the problem with your raise?

~~~
DrNuke
Efficiency certification going to be regulated pretty soon for safe flight
permit so this would open a pretty big market for services, training of
certificators and our novel universal efficiency benchmark, we think.

------
krushing
A floating camera has to be one of the major hardware projects Snap is working
on.

------
yalogin
Speaking about spectacular demo videos how is magicleap doing?

------
pfarnsworth
Exactly as I expected.

------
nakedrobot2
"Lily raised over $35 million in pre-sales and even secured $15 million in
investment"

 _How in the holy crapping hell_ did they manage to burn so much cash with
NOTHING to show except a fraudulently-produced pitch video?

Is there criminal investigation happening? This smells very bad.

edit: removed capital letters of outrage and replaced with asterisks

~~~
samfisher83
Supposedly 34 mil of customer money was in escrow. They were only operating of
the 15 mil in investment. I don't know if that is true. If they invested that
34 million they could have made some money in interest.

in [http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-
cancel...](http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/12/lily-drone-project-
cancelled-32m-in-orders/)

Apparently their original footage was from a DJI inspire.

~~~
ionwake
So basically the video was just of some guy controlling a drone? There was no
actual following ? The wrist device didn't actually do anything ?

Is this true ? Or did the prototype atleast work ?

~~~
samfisher83
Supposedly all fake:

[http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-
co...](http://www.droningon.co/2017/01/15/san-francisco-superior-court-pursue-
lily-drone-legal-battle/)

------
pencilpup223
This news is over a week old...

~~~
techthroway443
Your point?

------
semi-extrinsic
Color me unsurprised. They marketed it as an action-sport-filming drone, but
the top speed was utterly inadequate for essentially all actionsports where
drone filming would be cool. It literally wouldn't keep up with Usain Bolt
running the 100m, nevermind a regular person on a bicycle.

Shameless plug: a friend of mine is one of the founders of a competing startup
making a self-filming drone that has more than twice the top speed, so is
actually usable. They've been shooting on location with top athletes using
pre-production models for the past year, first production models are going to
final assembly these days.

[https://www.staaker.com](https://www.staaker.com)

Edit: s/full disclosure/shameless plug/ as per discussion below.

~~~
dewyatt
I really don't like when people use "full disclosure" as an excuse to
advertise.

~~~
enraged_camel
I think HN as a whole has way too much self-promotion going on.

It's especially grueling when people preface it with stuff like "shameless
plug" or "not to push my own product, but..."

~~~
jakobegger
I find the self-promotion on hacker news about a million times more
interesting than yet another discussion about Elon Musks latest ridiculous
idea.

~~~
enraged_camel
Really? I'd rather read about the ridiculous ideas of a person who
simultaneously runs an electric car company and a space rocket company, than
about some unimaginative CRUD startup that is "Facebook for X".

~~~
jakobegger
Maybe I'm reading different parts of HN than you are, but I see surprisingly
few "Facebook for X" startups mentioned here.

~~~
enraged_camel
That's true. Maybe I should have said "yet another JavaScript framework."

