
Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors - KKKKkkkk1
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/exclusive-mass-layoffs-reported-after-starsky-robotics-fails-to-find-buyer-investors
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colonCapitalDee
Wow, I interviewed with Starsky for a summer internship position back around
the beginning of December. The interview went well, but I never heard back
from them. I just assumed that I didn't quite clear the bar, but it looks like
they got the news that funding wasn't coming (timetable from the article
matches up) and just shut hiring down.

During the interview I asked my interviewer about Starsky's long-term
prospects, and he said that they would have near doubled in size come summer.
Lol

~~~
jiveturkey
What I find LOL that in December, the interviewer thought "long term" meant 6
months from then.

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chooseaname
> “Our approach is taking the drivers out of the truck and have them working
> remotely to make high-level decisions while the truck is on the highway,”
> Seltz-Axmacher told FreightWaves in May 2019. “To be honest, I don’t think
> that a super-computer can be built that is smarter than a truck driver.”

Probably why they didn't get funding. VCs don't want to hear that (even if it
may be closer to the truth than _anyone_ wants to hear).

~~~
walrus01
This seems like a setup that while a logical architecture decision, would be
reliant upon really rock solid mobile broadband on the routes driven by its
trucks. Like, seven nines reliable. I saw videos of their test setup with a
driver at a desk workstation/"cockpit" which was driving a remote truck.

Imagine if a human needed to make a decision with less than a few seconds of
reaction time, at freeway speeds, and the LTE network where the truck happened
to be at that moment was having a hiccup.

It's much worse than a cargo drone that might have a 12-14 satellite
GPS+GLONASS lock, that could be programmed to stop and hover in place, or
retrace its flight path breadcrumb style back to base in the event of brief
loss of WAN network connectivity. It's something with possibly 20,000
kilograms of mass moving at 70 mph with live humans in traffic all around it,
and a lot of inertia.

It's an external technical problem that the company itself can't solve,
because they're not in control of LTE/5G network operators, they don't make
LTE radios/modems/antennas, etc. The only places that I'm aware of using fully
remote driven trucks are giant open pit mines in western Australia, where the
mining company fully owns and operates in-house the network linking the
trucks.

I personally know very little about self driving technology, but working in
network engineering, the idea of relying upon the normal publicly-accessible
nationwide LTE network operators for something that could be a life-critical
safety function really scares me. Even with a max-priority service like
Firstnet on ATT it would be sketchy.

~~~
topynate
The trucks could have AI that worked most of the time. Not well enough to rely
on for normal operations, but good enough for a fallback in case of losing
connectivity.

Some made-up numbers to explain my point: Consider a situation where the
remote operator will make the right response 99.9% of the time, failing 0.1%,
and the AI is 20 times worse, making an error 2% of the time. The actual error
rate will be (0.1% * connection reliability) + (2% * (1 - connection
reliability)). For 3-nines reliability, which is pretty poor, the error rate
will be about 0.102%. For 4-nines it will be 0.1002%.

Those sorts of figures would effectively pay for themselves in terms of
safety, once you factor in the benefits for monitoring and work conditions for
a desk-operator vs a physically present driver, and they don't require either
a particularly reliable connection or a particularly good backup AI.

~~~
nathanaldensr
Ah yes, the mythical "AI" that has yet to be invented.

 _Let 's just sprinkle in some AI and it'll work!_

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derefr
The exact cases where human reaction times fail are already taken care of by
local subsumptive AI† in cars. For example, collision avoidance is “AI”; lane-
keeping and adaptive cruise-control are “AI”; etc. For that matter, an
automatic transmission is “AI” in the sense of abstracting away a clutch and
gears under a prediction of when you’d want them used.

† ...which doesn’t actually imply anything to do with Machine Learning. Your
computer downclocking when it overheats rather than catching on fire, is an
example of “subsumptive-architecture artificial intelligence”, even though
it’s a hand-coded algorithm doing the subsumption. The “artificial
intelligence” in this case refers to the emergent property of the layered
subsumptive processes, not to the processes themselves.

~~~
ddispaltro
Don't forget anti-lock brakes.

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some1else
The article omits the size of the company. Apparently 54 people were employed
at some point[1]. LinkedIn now lists 36 employees[2].

1:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotic...](https://www.google.com/search?q=company+info+starsky+robotics+employees&rlz=1C5CHFA_enSI812SI812&oq=company+info+starsky+robotics+employees&aqs=chrome..69i57.5416j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

2: [https://www.linkedin.com/company/starsky-
robotics/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/starsky-robotics/)

~~~
sdan
Starsky was definitely hiring. They posted on every "Who's Hiring" on HN for a
considerable amount of time.

Unsure if it was ever 54, but they definitely were aggressive in hiring (job
postings also kind of reflected that).

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sdan
Wow... that was pretty unexpected.

But to be honest they haven't done anything too notable within the last year
(Plus.ai is pretty much the biggest thing I can think of right now and maybe
Ike in the trucking space).

Really interesting to see how everything in the AV space plays out:
Deepscale/Drive.ai were both aquihires, Cruise/Torc/Argo/Aurora were bought
out mostly, and the others are either just starting (Ghost and Voyage) or
doing something that aids them (Renovo).

So essentially: either you're bought out by an OEM or funded by VCs hoping to
get acquired (I don't think you can surivive in this space without being
bought out or aquihired).

Disclaimer: I worked at Renovo.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
Zoox was supposed to announce a new funding round by the end of last year, and
still crickets. The further into 2020 we get the more I think they might not
get any more money.

~~~
ycombonator
Just checked out the demos on their website. I have always been curious what
graphics they use to represent what car sees. Are there any open source
versions of these out there to explore ?

~~~
gonesilent
Stiching cams like this has started to hit the back up camera market. Takes a
few hours of setup. Stop at an RV dealer and check out the cams systems on the
$$$$ units.

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rdiddly
Website still says they're hiring. They signal robust growth, you pay for it
in wasted time. I wonder how many jobs I've applied for have been like that.

~~~
pyb
Fake vacancies is a huge and underreported problem for jobseekers. It is
impossible to tell just from the job description.

~~~
2J0
I know of deep fake employment opportunities designed exclusively for
identifying opportunities for IP larceny. This is a huge reason for locking
down everything if you have any relatives of important people in your
organisation as interns. This is the oldest privilege escalation hack I know
of, and you might want to see if your outside legal will support a fake
interview process for your own people via a headhunter. Reciprocal and wholly
legitimate arrangements exist like this in many industries. It’s frightening
how much we found we were leaking over family breakfasts in seemingly innocent
ways like revealing meeting details and simply mood responses to eager-junior
inquiries. Send your sons and daughters to start their own business and learn
to value poker playing before they get inside the “family” business. BillG
played poker rather well I’ve read...

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pyb
Not sure I understand what you are denouncing ?

The fake vacancies I had in mind are not so malicious. But for the candidates,
in aggregate, they are a waste of precious time and energy.

\- Company has still opportunities on their website, in order to look healthy,
when they are in fact laying everybody off (as is the case in the OP)

\- Company publishes an offer for legal reasons, but in fact wants to hire a
cheaper resource from abroad once they've "proven" that they "couldn't get any
local talent"

\- Company publishes non-urgent offer, in the hope to fish for resumes, and/or
waits for years for the "perfect" talent to knock on their door

\- Company forgot to take down vacancy, someone got hired 3 months ago

~~~
shiftpgdn
Those are all real problems but there is an insidious one where you pretend to
poach an employee from a competing firm but instead just do everything you can
to brain dump them during the interview.

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treyfitty
I’ve never been involved in fundraising, so I have to ask: how often to
investors balk at the last minute? Seems like a dick move.

~~~
danpalmer
What it probably means in this case is that they had a term sheet, but that
during due-diligence (1-3 months between term sheet and signed contracts) they
pulled out. It's possible they found things they didn't like in DD. It's not
uncommon to find oddities, but normally not a big issue at all.

It's a really bad move. It looks very bad to companies who might be seeking
investment, and could get a VC a name for causing issues in deals, so they
only do it when they really need to. It typically means the company closes
down as most companies raise when they have ~months of runway left, and
raising a new round would take too long in most cases.

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seibelj
Why couldn’t they raise more money or get acquired? I thought self-driving car
startups were worth $1mil per engineer (at least!) in an acquihire let alone
semi-functional tech. Was it a scam?

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a_t48
[https://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps-
nearly-10-...](https://www.ccjdigital.com/starksy-robotics-wraps-
nearly-10-mile-unmanned-
run/?utm_medium=single_article&utm_campaign=site_click&utm_source=in_story_promotion)
It's possible that they relied too much on remote assistance. Really hard to
say what state their tech is in and what stage investors want to see before
putting in cash.

~~~
shorts_theory
> “We beat Waymo. We beat all the big OEMs. We’ve beat just about the whole
> industry,” says Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, founder and CEO of the San Francisco
> based start-up.

I find this statement pretty disingenuous when Waymo is trying to tackle the
part of the problem Starsky isn't able to solve with their own self-driving
tech - driving without a human in the loop for the last mile.

~~~
anon102010
Given they beat all these big players their valuation should be extremely high

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_sbrk
Hutch knew this would happen. Those trucks are no Gran Torino.

