
Robotics startup Anki is shutting down - yitchelle
https://www.recode.net/2019/4/29/18522966/anki-robot-cozmo-staff-layoffs-robotics-toys-boris-sofman
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throwaway66666
Horrible... I thought they were doing fantastic. Everyone loved Cozmo. Superb
reviews, insanely good marketing. Claimed they sold 1 million robots. 100m in
revenue. What went wrong?

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lsaferite
Their burn rate on cash was too high. They had a ton of overhead costs in the
R&D stages.

I loved Anki, but I'm guess it's good I never exercised my options.

I feel for all the employees.

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dawhizkid
Only a week of severance? That is completely ridiculous. The founders &
investors (including a16z) should be ashamed.

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0x8BADF00D
It could have been worse. One of my coworkers worked at a BigCo back in the
day, and those layoffs didn’t give you anything.

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xiaolingxiao
a friend of mine work(ed) there, we're both PennRobotics. They were very
ambitious with all the things they were trying to build. It seems like they
just ran out of money and couldn't sell enough (no offense) robotics toys.
It's a reminder that despite the hype and fear-mongering, real life
application of robotics in consumer space is very limited, with questionable
demand.

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yitchelle
As a device for freeing up my time to do other things, I would really welcome
robotics into my household. I have a robovac and that give me a glimpse of
what is possible. Unfortunately, its intelligence is not quite there yet and
its maintenance is quite high, but we are getting there.

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xt00
Robotic toys is a tough area. Higher than standard toy development costs,
relatively limited market / higher cost products and similar challenges to
being in a toy market. I mean — they probably could have pivoted to self
driving car software or something.. too bad.

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lsaferite
They never considered themselves a toy maker. The first 3 products were
considered toys and a means to an end. Their 4th product was them trying to
transition to their long-term goal of being a Robotics and AI tech company.
The 5th product that was in R&D was certainly not a toy.

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xt00
Interesting — what was their next product? I haven’t been following them
recently.

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lsaferite
I haven't worked there in over a year, but I'm sure my NDA is still in effect.

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throwaway808080
Robotics is hard because hardware is hard. Add software complexity to it and
it grows to a monster. Rather than shutting down, i’d have hoped them to be
acquired by someone else with deeper funds.

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lsaferite
That's what they were attempting to do. They failed and the result is shutting
down with 2 days notice.

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kissgyorgy
What the fuck happened? I bought Vector, now it will be useless???

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lsaferite
It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Vector relies heavily on cloud services to operate. That being said, it's a
full fledged stand-alone device from a base computing POV. It could be
operated without cloud services. You just lose things like voice-to-text
processing and any advanced functionality they moved off the device into a
service.

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minimaxir
This one is legit surprising. Anki had big physical booths at retailers,
although admittingly I've always seen those booths completely full. (they're
expensive)

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MrGilbert
That's sad - I wonder how "hackable" vector and cozmo are, now that the parent
company will be gone.

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RavlaAvlar
After Jibo and Anki, can we concluded that social is a dumb idea?

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telotortium
Yay! Less name squatting on the name of the Anki flashcard app.

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rmwaite
How is that name squatting?

