

Fear and Loathing at Zigfu: My Y Combinator Experience - amirhirsch
http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2012/10/fear-and-loathing-at-zigfu-my.html

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FrojoS
Amir, thanks for writing this article. Very informative! Just a few weeks ago
I tried out ZigFu and really liked it. I'm sorry to hear the team has left.
But I hope, ZigFu keeps being successful, even if not in the VC sense.

In my humble opinion, one, if not the biggest problems is, that the Kinect is
just not good enough, yet. My experience is, that the Kinect works well for
the T-pose and anything that resembles it, but not well or at all once your
arm is pointing towards the Kinect. Here [1] is a recent paper, with the most
detailed validation of the MS Kinect I have seen so far. They report a maximum
error for reaching movements with OpenNI of _46.9 deg_ in the elbow angle
estimation. Another problem is lag. From what I hear, the main problem here is
the USB 2.0 bandwidth. Hopefully the next generation, Kinect 2 and co., will
improve a lot.

[1] S Choppin, J Wheat , 2012, Marker-less tracking of human movement using
Microsoft Kinect <http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/cpa/article/view/5271>

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amirhirsch
Thanks for trying it.

I agree that the sensors are a limiting factor for the current applications
and of course Kinect is just the beginning of this technology in consumer
markets. The description I provide of a 3-D integrated computer vision
processor attached to a high-pixel-count CMOS array will address the latency,
power and frame-rate issues. The algorithms and automation of computer vision
to hardware still needs to be solved.

Sony is already licensing 3-D integration techniques for their image sensors:
[http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229507/Ziptronix-
bo...](http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229507/Ziptronix-bonds-with-
Sony-on-image-sensors)

~~~
FrojoS
Personally, I have mixed feelings about integrating the skeleton trackers into
the hardware. While this might drive down cost for specific use cases, it
limits the capabilities of these natural interface devices. The skeleton
trackers are based on many assumptions, like approximate camera angle and
position, proper clothing etc. Once, any of these assumptions don't hold true
any more, for instance a camera from the top, side or back, a object held by
the user, uncommon clothing like baggy pants or skirts, you have to write your
own skeleton tracker in software.

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tisme
Looks to me as if you're on the road to building a company the hard way, but
if you persist I think you just might get there. Taking a few wrong turns
doesn't need to be the end and you seem to have learned a number of valuable
lessons.

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nhangen
Interesting post. Seems like you were affected by the standard SV MO - worry
about profitability later, only after you'd scaled your user base.

Sounds like you're still a believer. What is your plan now?

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amirhirsch
I'm going to keep supporting Zigfu, release more products, and recruit people
after I save enough money. I'm also working on secret projects that I can't
talk about.

~~~
nhangen
So are you going to seek to raise money eventually, or try to bootstrap?

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erohead
Smart words: aim to earn money instead of raising money.

~~~
davros
He also said he should have been more frugal with the money they had, and
focused more on developing product instead of chasing investors. I agree.

As an investor I'd look for a business like this to be break-even after 12
months then aim for 100% growth funded from cashflow or 200% with a modest
additional investment. VCs will be interested and bring big dollars after
you've reached a critical market threshold, but in the mean time you're
building a real business.

Cash invested should match your ability to use it effectively, but as in this
case it can distort your priorities by making your day more about getting more
investment than creating a great business.

Amir, stick with it. Focus on building a rapidly-growing busines. If you do
need more investment, keep it to the minimum and be really clear on what
you're going to achieve with that capital. If you're demos are already that
good, you should be able to find the money.

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nhangen
Man, had to stop after the cigarette comment and ask -

What is it with people in SF smoking? When I visited I felt like I spent my
entire day walking through a cloud of smoke. So odd for me to see programmers
that smoke. Just can't reconcile it. (back to the article).

~~~
nsp
As a developer who smokes, there are a couple aspects I've discovered that I
think make the habit more popular with developers.

Obviously, the short-run benefits of smoking are far outweighed by the long
and medium run detrimental effects, and this isn't an argument in favor of
people smoking.

1) nicotine is a cognitive enhancer, giving short term improvements in
attention and memory.

This has pretty clear benefits for programming. See sources/citations at end
of comment for more information.

2) The nicotine addiction withdrawal cycle of leaving the building to smoke
every x hours provides a relatively scheduled context shift. I've found this
to have similar effects(albeit more mild) effects to timer based productivity
techniques with timed periods of focused effort followed by breaks. I
frequently have 'aha' moments in the elevator on the way down to smoke from my
office after being stuck on a particular problem or bug coding.

See: NIH 1992 - <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1579636> " Abstract 1\.
Nicotine improves attention in a wide variety of tasks in healthy volunteers.
2. Nicotine improves immediate and longer term memory in healthy volunteers.
3. Nicotine improves attention in patients with probable Alzheimer's Disease.
4. While some of the memory effects of nicotine may be due to enhanced
attention, others seem to be the result of improved consolidation as shown by
post-trial dosing."

Cognitive Effects of Nicotine Amir H. Rezvani and Edward D. Levin (2001)
[http://directory.umm.ac.id/Data%20Elmu/jurnal/B/Biological%2...](http://directory.umm.ac.id/Data%20Elmu/jurnal/B/Biological%20Psichatry/Vol49.Issue3.2001/6959.pdf)

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wturner
Why not just chew nicotine gum and abate the possibility of cancer.

~~~
bravoyankee
Nicotine gum is addictive too, with its own set of problems.

~~~
wturner
I know, but it's not nearly as bad as tobacco and smoking imho.

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zaroth
Some great thoughts, like this one:

"Revenue is just like funding but it costs you less to get it, and building
products isn't a total waste of time even if they don't succeed at massive
growth."

~~~
tyang
Yes, the first part of this quote is now part of a question I asked on Quora.

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amirhirsch
I'm adding my answer on quora now. Many hugely disruptive breakthrough
technologies will require massive upfront funding before revenue is possible,
but perhaps those kinds of startups are not accessible to those in YC. This
was supposed to be a message to companies that start with $250K to not just
spend money building a team and tech-demos assuming more funding will get them
to revenue-generating products.

~~~
nivertech
It seems you paid yourself large salaries. What was your burn rate? I paying
myself $1K salary and only because of the minimum wage law. Even paying $3K to
4 people gives you ~ 21 months run

~~~
amirhirsch
We had more people on our team than the four founders, and we had higher
expenses being in separate apartments.

I like the way Stripe was built on a long vacation in Buenos Aires. If you're
doing something that only requires internet to be built, your entire team
could go on a several month vacation after demo day and it might result in a
50% lower burn rate depending on where you go, and probably 50% higher output.

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ericfrenkiel
it takes a lot of courage to be open and honest; a heartfelt kudos on the post
Amir.

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rdl
Is today the official "post depressing things about YC to dissuade people from
applying, but not really" day (sort of like converting to Judaism...)?

~~~
amirhirsch
this wasn't supposed to dissuade people from applying! just sharing some
wisdom.

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nivertech
Amir seems to be the opposite of many other YC startups, which launch product,
wait 3 months and then pivot. Some already pivoted 3 times.

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cmccabe
The problem is, you're a sharecropper. Microsoft owns the Kinect and its
surrounding ecosystem-- lock, stock, and barrel.

If there's a real market for Kinect development tools, Microsoft will sooner
or later own it, exactly the way that they own the C++ development tools
market on Windows, Zune, XBox 360, etc.

It would make a lot of sense for them to release something like what you've
developed for free. After all, if it pushes up Kinect sales and locks
developers more tightly into the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft will want to
do it.

Even if they don't want to release the development tools for free, I see no
reason why they should let you access their hardware. The next version of the
device could easily have a locked-down, encrypted communication channel. Look
at how hard Microsoft tried to prevent the various XBox iterations from
getting hacked. They even went so far as encrypting the buses that ran inside
the device.

If you really want to work in this area, build your own hardware and make it a
truly open platform. However, be prepared for attacks from a known patent
troll.

~~~
teichman
You could also use the Asus Xtion Pro Live. Like the Kinect, it's derived from
the original PrimeSense device. As an added bonus, there is no annoying extra
power cord and the RGB and depth frames are actually synchronized.

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shenberg
The problem zero userbase - it was supposed to be launched with an ASUS media-
center PC with some other cool tech as the WAVI Xtion (WAVI is an existing
product they make that does uncompressed 1080p streaming). Unfortunately, that
just didn't happen, so there's still no competing consumer product.

