
Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz Is Out - eatbitseveryday
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/28/magic-leap-ceo-rony-abovitz-is-out/
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alangibson
In my office there are several sets from Oculus, ML, etc. Every time one shows
up, it goes like this: everyone stands around and has a go at it, then it is
never touched again.

That's basically the state of VR and AR as it exists today.

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Lewton
I organized a vr party recently with my old beat up vive and people played
keep talking and nobody explodes for 6 hours in a row

That’s the state of VR today.

Whenever I do VR as a social activity there’s never anyone leaving
unsatisfied. And I’ve “sold” plenty of headsets that I hear reports about
still getting regular use several years later

And now with oculus quest it’s an even easier sell

Every time there’s any vr related post on HN, the most upvoted comment is
about VR being dead tech, all the while oculus and valve have their headsets
on constant back-order

Maybe consider that you’re not the target audience

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luckydata
> I organized a vr party recently with my old beat up vive and people played
> keep talking and nobody explodes for 6 hours in a row

I've been hanging out in real life with a lot of people and nobody ever
exploded. That seems to be par for the course, not something to brag about.

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dbmueller
What is meant by "exploding" here?

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pbk1
"Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" is a VR-enabled videogame [0]

[0] [https://keeptalkinggame.com/](https://keeptalkinggame.com/)

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effingwewt
Now the comment makes sense, appreciate it.

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dhosek
Jon Gruber's take is brutal:
[https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/abovitz_magic_leap_transl...](https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/abovitz_magic_leap_translation)

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ebg13
The bit that really stands out to me is where he says "We even convinced
Google to invest. Google! Those guys are smart!"

This flavor of trope really needs to die. Some people at Google may be smart,
but it's pretty clear time and again that many at Google are not, and that
Google as a whole is not. "Google is smart and I should trust them to make
smart choices" is the kind of cancer that gave ML almost 3 billion dollars.

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sebringj
I would contrast Jerri Ellsworth of Tilt 5 as the exact opposite of Rony
Abovitz. She is low-key, tech smart and made a product quickly with a
relatively low budget while having that magic feel to it in the AR world
although in a limited, clever and practical way for table top gaming.

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criddell
What was ML showing investors and reporters before their first product
release? Was it all smoke-and-mirrors, or do they have something interesting
that they haven't been able to make into a product?

Do NDAs (like the one Kevin Kelly had to sign) ever expire? I'd love to hear
the story one day of what was going on in that company that allowed them to
raise so much money.

~~~
sbarre
They have a product, it's out in the market now.

It's just not relevant or interesting to the mass market in the way that Magic
Leap was able to lead investors to believe it would be.

I think it might actually be that simple.

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Cactus2018
> They have a product, it's out in the market now.

Sure enough! (image link)
[https://images.ctfassets.net/wzcrdezk3u3k/4BYPBt61B2XnAsY3ys...](https://images.ctfassets.net/wzcrdezk3u3k/4BYPBt61B2XnAsY3ysn4Fc/e25bff85385b77f0eb5e9e9a2e01d3b9/Developer_3x.png)

[https://shop.magicleap.com/#/](https://shop.magicleap.com/#/)

>> $2,295

>> What’s included? Magic Leap 1 (Lightwear, Lightpack and Control), Lightpack
Charger, Control Charger, 2 USB-C Cables, ...

~~~
Cactus2018
Review and specs [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/magic-
leap-1-augmented-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/magic-
leap-1-augmented-reality-headset-a-cheat-sheet/)

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ArtWomb
If the "virtual" space is a zero-sum game, then Oculus is beginning to expand
on an already formidable burgeoning empire ;)

The strategic points that have paid off are the laser commitment to consumer
electronics and gaming. Ceaseless technical product innovation and release
cycles. And the stellar relations with the indie game dev community.

I think looking at something like Echo VR, which is basically the Battle Arena
from Ender's Game. I always loved the zero-G levels in Unreal Tournament and
Quake Arena. But this an environment where "which way is up" is truly
relative. It represents a new "VR-native" style of game play.

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kbumsik
> If the "virtual" space is a zero-sum game, then Oculus is beginning to
> expand on an already formidable burgeoning empire ;)

Is it? I saw that Valve also is getting much attention with Half-Life Alyx and
Valve Index.

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ArtWomb
Alyx is remarkable. You are in the Black Mesa universe. And it's appropriately
horrifying.

But in a perverse way, and this is probably a generational thing, I found the
original PC-era Half-Life more immersive. Just could not stop playing until I
reached the end. And was always rewarded with a narrative that got weirder by
degrees. I think it was the novelty of getting stuck and seeking out
trustworthy walkthroughs from some anonymous dial-up era phpBB forums ;)

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baybal2
An interesting persona, you can check web archive for articles he deleted from
his weblog.

You can only guess why he decided to delete them one decade after he stopped
blogging. I believe, he didn't want to be seen as too much "new age hippie"
type.

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flmlta
It's really easy to make a comment and have it come off as dismissive or
unsympathetic, I recognize that thousands of people put in tons of hard work
on a product and tech stack that they believed in.

I keep reading my friends' goodbye messages to ML after being laid off and
being amazed at how different they perceive their work than I do as a
consumer. It's like the culture is closer to Jonestown than Cupertino.

I say that because I don't know how much koolaid you have to drink before the
ML product that was released to consumers becomes impressive. The experiences
available on their platform are not compelling. The headset is inferior and
expensive.

Much of what I've seen exclaimed by ML employees as examples of their product
and company's quality are things that I consider organizational bugs. Their
tech stack is as deep as the Marianas Trench and they're too proud of it.

I don't think ML will be in business in 5 years unless they slim down, sell
off IP, and relocate. They do have some really impressive tech and smart
people, but I don't think the company as it exists today is viable.

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ngngngng
I only want one AR app and no ones made it yet as far as I know.

I just want to be able to walk around the Acropolis in Greece (or any site)
and see it in AR as it would have been throughout history. Have little digital
scenes play out with people from 2000 years ago, show me buildings as they
were before they were destroyed.

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r2champloo
Funnily enough, the Carnegie Natural History Museum funded a project exactly
like this at Carnegie Mellon University. An AR tour of their Architecture
exhibit that placed exhibit objects back into their full construction. I
wonder if that project went anywhere...

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jondubois
The tech culture of investing gigantic sums of money in a handful of hyped up
projects is sick IMO. Especially when these investors already know perfectly
well that only 1 out of 10 startup makes it and that it's almost impossible to
predict which ones will succeed. Even Y Combinator, which is top of the top,
doesn't have that high success rate in terms of number of companies.

Instead of giving this one company $2.6 billion, the investors could have
invested $100k in 26k different startups. They could have literally scrolled
through the list of the top 26k open source projects on GitHub and invested
100K in each of their teams to come up with any kind of business related to
their expertise.

Their success rate is bound to have been better. This money was just wasted.
Investors are just too lazy to interact with so many companies. Too fat and
lazy to make an impact.

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amitutk
> Instead of giving this one company $2.6 billion, the investors could have
> invested $100k in 26k different startups.

This already happens, its called angel or accelerator funding. YC gives $150K
to 200+ company every year. Some of these companies then raise more, then some
more.

For founder with successful exits or other outstanding achievement, they can
effectively start with series C and raise 50 million as the first round.

Thereafter everyone wants to bet on the winning horse.

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jondubois
It doesn't happen enough. Nowhere near enough. The number of companies which
apply to YC versus the number which are actually accepted is a very bad ratio.
YC and all other incubators combined do not represent a free market by any
stretch of the imagination. They're picking winners based on some selection
criteria which worked at one point in history... This funnel has been so
thoroughly gamed and hacked that at this stage, they might as well invest in
random companies. Does anyone realize just how hard it is to get even $20k in
funding for a hard working honest founder who is not a psychopathic
manipulator. IMO, anybody who can't setup a functional profitable business
with $20k funding is unfit to run any company. You've got to give a first
chance to more people and fewer second, third and fourth chances to charming
psychos.

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objclxt
> Does anyone realize just how hard it is to get even $20k in funding for a
> hard working honest founder who is not a psychopathic manipulator

It isn't that hard to get $20k in funding if your idea is halfway decent -
that's not the value that YC provides. The value that YC provides is in the
networking and connections, which I think a lot of people would argue is worth
far more than the money.

> anybody who can't setup a functional profitable business with $20k funding
> is unfit to run any company

Not quite. Good luck setting up a profitable hardware business with $20k of
funding, tooling costs alone are going to dwarf your seed capital.

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jondubois
>> It isn't that hard to get $20k in funding if your idea is halfway decent -
that's not the value that YC provides. The value that YC provides is in the
networking and connections

It's very hard in most countries - Coming from someone who has been applying
constantly for 10 years. At one point I even managed to get invited to some
events and conferences where a specific seed stage investor was going and I
approached him enough times at different events that I was eventually able to
secure coffee with the guy; took 2 years from when I started trying to get
investment. Then this investor encouraged me to apply to their incubator...
Then they just rejected me. My open source project was one of the most popular
in Australia at the time. I had worked on it for several years and I had a
solid business strategy and I could really have benefited from $20K and any
kind of support network (I was never asking for YC level business connections,
just some help me get 1 foot in the door with 1 B2B customer would have been
great).

BTW my project was more than 'halfway decent'. As proof, today my project
powers multiple mainstream tech projects and several major blockchain projects
and I'm collecting forging rewards on one of them. Did it with $0 funding and
most people I met actively working against me instead of helping me. Got
screwed over so many times.

I don't think my case is unusual. What happened to me is just average.

The thing is that in spite of it being so difficult to secure a mere $20K,
this whole experience did not make me believe that fiat money is valuable. It
did the exact opposite. So now I'm dedicating my career to the fight against
fiat money.

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ideals
It sounds like he will still work there, just not as CEO. This article is a
bit light on details. There's no reason given for this.

I'm surprised this didn't leak during the last couple rounds of headlines
about laying off staff and more recently raising money. Is Magic Leap really
good at keeping secrets or was this a last minute change to funding outline?

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catacombs
I feel like this has been a long-time coming, as the company continues to be
shrouded in secrecy and not release anything of significant value.

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psmithsfhn
I worked at an AR startup that got rid of their very smart and charismatic CEO
eventually.

Guess what happened?

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ykevinator
Am I banned?

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Gibbon1
Not yet I guess.

