
Essential Raises $300M - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-07/android-creator-s-phone-startup-raises-300-million
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rayuela
This one honestly makes no sense to me. How is this company being valued at a
Billion dollars with a flagship product that is indistinguishable in features
and price from any of its competitors. Who the hell is going to gamble on a
new, no name brand for a $700 product that is exactly like the very reputable
products from Apple, Samsung, and 50 other phone manufacturers?!?

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jpm_sd
Also, what is the benefit of a "bezel-less" phone? I always put cases on my
phones, ever since I dropped one and spider-webbed the screen some years back.
Without a bezel, the case will be covering up part of the screen...

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stormbeta
Agreed. Modern phones are so fragile as to make cases mandatory for anyone
that doesn't just sit around all day, and bezel-less designs make it even
worse while adding zero practical value.

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wastedhours
Fortunately there's a rather large portion of the population (myself included
for 75% of the time) who do rarely more than sit around all day (staring at
some form of screen or another).

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zrgiu_
I may be biased here, but I think almost everyone here is missing the point.
Yes, Essential raised $300M because Andy Rubin is at the helm, but the bet is
not on the phone they just launched. Its on the Smart Home. Here's a quote
from Rubin himself:

    
    
        The long-term vision for Essential, Rubin said, is more closely aligned 
        with the Essential Home, which Rubin hopes you’ll put in your kitchen or 
        living room and use to control all the connected devices where you live.
    

Apple has HomeKit, Google has "works with Nest" (a joke, really), Samsung has
SmartThings, etc.. If he follows the same path he has with Android and decides
to open up the Essential Home platform [1], then its going to revolutionize a
market that has the potential of being as valuable as the smartphone. If
that's not a company that's worth $1B, especially led by someone with Andy
Rubin's track record, I don't know what is.

[1] I mean truly open, the way he's done with Android. The Essential phone
will already be more open that most phones on the market (unlocked
bootloader), there's good reason to believe the Home will be too.

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twakefield
That's good perspective. My followup question is: why build the phone,
then...because it's the remote control?

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builtinbuffalo
He needs to show something tangible to investors and the world. He's a phone
guy, so he starts here, knowing voice assistants are still a few years away
from mainstream. That'll give him a customer base and some revenue, keeping
investors off his back which extends his timeline as the voice assistant /
smart home market develops over next five to ten years.

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eldavido
Longtime Android user here. I would love to see this company succeed, but I
don't see how it's possible.

Even if you can design a better phone, Apple has two massive moats protecting
them, namely, iOS and their manufacturing prowess.

The investors in this are going to take a bath. Again, this isn't the outcome
I want, but I think it's the outcome we'll get.

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pawadu
I don't know... I didn't expect OnePlus to survive long either and yet here I
am three years later seriously thinking of switching to Android and OnePlus 5.

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mixedbit
I believe there is a space on the smartphone market for a new powerful player.
Today there are two mainstream choices iPhone and Android. A significant
portion of iPhone users are devoted fans, but Android is more often just a
practical choice. The first Essential phone is just another Android device,
but based on the investment and people involved I don't think this is a long
term plan. If Essential releases a device that is clearly distinguishable from
Android phones, they may win many Android users.

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_pmf_
> If Essential releases a device that is clearly distinguishable from Android
> phones, they may win many Android users.

I don't know. HTC had some really high build quality models; did not do them
much good (haptically, those were the best of their time). With Google
beginning to crack down on vendors mangling the Android OS (part of the
unified update strategy), differentiation from Android will be even more
difficult.

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mixedbit
Software differentiation would more important and easier than hardware, so
Android fork or completely new OS that could maybe support Android apps.

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Fej
Who actually expects this to succeed? It's a mediocre flagship.

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jaredhansen
>It's a mediocre flagship.

So was Android.

It's a bet on Rubin himself and the team he's recruited, not on the current
product.

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revelation
But they have a product. It's a smartphone, in a saturated, downhill headed
market.

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jonknee
They have another product as well, it's not a smartphone.

[https://www.essential.com/home](https://www.essential.com/home)

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jpm_sd
It's like Google Home, without the enormous company full of brilliant software
engineers behind it?

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Apocryphon
But with the brilliant software engineer who played a large role in making
that company enormous.

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dirtylowprofile
Is it me or investments like this should be better of some better startup
ideas like solving global warming, crisis in other parts of the country. There
are other parts of the world that needs more solutions than another phone.

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alexbeloi
The obvious answer is that the returns on global warming and solving crises is
hard to quantify, and selling gadgets is easy(easier) to quantify.

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skc
They'll be bought by Google at some point I presume.

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smnscu
"How to change jobs to increase compensation", top exec version.

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mpeg
Or, sometimes, for the acquiring company "how to shift budget from M&A to R&D
without upsetting investors"

