There's a big difference between a venture backed tech product that doesn't work at the desired scale because of the laws of physics and a medical product that doesn't work because of phlebotomic reasons (also, procedural and calibration).
And that difference is who gets hurt.
uBeam is going to hurt the VCs, Theranos hurt everyone who relied on the results of their tests.
I had a hilarious experience being brought into a meeting at Steorn, designed to explain to potential investors and commentators the technology and the origins behind it.
I'm not going to make any comment on the intentions of the founders or even on the technology itself. The presentation itself however was comically childlike and questions were answered with a circularity that was amazing to witness. What I noticed, though, was that if you ask penetrating questions and if someone calmly and persistently fails to address the core of your question then other people eventually accept that your question has been answered!
I think that would be a stastical question. Theranos recalled 10's of thousands of potentially inaccurate blood tests. Some of these were presumably the deciding factor in a treatment decision. Wild guess : 10% of the time a single test result may change the treatment decision. So that is order of 1000's of patients getting different treatment than their doctors would have chosen. Wild guess : 10% of unnesessary treatments have undesirable side-effects, 1% of missed treatments have an avoidable bad outcome. So my wild math is order of magnitude of 1000s of patients with unnessary expense, 100s of patients with unnesessary side effects, 10s of patients with avoidable bad outcomes.
Using statistics for this type of question always bugs me, but there is no other way to see the impact. Using stats has an effect of reducing the seriousness of an failure.
I mean, we are dealing with life, health and death, serious stuff.
There was a Tumblr blogger su3su2u1, a physicist, who was all over these guys:
> I reached out to an investor in impossible startup I had talked about previously. Had a long phone call today, in which he explained to me he didn’t invest because he thought they’d ever be a viable business. He invested because he thought between their pitch/charisma and the names of the investors backing them they’d be able to get several rounds of funding, and he’d be able to cash out.
That is: for VCs in the present climate, "find a greater fool" counts as a business plan.
It's about now that front-end web devs who are good with JavaScript should be stocking up on tinned food.
I think this right here is why some VC's are so rabid about criticism of startups they've invested in. For a while now it's looked like a lot of pump-and-dump behavior.
Funny thing is that Marc Andressen had some mean comments on @pmarca about how HN reacted after first news appeared here and commentators showed it was technically impossible (or at least not what most people expect)
You mean those "Hater News" comments? Yeah, if you don't support the VC's narrative you're a hater. Doesn't matter if you've got legit concerns related to physical laws.
It's a very, very general trend in the industry, without naming anyone. It's just that Marc is so outspoken and has his fingers in most of the pies out there.
Seriously — uBeam's claims were always ridiculous. Anybody with any kind of engineering background should be able to feel it instinctively, and be convinced after spending a couple of minutes with pen and paper.
I agree with you. There was a cascade of low efficiency stages. Making UHF sound in electrical form - a wave train - into a speaker or transducer to couple to the air = overall efficiency of 3-4%. Beam into the air as well focussed as possible - 10 feet away, less than 25% there. Turn that sound into electricity with another transducer with 3-4% efficiency = over all under 1%.
So a honking great ultrasonic horn using 10,000 watts of power will transmit around 10 watts of usable power. The whole area will become an ultrasound cooker(you dare not walk through the beam = dead and cooked if you stayed for long, blood clots in a second or less. and for a large area bats will hate it and dogs howl
I'm not deeply into the details, but doesn't it depend on how focused the ultrasonic beam is if you can fully protect the beam from hitting people by some smart and rapid sensing ?
From what I understand, uBeam's low power demo `works` because they're still (mostly) in the linear range. As you scale it up, you run into a couple of nonlinearities that form an upper limit of the power density and distance.
1) You can't run sound at over 1 atm of overpressure, because the troughs can't get to negative pressure. This limits the amount of power that you can physically get into a region using sound pressure.
2) Dispersion is a nonlinear effect that changes the frequency distribution of the sound, which has the effect of reducing the focus effect at greater range. (Also, affects the absorption losses).
3) Even in fully linear systems, phased arrays don't focus all the energy into one area, they have significant side lobes. You can monkey with the shapes and intensities, but TNSTAAFL.
The SPL that they're talking about is in the range of jet engines at close range. Yeah, it's ultrasonic, and yeah, it's focused. But I don't want to get anywhere near the thing.
The world is nicely linear, until it's not. You have to know where the simplifying assumptions end.
If you have to develop 100% accurate human detection and avoidance systems in order to avoid catastrophic tissue damage for users of a mild convenience, maybe you should pack it in.
Some things are worth the risk. Spaceflight, experimental cancer research, assassination of despots, hazardous waste storage technologies. Sometimes you really do need to crack a few eggs to advance humanity.
But the 'advance' we're talking about here is the trivial convenience of not plugging in your phone.
This technology starts with phone charging, where it ends may be quite a distance from there. We've also quite literally had to develop as close as we can get to 100% safe ways of pretty much everything complicated we do, from surgery to driving to toasting bread.
Are they being called the next Theranos simply because they're also a tech startup without a working product that has a woman founder/CEO? Sure looks that way. uBeam is just a dumb idea that can't work. Squandering a few million of VC money in pursuit of a dumb idea happens all the time. This article seems really meanspirited.
Well... I gather uBeam's stick was to give a demo of an impractical ultrasonic power transfer system (off-the-shelf transducers transmitting a small amount of power over an insignificant distance) and claim that they just needed to scale it up by improving on the existing technology. Which presumably sounded reasonable to VCs who didn't bother doing some back-of-the-envelope maths on the physics...
We could have learned that lesson in many other ways. I am glad we have the opportunity when it was pointed at one person at a time—that could have been a subway or aircraft controller.
Now, the hard part is ensuring we really do learn the lessons Therac can teach us.
I was about to post "...or could have been a Toyota ECU?" But doing a little obligatory pre-mouth-opening-due-diligence, I discovered that the Toyota ECU I remember so much bad press about apparently wasn't at fault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–11_Toyota_vehicle_recalls
The blog that the article was sourced from (http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/) currently has a biting post about how Theranos' failures are endemic in the tech industry:
"Companies in the new tech area tend to be a little lax when it comes to doing things carefully - Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, tells us all to "Move fast and break things", which I have to agree is a great way to innovate and learn when your product does nothing of actual importance at all. It doesn't matter if you don't get your silly cat videos, or can't post pictures of your holidays, because your business payroll doesn't run on it, your medication isn't delivered by it, nor is your aircraft navigation based on it. Real consequences of a Facebook blackout are near zero."
"[...] In both these industries [generator manufacturing and medical ultrasound] the mentality was "we must make sure this is safe" and the idea of reducing or skipping safety is never considered, but I do not see the same thinking in many of these tech companies. I have literally heard "what's the minimum we have to do?", "we don't have proof it's a risk", "that sounds time-consuming and expensive. We should do <pointless but fast/cheap thing> instead", and "well if it goes to court our lawyers say they have good arguments"."
uBeam isn't like Theranos because uBeam isn't defrauding anybody. They have honestly described how the product works. The product just happens to be a horrifying deafness ray. Some VCs will fund that.
uBeam is most likely vaporware that violates the laws of physics - at least in what they propose on a product level - but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be funded to try working on a really hard problem. Maybe in their R&D they fall short by a large margin on the product side, but still make some meaningful contribution.
I think where everyone loses their cool is when the company purposely gets massive amounts of PR to glamorize themselves (and their founder) as if it's already a success [1]. IMO these guys should be keeping a low profile, like the people working on Jetpacks and similar things. Make some noise when you have a demo.
Pretty sure Forbes was on this same blog post more than two weeks ago. https://is.gd/5xJ4QY
[EDIT] Additionally, they accurately point out that, apart from the VP's rant, uBeam is actually persuing something more akin to cordless charging, within a few meters of a charging station.
That's still something of a pipe dream given the inverse law of power distribution. But rather than hitting the target perfectly to wirelessly charge my S7 it'd be nice to just set it anywhere on the counter. Not sure that's disruptive, but it's more possible than ubiquitous, in-home charging.
uBeam claims to be using ultrasound to transmit power, while the other companies (inluding the one you mentioned) in this field are using radio waves. Electricity over radio waves is well understood and basically works. The problems there are ones of engineering a system that is sufficiently energy efficient and reliable in a reasonably compact package rather than any fundamental scientific problems.
I'm kind of surprised at their list of investors. I mean Mark Cuban is generally a skeptical guy at investing from what I see on Shark Tank. Then there is some major investors (Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Shawn Fanning...) Can't these people afford a technologist/scientific consultant to bounce thughts on the feasibility of ideas before investing in them? I guess for them spending a $1M here or there is pocket change.
Mark Cuban is a lottery winner and reality TV star. He made his own money by selling a company to yahoo for billions that they shut down shortly after taking a giant loss.
Who knows about all of these guys though. It makes you wonder if they are taking unresearched scattershot approaches to winning carnival games in the hopes of walking home with a few big prizes.
"""uBeam CEO Meredith Perry tricked co-founder Nora Dweck into an 80/20 split of the company instead of a 50/50 split, according to court documents. Dweck sued Perry, who “settled out of court with Dweck rumored to get 20% of the company"""
I'm assuming this means an additional 20%? If not that's a pretty great settlement for the sued party :P
I think it's becoming a meme. Failed startups is nothing new. Failed healthcare startups is different, because healthcare has created a vast regulatory and auditing network to specifically prevent the creation of startups that will fail.
Not really - the regulatory framework prevents giving bad medical services to people. But many healthcare startups have failed. Just in the area of non-invasive glucose testing there we're probably tens of them. No shame in failing, assuming you gave an honest effort.
The three usual metrics that are used are "Team", "Market" and "Product" with investors focusing more on one or the other.
I'm fairly certain that investors who focus on team and market over the product metric are the ones who will continue to get burned by this sort of scenario. This isn't the last company that will try to peddle vaporware and get away with it for an extended period of time.
You're hearing about the outrageous stories because they're outrageous. Crunchbase and Angel List are filled with unsexy companies with low profiles, doing good work and generating returns. Those don't make for enticing front page stories, though.
Maybe I made too big of a generalization. Yes, lots of unsexy companies out there doing good work. You don't have to have a big market potential to be a startup. I prefer startups that generate real returns than those that promises the world.
But the idea that a startup even got funded millions of dollars by some very famous investors kind of makes you think about the concept of venture capital in SF. Are they really as "expert" as they say they are?
So far as I know, the pitch of VC is that they target outlier returns, and therefore will make highly unlikely bets in the pursuit of those returns. So it's not particularly revelatory that a VC-funded idea turned out to be unfeasible, because that's what you'd expect with such a strategy.
The claim of expertise comes from the idea that VCs can generate magnitudes better returns than the market. This is a true claim when talking about top firms, and I don't see how the fact of VCs making a bad bet disputes that -- unless your standard is that experts never lose money.
I don't think we are arguing different points here. Some VC place bets on outliers companies like uBeam and Theranos. The problem that I have is that they didn't do their due diligence. You can bet on outliers no matter how unfeasible it seems, but you still need to do your research. The fact that uBeam is argued by many to be physical impossible, supported by facts rather than opinions, strikes me as surprising.
Expert is not always winning. It means not betting on outliers just for outliers sake. Can these VC firms go back to their shareholders and convince them that they did their due diligence?
Reading from these articles, its painfully obvious they were not being transparent with their investors. These companies have all been around for a few years, and the fact that none of them have seen a reliable working product is another surprise. Mark Cuban has said he has never even seen a working prototype from uBeam.
There is certainly a method to the madness, but if you are hoping for an answer that includes technical progress or sound long term business plans you may be very disappointed.
> Are there companies run with male CEOs that have done the same? Not crazy ideas, but crazy ideas that are not scientifically plausible that also get PR and VC funding.
Muller sky car?
Kastje van van der Sloot?
Goauld?
And numerous others. Yes, Male CEOs have done the same thing. In fact, they have done it many more times than female CEOs because the division is still skewed towards many more male CEOs than female CEOs.
And what does this have to do with anything? Let's not get distracted here and get back to discussing facts about the technology (which can't possibly work like they are claiming).
I find it more interesting that they're both archetypes of an "attractive" woman (blonde, light-skinned) in American culture.
In studies where workers/students are asked to rate their peers on traits unrelated to attractiveness (including intelligence), there's a consistent bias toward attractive peers. [1]
uBeam's technology sets off the BS alarm of most university students with intro physics knowledge, so I find it mind-boggling that an entire room of VCs threw millions of dollars at this.
> both archetypes of an "attractive" woman (blonde, light-skinned)
Says who? light-skinned women appear in american fashion magazines a lot because most of the population are white. Tanned, or light brown skin is still considered attractive though. Blonde women are stereotyped as ditzy/bubbly/fun, not necessarily "attractive".
Light skin + blonde isn't considered attractive in America. A nice tan is almost universally more desirable. It's why Nicole Kidman has always been a Hollywood outlier in terms of her skin tone. It's why celebrities typically sport tans. It's why pasty / paleness due to lack of sun exposure is viewed as a negative when it comes to attractiveness (in American culture it suggests loner / lack of social activity / lack of physical shape / poor health).
theranos is almost a decade and a half old. i'll just come right out and say that the FDA is a sham and I honestly wouldn't care if they Theranos didn't pay extra to have some peer reviewed paper published or adhere to the laws proposed, written, ammended and passed by people without degrees in the field.
It is a shame Theranos did some questionanable, unethical & likely illegal things. I wont hold them up as the Unicorn's gift of Zeus here, but I really could care less about red tape. 23andme had an injuction against them by these clowns(fda) so unless soneone here can say in 2008ish 5 years after Theranos was founded, you knew it was going to implode, then I would say would you still not want another company in the space to get funded? Nobody gets points for standing infront of Yahoo right now and sayibg they are in bad shape, shits obvious. However there are many companies succeeding where Theranos failed.
As for uBeam, I assumed this would fail. I just looked at it like a privately funded research project. Regardless, it seems like this space is actually succeeding (just not uBeam wireless inplementation) so I am excited about that.
tl;dr it's really easy to be negative with a decade or more of hindsight. sure these were collosol failures & that money could have been spent elsewhere, if nothing else these high profile companies likely inspired some competitors and interest in the space and many of them aren't doing something physically inpossible
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11672270
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11693184