Lily Drone demo video that generated $49 million was bogus, says DA

Well, all this legislation and DA’s accusations make it sound like there’s now an opening in the market!

That’s like attributing something to “Wordpress” or “Blogger”. Forbes is a shell of its former self.

If a major product can’t attract venture capital, one has to examine it very closely indeed when kickstarted or similar.

If you think you are smarter than people who spend their lives gambling on new ventures, think again, carefully. They obviously are not always right or the dot com boom never would have occurred, but but see where the bug money is going for as fairly reliable weathervane.

A basic rule of economics is or should be "About one day after a new form of financing is developed, the con artists will be using it.

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Real life is a lot more different. I’ve heard that machine version can detect obstacles cleanly, but I’m not sure if this is really the case outside of very clean laboratory tests. The drone will have to detect these obstacles in real-time, in less than clean conditions, and then decide how it can move around and/or see around these obstacles.

Making the drone move at more than 15mph, even in strong wind, which it would absolutely need to do, is indeed a manufacturing challenge.

This just has scam written all over it.

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Yeah yeah yeah, but if you get in now you save a hundred dollars!

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Is $50 million really not enough?

Just seems like you could hire 5-6 grad students, throw money at them (say, $50-100k/month plus stock options), and you’d have a solution in 3-6 months.

I think the reason why this failed wasnt that they didnt have a working prototype. It’s because they had no intellectual capital whatsoever. Just marketing people.

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This sucks. I showed some of my coffee customers that video and it convinced them to invest. Seems like a hard product to develop but certainly not impossible.

Ah, but then you need to build and ship all the devices. Their pricing model didn’t account for hiring anyone, let alone a team.

Nah, I’m Darwinian on this. People aren’t Kickstarting things out of desperation, it’s a leisure expenditure. If people were losing life-savings on the hope of a potential life-saving drug, then I’d be less sanguine, but as it is fools are parting with their pocket money. I’ve seen scientists and engineers try to demonstrate to people, with math and occasionally small scale demos why a stupid energy saving or solar gimmick won’t work and people will insist on continuing to throw money at the project hand-waving the concerns with, “It’ll get worked out in development.” There’s a point at which it’s really no one’s job to stop people from lighting their money on fire.

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