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Comment by Afrotechmods | Hacker News Reader

1) This is the blog by the former VP of Engineering that the article references: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/search/label/ubeam

2) Does anyone know if she ever apologized for this awful speech? https://youtu.be/ukgnU2aXM2c?t=240

3) This uBeam shit is literally one of the reasons why I created a beginner's course in wireless power. It drives me nuts that investors have gotten ripped off so many times in this industry and the degree to which the media has been complicit in the hype train. If Mark Cuban or any other VCs happen to be reading this, please watch this course before putting any more money into wireless power. I created a coupon so you can watch it for free.

https://www.udemy.com/wireless-power-to-the-people-wireless-...

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I strongly recommend that blog. It's so very rare that an insider after leaving will publicly point out the bullshit. So rare and so valuable.

Anybody new to the tech industry should carefully study that blog. It's far easy to spend years of your life on something that sounds good but couldn't possibly work.

No joke, that's a terrible speech archived for posterity and it will follow her for the rest of her life.

> I was not an engineer, and I did not have Asperger's.

Yuck. Seems like she thought that was going to be a laugh line.

Some people just don’t have comedic sensibilities or timing, and that’s fine. But sometimes on stage jokes let you see what the speaker considers to be funny, which can occasionally be horrifying.

These are interesting data points; thanks for sharing. It makes me wonder then how board/investors/etc understand the companies, their technology and when to step in. There seemed to be less-informed-more-hype-associated investing for this situation). It then seems to becomes an economic game of understanding which companies in your portfolio to let die, to patch up with intention of selling soon, and to patch up with intention of getting the "train-back-on-track", all while managing perception of the business and any success or associated hype with downplayed failure (?).

It makes sense with pump and dump schemes, but less so, to me, for investments you need to hold on to for a long time.

I think about Warren Buffet's IBM investment. Anyone who talked to IBM engineers or perhaps read Robert Cringely's blog knew that IBM was facing a steep decline. However Warren Buffet applied the lens of finance to IBM's stock and it looked like a good deal. It wasn't.

Probably what is happening is that VCs/tech investors in general have had success in one area and then take it as a positive reinforcement of their own skills. Sometimes the investor is looking at other signals, which worked for them in another project. In this case, there was probably total ignorance of physics combined with the unwillingness to just ask some basic questions from people with knowledge in the area.

Perhaps the lesson for everyone is the VCs who did really well in the past decade or two -- if they fail to learn about the areas they are investing in -- may not be capable of distinguishing the next wave of great companies from intellectual fraud.

The now-four-year-old comments on that video are just... mwah.

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