Blippar finds life after death; former investor buys assets to relaunch

This is actually a viable exit strategy for a founder, if you can believe it. The first startup I worked at blew up 3 times. The initial investors gave up and sold their losses. The assets were sold to a large company. The large company agreed to keep the company separate with the founders on the cap table in exchange for keeping the team together. Ran through all that money and then sold the company again, though abandoning the tech and really just selling the team. Each round everybody got non-trivial retention bonuses. The founders were careful to negotiate a non-preferential cap table (how they did that is beyond me -- amazing sales people) and made a tidy profit on each sale. It's not "unicorn money", but it's definitely "living well" money. And the funny thing is that running the same company in the ground 3 times is not a strike against you in the VC world it seems.

I was young and stupid at the time. I should have stuck around and rode their coat tails for a while -- I would have made at least "house money" off it. But I was a bit too focused on doing "real work" and ended up embarking on a career that made many people very wealthy, not including myself ;-) No regrets really, but I may have some when I retire...

> "After it failed to pull together an emergency funding deal ... One of the AR startup’s main investors, Candy Ventures, has acquired the company’s assets and will be keeping the brand alive underneath the leadership of [the] founder"

I'm no investing expert, but this indicates to me that Candy Ventures intentionally allowed the Blippar to fall into this state of shambles so that Candy Ventures could somehow get a better deal. Seems like an absolutely brutal business strategy.

> Blippar may have blown up in dramatic fashion, burning through more than $130 million in funding for its dream of building an augmented reality empire...

Wow

> At one point, the startup had more than 300 employees and claimed a $1.5 billion valuation.

Somewhat surprised I hadn't heard of them. Lots of posts about them [0], but it seems this is the first time they're being upvoted. I would have loved to see more of these posts than the common posts about Tesla, Uber, Apple, and Google, and cryptocurrencies that get so many upvotes. I generally just scroll through the "new" page now.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=blippar&sort=byPopularity&pref...

To follow up on the recent HN post about Glassdoor fraud, it's amusing to see how many people were apparently happily bopping along at Blippar as recently as 6 months ago

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Blippar-Reviews-E810640.ht...

Maybe this is a case of too soon for the market?

Plus being in the UK instead of the US.

Is AR inherently vaporware? I've been very underwhelmed by both HoloDeck and MagicLeap. Is this basically a promise that can't be delivered?