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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Normally tech companies tend to be overpriced, but $880M for 80% of Boston Dynamics (total value of $1.1 billion), doesn't that seem a little low?

Other tech companies can seemingly lose millions, as long as there's an advertising or data-mining angle to the product. Because Boston Dynamics aim to actually create physical products they then get valued lower?

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It's the same issue faced by other "moonshot" R&D enterprises like DeepMind. They burn tremendous amounts of cash, and as other comments have noted, the path to profit is unlikely to be a direct path through their core competency, whether that be general purpose robotics or AGI.

DeepMind's greatest commercial achievement seems to have been around optimizing energy usage in Google's datacenters, which as a standalone product would have a relatively small addressable market. The progress that BD has made is likely similar: immediately valuable to a small number of players, even if the long term winds up being something far more grand.

The research they've done is undeniably awesome, but valuations aren't based on awesomeness, they're based on ability to make money. So far, Boston Dynamics hasn't done much there. There's potential to make a lot of money, but that's far off.

I doubt they want BD for the products they're making. They want BD for all the hundreds of tiny little innovations they're making.

For example, a motor that has more torque with low power consumption.

A joint that can flex a certain way.

All those things are worth $100000000x more than a robotic Spot when it comes to industrial applications.

This is an extremely low valuation for how famous BD is. They could have gone public and sold 10-20% of their stock for $1B.

Does this come down to the unit costs?

Your typical tech unicorn can at least tell a story of tens or hundreds of millions of potential customers (either paying or eyeball-monetized) with a unit cost of pennies per customers.

Boston Dynamics story is still "each robot costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars" and "almost no one has a use for one".

Honestly I'm not sure there's a story for a profitable market for humanoid robots until your robots are sophisticated enough to build themselves.

> Normally tech companies tend to be overpriced

According to what criteria?

Based on profits at the date of valuation. Its a useless way to value companies, but that's basically always what this comment means.

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