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Failed Palo Alto Startup Pivots From Trying To Be an 'Android Killer' To Self-driving Tech (bizjournals.com)
A Palo Alto startup that stopped trying to be an "Android killer" last year after raising $185 million has apparently pivoted to developing autonomous vehicle technology. From a report: The company now known as Cyngn has changed its name from Cyanogen and recently got a permit to test its self-driving tech on California roads, according to a report Wednesday on Axios. It's being led by Lior Tal, the former chief operating officer who took over as CEO last fall when Kirt McMaster left. The rest of the startup's current team of about 30 people appear to have joined since the strategy shift, Axios reported, citing LinkedIn records. Some of them are former Facebook people, like Tal, and alumni of automakers who include Mercedes-Benz. No new funding has been disclosed for the reinvented company. It lists on its website investors who backed it before it pivoted, including Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, Qualcomm and Chinese social networking company Tencent. The company was the center of acquisition talk in 2014, when companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung and Yahoo expressed interest in the company.
If a startup fails to come up with having a compelling profit-making story, but has money left, wouldn't it be the prudent thing to return the money to the investors, then decide, what should be done now. Not completely pivot to a new space that has zero relation to the original investment? If the team is basically one remaining guy, and a completely new team, how does this even fly with the investors?
They already got failing part down to science, so they are ahead of many other startups.
This makes total sense if you've been watching Silicon Valley.
They're chasing buzzwords (and the money).
I thought VR would come before self-driving, but here we are.
How the fuck is "Cyngn" pronounced?
"Sine-gan"?
"Sine-gone"?
"Sin-gin"?
"Sin-gone"?
"Kin-gan"?
"Kin-gone"?
"King-enn"?
"See-why-an-gone"?
When I first saw it I thought it said "obgyn", which is short for the term "obstetrics and gynecology".
They should reinvent themselves as an "AI" and "autonomous driving" company. The VC money will come rolling in!
...designed to soak up investor cash while producing very little practical applications. I don't think they realize the difficulties of controlling a semi-truck at 70 mph on on a windy mountain road or during fog/smokey conditions. (Hell, commercial applications could afford RADAR/LIDAR and all sorts of sensors that would be impractical on a consumer vehicle and it would still be difficult.)
The best application of self-driving right now is automatic parking and automatic turning for tractor-trailers.
They completed the task of destroying Cyanogenmod and are looking for what to destroy next.
How is this not fraud?
It works for executives, why not for startups?
Keep chasing the shiny new thing as long as the investors cash hold out.
Sillly Valley has jumped the shark - well, they did back in the 00s.
There hasn't been anything innovative out of that place in 20 years. There have been plenty of companies who claim that they are, but nah. Rehashed shit from yesteryear.
We have to remember that today's global economy is quite distorted.
We've gone through 8+ years of "quantitative easing", which is basically a fancy way of saying "printing a lot of money". It hasn't just been one currency affected by policies like this, but many of them, including the major global currencies.
We've seen this infusion show up in a variety of ways, including massive bubbles (i.e. low-level hyperinflation) in a variety of asset classes, including real estate and stocks.
Then there are the extraordinarily high public and private debt levels.
On top of this we have so-called "globalization", which has essentially siphoned off resources from developed nations into third-world hellholes where products can be manufactured cheaper due to a total lack of regulations protecting workers and the environment. Not only has this harmed (if not ruined, like in Greece and Spain) the economies of developed nations, but it has also resulted in some of this foreign-controlled money flowing back into developed nations in an attempt to seek a safe-haven, helping to further inflate the prices of assets, namely real estate (like in Australia, Canada, London, NYC, Paris, San Francisco, and Seattle).
To make matters even worse, we've seen interest rates artificially held down around the globe, not just to sub-1% levels, but sometimes even into negative rates!
So now we have a situation where there are a lot of people with a lot of money they never really did much to earn, and they're looking for something to do with it. It has become nearly impossible to obtain any sort of a reasonable rate of return using traditional investing methodologies, so we've seen more and more resources flowing toward high-risk ventures.
I have no idea if this is the case in this particular situation, but the investors might not really give a damn about the money. $185 million may seem like a lot to you, but it really isn't all that much for some investors. When you've got tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars that you're trying to get some sort of a reasonable return on, a measly $0.2 billion won't even be on your radar.
The only solution to these multi-layered distortions will likely be a significant collapse of the global economy, much like happened at the end of the 1920s. Only once the economic distortions that are currently in place are removed can the free market again reform in a way that allocates resources properly.
They are clearly going after the acquisition ploy. Hoping to get enough PR traction in a hot field to become an acquisition target. Won't be Waymo or Tesla or anyone, but maybe an also-ran, or catch-up firm like a Chinese one with a lot of money. Or maybe hope that Apple buys you for the staff.
SV is topsy turvy, but if 'investors' want to toss money at losing propositions, that's their choice to make.
Way to narrow it down from millions to ten of thousands. What an appallingly shitty lead.
I thought VR would come before self-driving, but here we are.
How about virtual driving? That would be safer.
As it is, switching from "Android Killer" to baby-and-little-old-lady killer doesn't sound so good.
As long as those investors give us their money, amirite???
Fuck.
I tend to rant.
I don't understand. Why is this newsworthy? startups change focus/markets.
They are private, so the people who have a say are the seed/VC investors. What is the implicit objection here?
Oooooh. Sorry - I failed to catch on to this being an astro-turf or troll article. My bad
Will we be seeing 'Careful Student Robot Driver' on the trucks then?
1. Fedgov prints a bunch of free money out of thin air, calling it "Quantitative Easing"
2. Fedgov gives that free money to their friends / "campaign contributors" in the big banks
2. The big banks bid up every asset they can find, but still have piles and piles of free money sitting around.
3. Big banks can't figure or anything else to do with all that free public money - so they start giving a bunch of it to the bankers' inbred, half-wit cousins who run VC firms in Palo Alto
4. The VCs discover they've been given more money than they can possibly waste on hookers & blow. So they hire a few of their butt-buddies from the Stanford dorms to found some "startups".
5. The butt-buddies look at what other loss-making companies are doing, then do the same thing only with an even stupider company name.
6. No business acumen, nor any actual talent, are required to get a leadership role at a startup. You just have to be from the "right schools". Consequently the startups have no business model and not much ability to execute. But hey - at least this time they didn't pay "outrageous" salaries to a bunch of filthy working class nerds!
6. The startups make a handsome loss, undercut and bankrupt a few legitimate businesses, and keep on getting bigger and bigger valuations each time they return to the VC teat to suck more free public money.
7. Somewhere way up the food chain, someone in DC or New Jack City gets a little nervous about propping up so many worthless loss-making "startup" companies.
8. The steady stream of free public money starts to dry up
9. The Crash!
10. Somewhere in Palo Alto, a Stanford boy can no longer afford his Personal Ass Sanitation Assistant, and is forced to resume wiping his own butt.
Once they build their self-driving car, they will train the onboard computer to track and run over all Google's Android engineers that can be found walking along Palo Alto...
Eh, virtual driving is more dangerous. Lag and connection drops with real time steering is asking for legal problems, and worse the schmuck behind the wheel is at fault for the lag induced crash. There are ways around it of course. Keeping the driver in cabin would negate most of the virtual driving benefits. The best they could possibly do would be set up a bunch of cameras to get a better line of sight. Ironically it would probably run afoul of distracted driving regulations. Remote virtual driving might work for off-roads operations but that is far more niche.
another made up, bullsheit, useless euphemism spit from the orifices of nonsensical failed Silicon Valley brogrammers looking to con more coin from gullible vulture capitalists to fund pointless consumptive lifestyles without any real value to society
Keep in mind that when they speak of negative interest rates, they are often referring to negative real interest rates, which are the rate of interest - the rate of inflation. So, if the interest rate is .5% and the rate of inflation is 1%, that means a real interest rate of -.5%. This means, though you are getting interest in your account, the overall purchasing power of the money is going down.
Just thought this should be clarified since the term "negative interest rate" has been thrown around a lot the last decade.
Just wanted to throw in that there have been several examples of nominal negative interest rates - i.e. not just negative after inflation but actually negative, i.e. less than the principal is paid back. In some countries this has only happened in some isolated markets (central bank interest rates, government bonds etc.) but in others it has become a wide phenomen. For instance, in Denmark home-owners have (and still have) loans financed with negative interest (also on some existing loans with variable interest rates that were suddenly refinanced to negative), and negative interest on bank deposits (so far only for deposits made by companies but, still, truly negative rates). I believe Switzerland, Germany, Japan etc. are examples of other countries that have seen various degrees of negative interest.