I’m all for reinventing the wheel to make it better. It rarely works out, but when it does it’s well worth it. But if you can’t even describe what makes your wheel better, what are the odds it’s actually better?

I want to point out that they weren't necessarily building a great lock.

The "great product" bit seems to be the usual consumer startup rhetoric by the CEO, which many people fell for.

I can confidently say that it is marketing rhetoric because a similar example already exists in the world: car locks.

I still drive a car where you have to manually insert the key and turn it to open the door.

I've also driven cars where the locks are remote controlled.

I've also seen cars where you press your thumb to the lock to unlock it.

There's nothing "great" about any of the above after the first two or three uses.

Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware

Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.

To your three points:

0. We could all delightfully try to innovate all day without millions of wasted funding and a guy spewing garbage like every day that for a boss, filling our heads with propaganda. Also, does a lock need to be delightful? Did you not read they wanted you do be addicted to using their lock????

1. What's the difference? How about money, ego, and industry. we all get to have passions, but do they all deserve millions in funding?

2. Uh, what community is that? One of those "global" communities? I'm a hacker and maker, but I certainly don't feel like i'm a member of any such community. I'm not here to pat on the back the privileged failure of people I don't know, just cuz they are by some loose definition "makers" or hackers. Like, hackers do things with ingenuity and curiosity, not $50M. And I am mocking that project from the top-down, starting with the manic CEO who wrote that crap; so, it only trickles down to the hard working people who were conned into giving passion and time to the endeavor, but at least they got paid for being hoodwinked into believing they were "changing the world"... with a lock.

> Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much.

And Hacker News is full of people who lob bombs at everyone who tries and fails because it makes them feel superior for never having tried, all the while vastly underestimating the difficulty of building something meaningful.

Most efforts at building something great fail, so it’s easy to shit on everything and be right 90% of the time and think you’re a genius. The thing that makes Silicon Valley work is that the times when you’re are what really matter. If you say Facebook is overvalued at $3 Billion (as most of HN agreed) you could easily be wrong not just 1x, but 100x.

The world would be much better off with more people trying and failing while using hyperbolic language than having more trolls throwing parties on their graves. There’s absolutely no shortage of the latter.

The thing is, I bet you they would find sympathy here if they launched, competed, and couldn't find a toehold. That would have been an honourable exit. But the way they went out here, after burning through $45m in investment funds and mismanaging a potential sale, then trying to imply blame on the would-be buyer--this doesn't look good at all.

Edit: example of HN crowd sympathetic to a postmortem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608

What shows us it was mismanaged? How do we know the acquiring company didn’t cold feet and bail after the founders had run out of options to hedge?

You can’t raise a round with an acquisition pending, so you kind of have to put yourself in a precarious position. Perhaps they could have done something else, but hindsight is 20/20.

A few things:

- They didn't pay contractors for months of work

- They gave no hints to anyone that they were running out of funds

- They agreed to stop looking for acquisitions while in discussions, without requiring a bailout penalty clause in exchange

- $45m for a lock? Where the heck did it all go? Elon Musk's initial investment in Tesla was $6m in 2004.

I have been a founder at 2 startups that were acquired. In both cases there was a "noshop" with no bailout penalty. But the "noshop" didn't say we couldn't look for additional investors. I don't see anything in this writeup that implies that the noshop was unusual.

"Hacker News always trolls new products" and "Entrepreneurs should always ignore Hacker News because they always troll new products" are equally problematic absolutes.

On that we are agreed

[Removed pointless ranting]

I'm glad you work at CERN as an engineer. I work at Hacker News as a moderator. Really, please don't "do this". You're doing more damage to this site, which is trying against steep odds to be a place for thoughtful conversation, than even 100% rightness of your points could justify.

I assume you benefit from Hacker News, since you're a user here and a welcome one. But if you're benefitting from it, please take care of it, the same way you wouldn't litter in a city park or set fire to one.

If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html you'll get an idea of the intended spirit of the site. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do; assume good faith, and please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

My apologies. You've a tough job as it is without me adding to your woes.

No worries! Thanks for listening. This is slippery stuff that we all need to be mindful of, especially at 4 AM. Myself certainly included.

Partially my fault as well. My apologies.

Headed to bed. Enjoy.

These know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts likely made both the hardware and the software you used to read that article, as well as everything you are using now using to post your message, on a site run by other know-nothing delusionals.

So yeah. Fuck them and their attitude. How dare people try anything.