You are thinking from the perspective of an individual investor. For VCs, this kind of return is abysmal since it won't cover the 7/10 companies that went completely bust. In order to VCs to take high risks on early stage companies, they need the winners to return 100x so the fund even makes financial sense. It's one of the main reasons why VCs constantly push startups for hyper growth.
This is certainly better than losing the investment completely but I can't imagine the investors being too thrilled about this outcome.
How do you reconcile this advice and position yourself if the seed round is only enough to prove out whether the product can be built at all?
As an analogy, say I had the idea for a car when everyone is still using horses. I raised a seed round to build my car but the funding is only enough to build a car prototype that goes 10mph. At 10mph, there is obviously no product/market fit since horses are still faster and cheaper. However, the prototype proved out the technical challenges, so I know with more capital I'd be able to make a car that can go 80mph, making the horses obsolete. How would your post apply in this case?
It is defined in the linked blog post and I believe it's a pretty good definition.
“The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can.”
Chinese knockoffs are already in full speed at a much lower price. One of my friends saw an exact Navdy knockoff called Carrobot in China selling for only $400. Supposedly it worked pretty well and was already shipping back in February.
May I ask what exactly are you looking for in the replacement?
We are actually building a wearable that gives you full hand tracking without the need for line of sight. It's intended for AR/VR applications since it's just as precise as vision based products without all the downsides. But one thing that's personally important to me that we are incorporating into the product is the ability to turn any surface I touch into a trackpad. It basically gives me a portable trackpad anywhere I go and I can sit 10 feet away from my computer and use my leg or arms of the chair to control my computer. I'm curious what kind of usages you need from a product like this.
Same thing happened to me also.. This is one of those times when I really wished that my browser would tell me how the heck did I end up on this particular page..
I think it just comes down to different personalities. I'm just like you. I tend to get agitated when people try to sandwich their criticisms or compliment me for irrelevant things when I just want them to get to the point. I'd very much prefer someone just telling me "your code is shitty and here is how you'd fix it and why." Unfortunately, people that take criticisms like us seem to be in the minority.
Nowadays, I find the only interaction I have with the scroll bar is to look at it to determine how far down a page I am. I always use the scroll wheel on Windows or the two finger scroll on the Mac trackpad to scroll a page.
From how I understand it, when you decide to exercise your options (pay the strike price), you owe taxes on the different between your strike price and current fair market value even if you don't sell the stock. Most of the time, this counts as AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) if you don't sell the stocks within the same tax year.
Actually this is a different but related area that Steve Mann calls mediated reality. It's essentially a level beyond AR by not only augmenting what you see but manipulating what you see (improved human vision is an example).
Meta is trying to achieve this through their AR glasses, which Steve Mann is part of.