gautamb0

Here's the thought experiment I'd run.

If you have a device that looks and feels like traditional glasses, but enables you to create and place an unlimited amount of virtual displays of any size and shape you desire, which can follow you around as you walk, why would you ever want to replace those with physical displays?

Everything you’re going through is perfectly normal for a startup founder closing up shop. Everything about it is a painful process, and it can be damaging to your self-worth.

Mourn it, move past it, and treat it as another stint of professional experience. You haven’t wasted time, you don’t have to start over. everyone works on a project that doesn’t live up to expectations at some point in their career. You’ve likely learned a lot and grown professionally.

Leverage what you’ve learned however you see best. Could be another startup, a bigco, academia, etc. The right companies will respect your startup experience. I’d strongly suggest taking 2-4 weeks completely off- no interviewing, no working, just recovery. (It won’t be enough to fully mentally recover- that will take much longer, but should be enough to get you back on track professionally) Lay down your arms so you can fight another day.

I agree fully, though I’d like to add a layer of nuance.

The best engineering leaders I’ve encountered have been hands-off (as you said, at a certain point it’s nigh impossible to scale otherwise) However, they’ve uniformly retained engineering mindsets, and have great spidey senses for when things are being overengineered, or when complexity is being underestimated, and much more. They all have also demonstrated the ability to drill in deep when the situation arises, and tend to have strong understanding of high level architectures and systems. I’ve had “pure people managers” who were non-technical and ended up having myriad weaknesses. The opposite has been even worse. But the best know exactly when and how to put on both their people and technical hats.

I’ve been in the enterprise vr industry for almost 7 years, and you’re correct with your estimate being very close to where I’d put it. The vast majority of revenue is from gaming.

If you have a vr headset, check out “Becoming Homeless” by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

Very impressive product- I certainly applaud your efforts and agree that the price is competitive for what it is. You can even use ultra wide monitors at similar resolutions as a comparison point. (Though of course they end up way ahead in terms of ppd)

This post resonated very strongly with me. 18 months is what it took me- everything that you listed to a t.

1. Start with a problem, not a solution. And validate that you can reach customers who will pay for your solution to solve their problem, before day 1.

2. Don’t pay attention or compare yourself to other startups/potential competition. No good comes of it.

3. Recognize how large a factor luck is. This means preparing for things to go wrong, but also accepting that factors beyond your control can hugely impact the trajectory of your business.

I went from a 3 person startup doing low 6 figures in annual revenue to a startup in the same space that had just closed its series A.

I interviewed with FAANG’s and startups in nyc and the Bay Area. I felt like my experience was valued by most companies I interviewed with, to my surprise, and many others had similar stories to mine.

It felt like the right the step, like going to a version of my company that’d turned out (a lot) better. It’s been a great experience- went from senior dev to manager, and love doing both. Management allows me to wear a bunch of hats in a similar way I did as a founder, but with a safety net and much more support.

My experience as a founder was extremely valuable. It made me a much better engineer and a much better leader than I could’ve been if I hadn’t done my startup. Overall, my career trajectory is better than it would’ve been otherwise, barring some stroke of luck in the corporate world. I have no regrets.

It wasn’t all roses, though. For the first 18 months or so after we shut our startup down (and through my subsequent return to full time employment), I was hurting pretty bad, constantly thinking of what I could’ve done differently and still had many, many sleepless nights. It took those 18 months to really get it out of my system and move on.

I still itch for the next one.

Like the OP, Roomba i8+. Dramatically improved our weekend chores routine. The automatic dirt disposal is also very convenient.

I went with Roomba over other brands as it seemed the best intersection of quality/reliability, noise and privacy.

VR ironically might fit the exact definition that he's going for with the iPhone as being a "real trend."

His friends, and many others, definitely have let their headsets catch dust. But there is a core that does use them every day, and probably won't stop any time soon, and it's certainly being put to work in non-gaming use cases.

I think he's being properly cautious, though, using the date as qualifier.

Windows Mobile phones were out for years well before the iPhone was, and were pretty similar in terms of capability and even hardware, but never reached its type of traction.

When it comes down to it, there were only a few key features and a lot of polish (many still argue over how much more polished it really was) which differentiated the iPhone to go on to sell billions, versus competing products from Palm and Microsoft partners to sell a hundredth of that.

Even in retrospect, it's not straightforward to pin the how and why. Back in 2007, it would have been very hard to guess correctly. It's hard to fault people who dismissed the iPhone as being yet another failed mobile project, and also hard to fault people who thought that PocketPC's would revolutionize computing.