It’s not Fitbit’s fault that the Pebble brand had negative value. The reason Fitbit was even able to acquire just the pieces they did was because Pebble was worth less than nothing and forced to liquidate their assets to pay a portion of their debt. Fitbit didn’t buy Pebble, they bought the only valueable assets of a…

Lol, no way. Pebble’s VC investors were not holding out for more than $740mil at a time when they weren’t willing to put another $25mil of their own into the company.

And let’s not forget Yahoo! who stupidly spurned Microsoft’s $44 billion deal and now will be lucky if they can get a tenth of that out of Verizon.

I got this idea: let’s smuggle something highly illegal and dangerous by hiding it in something that people at the border will be looking for, something also illegal. If we could find some really dank skunk weed with a strong aroma, that would be perfect. Ask me about my plan to save money by spending it, as well!

Behind every complaint about the cutthroat, opportunistic habits of Uber or Airbnb is the reality that those are the very habits that allowed them to dominate their respective markets. Others tried to be decent; they met the same fate as Pebble.

I’m with you, but having been through four startups myself (two that were acquired), I want to caution that a $740 million offer is not remotely the same thing as a done $740 million deal. Due diligence would likely have revealed Pebble’s various problems and dropped that pricetag significantly. Still, hard to believe…

The thing that boggled the mind was they had just ran a kickstarter for a new and very much perfected range of pebbles. And they were more than reasonably priced, in fact they could well have charged a lot more.

This is something of a cautionary tale of a startup worried about being viewed as a sellout. Had they, in fact, sold out, many of their employees would have probably seen a nice payday, rather than watch their stock devalue day after day after day.
Sometimes scale matters, and so does experience. Would it have been…

But it WAS sketchy and he left the military to join the board?

I’d argue that mimicking nature is often a good starting point. Though yea, this winged turbine seems like a “things you will never hear about ever again” invention to me.

Bird etc population declines are mainly due to stray cats being an epidemic.

Cat’s kill a billion birds a year, a few million in the name of wind power is a small price to pay.

The thing people neglect to mention is that wind power kills about the same amount of birds per watt produced as coal power, because coal power wipes out entire populations by poisoning the food/water/land that they eat/drink/breed in.

Are you implying wind turbines are why bird populations are in decline? What about pollution & natural habitat destruction?

I am by no means an expert but the whole “wind turbines kill birds” seems like BS that some big oil lobbyist came up with.

Habitat loss is the major reason that birds are declining, and I’m willing to bet that other human activities contribute faaaar more to this than turbines do. Also, if we are serious about saving birds, we really just need to exterminate household cats. They kill 4 billion birds annually, compared to a maybe few…

Hydro is bad for fishies, concentrated solar thermal bakes birds in flight, Nuclear is bad because of fuel storage, Regular wind turbines slices and dices, petrochemical/coal/gas pollutes.

I spent 4 years managing R&D projects at one of the worlds largest wind turbine manufacturers. The only reaction to this contraption that I can muster is a bemused chuckle. If you could manage to get 20% uptime out of this thing, you’d be lucky.

God damn that is ugly.

I’ve got around 400 turbines south of me, around 300 north of me. All within 7 miles either way. 1 West of me, about 1 mile, and another one going up next to it.

I do not EVER hear them, and have yet to hear of any birds dying because of all 700 or so of them.

I can get the need to go smaller, but…