Could Magic Leap End Up Like Theranos?
I don’t know what gives me the authority to write about Magic Leap, except experience. But my experience tells me there’s something wrong with Magic Leap. And it’s not the technology. It’s the same issue Roger McNamee called out in his CNBC interview (h/t Marc Cantor): greed.
Magic Leap, if you’re not a geek, is a company based in Florida — yes, Florida — developing a mixed reality technology. The founder is a Floridian who has founded other companies, so this is probably not just a Florida-based money scam as so many reverse-merge-into-a-public-shell companies have been in the past.
But this morning I read a big article in Forbes that was very positive, and another from BusinessInsider about legal problems at the company. (If you don’t follow Robert Scoble on Facebook, you should.) Years of owning a PR firm are telling me that the Forbes article was suggested by some PR person as a crisis management solution for the problems raised in the BusinessInsider story.
None of this would matter if the company weren’t valued at $4.5 billion. With that kind of valuation, and all those high powered investors, Silicon Valley can’t afford to have Magic Leap be another Theranos — a company that blows up in a web of scandal.
But it may well be, and that could have nothing to do with the value of its technology or the “cool factor” of its product. It could have to do with greed.
Remember, Magic Leap is a company. It’s a business. And much can go wrong in a business besides the product. (Think BetaMax). There are a million reasons why Magic Leap, a startup, could fail.
From a technology perspective, I completely believe in the possibilities of Magic Leap. I was among the first group of idiots who bought Google Glass at $1500 a pop and actually wore it (them?) for a year. While most of the people watching me thought I was photographing or recording them, actually that flatters them. I was actually immersed in my own world, and that world was represented on the screen in front of me by Twitter, Facebook, directions, and other information. To me, Google Glass was augmented reality. It certainly augmented MY reality.
People missed that about Google Glass, because they were so busy worrying about privacy and the creepy line. Well, for better or for worse we’ve crossed that, because millions of people played Pokemon Go this summer, a game in which random characters appeared automagically on our phone screens.
Pokemon Go reinforced my faith in augmented reality, as did ODG’s industrial glasses, which I tried on at CES a couple of years ago.
I’ve tried some of the expensive VR headsets and most of the accessible ones. I eagerly await Snap Spectacles. But the tension between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world is being played out now in Magic Leap, and that tension could easily destroy what’s good and possible about the product.
I’d hate to see a monumental failure ruin the potential for mixed reality. Especially one that has nothing to do with product, and everything to do with people. Could someone summon a couple of good executive coaches to straighten this thing out before it’s too late?
It is time Silicon Valley stopped throwing so much money at companies with unproven business models and unreleased products, and began throwing more at training entrepreneurs to be good at the people side of running a business.
