Another one bites the dust

MountainDude said:
They must have presented a reasonable business plan that drew in $86M in investments. Unless they lied, which is possible but unlikely.
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Dang it, all I am looking for is 500K to start a business venture.
GoFly said:
I don’t know about you, but I’ve met some pretty foolish millionaires.
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where can I meet these folks.??



(I know all you rich airplane owners here with all your loose cash laying around are jumping at a chance to invest 50K...)
 
Zeldman said:
Dang it, all I am looking for is 500K to start a business venture.


where can I meet these folks.??
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They are really not that difficult to find. The problem is that you need to either have some wild idea, in one of the currently fashionable areas, that you truly believe in enough to convince them that it's real and has potential, or be dishonest enough to outright swindle them.
 
DaleB said:
They are really not that difficult to find. The problem is that you need to either have some wild idea, in one of the currently fashionable areas, that you truly believe in enough to convince them that it's real and has potential, or be dishonest enough to outright swindle them.
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Theranos would be a good example of this. Cover employees with NDAs and sue them if they tried to blow the whistle. Helps to have a former Secretary of State on your board.

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
Theranos would be a good example of this. Cover employees with NDAs and sue them if they tried to blow the whistle. Helps to have a former Secretary of State on your board.

Ron Wanttaja
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I think that was a case of it starting one way -- True Believers -- and ended up with them being unwilling to admit it when their ideas proved unworkable, and drifted into outright swindling. I've seen that exact cycle play out in real life, in real time.
 
DaleB said:
I think that was a case of it starting one way -- True Believers -- and ended up with them being unwilling to admit it when their ideas proved unworkable, and drifted into outright swindling. I've seen that exact cycle play out in real life, in real time.
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As someone who is not the biggest fan of needles, I wish Theranos was viable :confused:
(Electric airplanes would also be nice)
 
DaleB said:
They are really not that difficult to find. The problem is that you need to either have some wild idea, in one of the currently fashionable areas, that you truly believe in enough to convince them that it's real and has potential, or be dishonest enough to outright swindle them.
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Yeah, I knew there would be a catch to it.

But an investment to the Zeldman Enrichment Fund will help stop this horrible and illegal sport...

 
Flatiowa said:
And one heck of a lot of batteries and electrical transmission line upgrades to charge them to equal.
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That’s just as losing a proposition. From a scale perspective, ~1.6 million barrels of jet-a are burned in the US alone. Most of it goes to commercial aviation.

One percent is 16,000 barrels/day. Everyday.
 
And at give or take a bit over 135,000btu/gallon and 3412 btu per kWh (disregarding transmission losses, charging/discharging losses) that rounds to about 40kwh per gallon. So times 16,000 barrels at 50 gallons per barrel, that’s a new drain of 32 million kWh per day for one percent on a grid that is supposed to just magically appear by going electric? Or 3.2 billion kWh increase to convert the entire system?
 
MountainDude said:
They must have presented a reasonable business plan that drew in $86M in investments. Unless they lied, which is possible but unlikely.
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I don't remember the context, but remember the quote - "I didn't lie, I just said some things that turned out not to be true." With this field, I've often wondered if there were two groups of people working together. A money group, who really wants it to work, and an eco/science group, who doesn't care about the money part. If those two groups don't ask hard questions of each other, they can lie to the public without knowing it. And if they do, they might be able to justify the actions in their heads as appropriate - OK to rip of silly venture capitalists either for the general harmlessness of it, or for the greater cause of improving the available technology that might be useful in the future.

Or maybe they were hoping for subsidies to make the research possible, and then to gain ownership of some sort of magical patents that would allow monopolizing the tech later on. The later kind of what happened in the PC industry in the late 70's to early 90's. For airplanes, though, I don't see any of that happening again. The physics seem pretty simple to me...electric motors have been around since the original Tesla.
 
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Just to throw out my $.02 worth since I've work on a couple of similar projects. In general, people become "millionaires" in these types of ventures because they are willing to accept risks that 99% of the general public are unwilling to accept. And people become "billionaires" because they accept the risks that 99% of the millionaires are unwilling to accept. While it may look "foolish" in hindsight, nobody really knows where the next Apple or Amazon may come from until it happens especially in the beginning years. In the case of e-aviation, Joby, Archer, and the others I mentioned are the potential winners in round one. So who's going to win round 2?
 
Albany Tom said:
I don't remember the context, but remember the quote - "I didn't lie, I just said some things that turned out not to be true." With this field, I've often wondered if there were two groups of people working together. A money group, who really wants it to work, and an eco/science group, who doesn't care about the money part. If those two groups don't ask hard questions of each other, they can lie to the public without knowing it. And if they do, they might be able to justify the actions in their heads as appropriate - OK to rip of silly venture capitalists either for the general harmlessness of it, or for the greater cause of improving the available technology that might be useful in the future.

Or maybe they were hoping for subsidies to make the research possible, and then to gain ownership of some sort of magical patents that would allow monopolizing the tech later on. The later kind of what happened in the PC industry in the late 70's to early 90's. For airplanes, though, I don't see any of that happening again. The physics seem pretty simple to me...electric motors have been around since the original Tesla.
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My own experience and observations on this... I was in neither group, but I got to watch it unfold from the very early stages. In this case it wasn't aviation related, but a very technical area with a lot of regulatory issues and oversight, so some similarities.

The investors naturally wanted to know that the business types (and I use this term quite loosely) had their poop in a group, knew what they were doing, had a solid plan for success, and all of that. The "business types" seeking funding had a seat of fairly revolutionary ideas, and they came up with presentations that were intended to extract the maximum amount of cash from the investors. Period. Were those plans in any way realistic? Well, they talked a good game. It seemed doable, if optimistic, at the time. As it turned out, their "plans" were more wildly optimistic pipe dreams, assuming that they could invent entirely new things that no one had ever done before on a very short timeline.

It soon became apparent that these things were not going to be somehow prestidigitated from thin air. It was do-able, but not with the group they had assembled. The business types made an understandable decision to shift their focus to a more traditional business model. We all figured that was a temporary measure while work continued on the "revolutionary new stuff", but somehow no one ever heard any of that stuff mentioned again. Ever. I don't know if they ever really explained to the investors that the new direction was all they could manage; I wasn't in the room for those discussions. At some point they seemed to lose all appetite for the visionary stuff they'd set out to do. So the visionaries left, the drones they'd hired from everybody else set out to build something just like everyone else had, some empire building commenced, and the results were predictable and unfortunate. Things were great right up until the VC money tap got turned off, then things got really ugly really quickly. Last I heard the tattered remnants were hanging in but the regulators and tax people were circling like sharks around a swimmer with a fresh cut.

In the case of Eviation (and a lot of others), I think the founders just count on fantasize rapid, exponential advances in technology that will let their creation come into being; "In a couple years we'll have new super-duper batteries with pixie dust". Of course these things just aren't happening within a time scale that will help them. In the case of Eviation specifically, it sure seems like their "airplane designers" didn't have much of a concept of how airplanes and aircraft operations actually work in the physical world, based on their early design choices. When it became obvious that they'd never get serious range out of their creation, they then seem to have just assumed the presence or creation of a new market that simply does not exist (short-hop prop air taxi service).

So, some VC groups lose a few dozen or a few hundred mil. Eventually the company will go nips up, the pieces that are worth something - if there are any - will get sold off, and the VC guys might recover a few cents on the dollar. They're investing in a lot of companies, though, and some of them make a LOT of money. The ones that were invested in the company I worked for have billions of dollars in dozens or hundreds of companies, some of which return many times the investments.
 
DaleB said:
The ones that were invested in the company I worked for have billions of dollars in dozens or hundreds of companies, some of which return many times the investments.
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So.. can you connect me with a couple? Lol
 
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DaleB said:
In the case of Eviation (and a lot of others), I think the founders just count on fantasize rapid, exponential advances in technology that will let their creation come into being; "In a couple years we'll have new super-duper batteries with pixie dust". Of course these things just aren't happening within a time scale that will help them.
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I'd expect that high-dollar VCs would be asking questions of some independant experts before shelling out millions, but maybe not. Anyone who's followed the actual engineering literature knows that the battery capacity required is not just around the corner. Why wouldn't VCs be aware of this?

But then, we must remember the wisdom of P. T. Barnum......
 
Half Fast said:
I'd expect that high-dollar VCs would be asking questions of some independant experts before shelling out millions, but maybe not. Anyone who's followed the actual engineering literature knows that the battery capacity required is not just around the corner. Why wouldn't VCs be aware of this?

But then, we must remember the wisdom of P. T. Barnum......
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The VCs think they ARE talking to "experts". The evangelists can explain in great detail why everyone is wrong and there's a quantum leap in technology right around the corner, and that corner is really close because the Earth is actually flat... and on and on it goes. I mean, the whole point of a lot of these exercises is "disrupting" existing industries, right...

And yeah, that.
 
I think most of these VCs literally have money to burn. They would waste it on women; they could waste it at the casinos. But they prefer other entertainments, and hence finance some pie-in-the-sky development projects.

They can drop a few mill here, and few mill there. Maybe nine will fail, but that tenth might put them in the center of an amazing development.

As ever, Gary Larson put it best:

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Ron Wanttaja
 
DaleB said:
The VCs think they ARE talking to "experts". The evangelists can explain in great detail why everyone is wrong and there's a quantum leap in technology right around the corner, and that corner is really close because the Earth is actually flat... and on and on it goes. I mean, the whole point of a lot of these exercises is "disrupting" existing industries, right...

And yeah, that.
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Well, I did say independent experts.
 
Half Fast said:
Well, I did say independent experts.
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Nothing will get you ostracized faster than telling people something they don't want to hear. They'd rather lose a 9-digit amount of money (mostly other people's to begin with) based on what the founders tell them, than be told the idea they think is great really isn't.
 
One must also keep in mind of any underlying reasons a person or group may have for investing in a venture like the OP. A quick check shows the same principal investment group behind Eviation also owns MagniX which I'm familiar with. Perhaps MagniX was simply trying to expand the market of their e-propulsion offerings through a homegrown entity vs it being simply a one-off effort?
 
wanttaja said:
I think most of these VCs literally have money to burn. They would waste it on women; they could waste it at the casinos. But they prefer other entertainments, and hence finance some pie-in-the-sky development projects.
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I’d also add that there’s probably a certain thrill in the gamble, which is probably how they got their money to start with. I used to fly a poker player…as near as I could figure, his risk tolerance was a lot higher than mine, which is why he had the airplane, but paid me to fly it. ;)
 
Just as one “EV” startup shutters, ‘NBC nightly news’ hypes a different “Flying Car” company on today’s broadcast
www.nbcnews.com

Flying car inches closer to reality

A startup in California says it is close to pioneering a piece of future tech many have dreamed of: a flying car. Alef Aeronautics gives NBC News’ Steve Patterson an exclusive demo of the car, its abilities and limitations.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
 
NorthEast Ohio said:
Just as one “EV” startup shutters, ‘NBC nightly news’ hypes a different “Flying Car” company on today’s broadcast
www.nbcnews.com

Flying car inches closer to reality

A startup in California says it is close to pioneering a piece of future tech many have dreamed of: a flying car. Alef Aeronautics gives NBC News’ Steve Patterson an exclusive demo of the car, its abilities and limitations.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
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They have more than 3,200 orders! This is totally legit.
 
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