<story><title>Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/jawbone-is-being-liquidated-as-its-ceo-launches-a-related-health-startup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BinaryIdiot</author><text>&amp;gt; The days of consumer hardware company&amp;#x27;s access to startup capital is over.&lt;p&gt;So I haven&amp;#x27;t worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I&amp;#x27;m not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now?&lt;p&gt;Also, for what it&amp;#x27;s worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I&amp;#x27;m convinced Fitbit can get back on the growth curve as long as they can get a new product out the door that consumers want. Tall order for sure but I don&amp;#x27;t count them as a failure yet.&lt;p&gt;GoPro want to move to doing software more so than hardware. Considering their software has always considered to be lackluster to borderline terrible I&amp;#x27;m less convinced they will turn it around but also not yet willing to say they&amp;#x27;re a failure.</text></item><item><author>stingrae</author><text>The days of consumer hardware company&amp;#x27;s access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EpicEng</author><text>I worked at a VC funded hardware start up for the first eight years of my career.  You&amp;#x27;ll never read about it here though; we made digital pathology scanners.  When I left we had sold the company for ~300M and were bringing in about ~30M &amp;#x2F; year in revenue.&lt;p&gt;I guess my point is that there is more going on in the VC space then you&amp;#x27;ll read about on HN.</text></comment>
<story><title>Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/jawbone-is-being-liquidated-as-its-ceo-launches-a-related-health-startup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BinaryIdiot</author><text>&amp;gt; The days of consumer hardware company&amp;#x27;s access to startup capital is over.&lt;p&gt;So I haven&amp;#x27;t worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I&amp;#x27;m not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now?&lt;p&gt;Also, for what it&amp;#x27;s worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I&amp;#x27;m convinced Fitbit can get back on the growth curve as long as they can get a new product out the door that consumers want. Tall order for sure but I don&amp;#x27;t count them as a failure yet.&lt;p&gt;GoPro want to move to doing software more so than hardware. Considering their software has always considered to be lackluster to borderline terrible I&amp;#x27;m less convinced they will turn it around but also not yet willing to say they&amp;#x27;re a failure.</text></item><item><author>stingrae</author><text>The days of consumer hardware company&amp;#x27;s access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spiralpolitik</author><text>Fitbit lost me when they refused to support HealthKit. As it stands I&amp;#x27;m not sure they can escape their demise as the market transitions from limited function devices to multi function devices like the Apple Watch. They strike me as getting rolled over the same way Diamond, Archos, and Creative got crushed by the iPod.&lt;p&gt;GoPro has a similar problem. Outside of special circumstances most smartphone cameras are now good enough for most consumer needs and will only get better. I think they could survive if they target the extreme sports type niche but otherwise I don&amp;#x27;t see them achieving escape velocity.&lt;p&gt;Both could be good acquisition targets a la Withings and Nokia. But the number of possible buyers is limited. Microsoft is possibly the only one that comes to mind that doesn&amp;#x27;t have anything in either space although given the failure of Windows Phone I&amp;#x27;m not sure they have the desire to try something similar in a different market.</text></comment>