uBeam cofounder and ex-CEO, Meredith Perry, recently updated her LinkedIn profile to show that not only was she was no longer in either of those roles as of September 2018 (or was it May 2018?), she is now no longer a board member at uBeam as of this month.
For someone who controls a pretty hefty amount of stock in the company, it's hard to be removed from the board. So resigned? Pushed? Founded her new venture and no time to do the arduous task of one 4 hour meeting per quarter? (She is asking about best banks for startups on her Twitter account, which you'd think having already done once she'd know...)
Interestingly it's almost 4 years to the day since I sat with a board member and lead investor and told him that IMO Perry was a liability and needed to take action or the company was in serious trouble. Well 4 years and near $30 million later and maybe he listened to me? :)
So how much longer does uBeam have? IMO it has to be measured in single digit months, possibly weeks as there's a new Acting CFO according to the webpage. We'll know soon enough. (Edit May 2021 - it actually took around 18 more months)
There is a photo of Perry on her Instagram account 7 weeks ago with Mark Cuban. And when someone asked is he was "buying in" she said "good things that I might share soon!"
ReplyDeleteHi, found your blog long time ago, and I have to say I'm still reading trough your past material, very interesting stuff. Part of my work is on biomedical tech and I got really interested with the Theranos scam. I have to say that UBeam seems to go that way as well.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if you have any comments regarding the european scene of startups or if you know any spectacular failures in Europe. There are multiple companies in the fields of bioengineering etc however they do not seem to draw much attention (or funding). My thought is that europe generally have higher regulatory standards and less access to VC and that reflects on the management of the startups making them much more conservative when compared with their US counterparts.
I have been chasing an unpaid invoice since March this year for an event uBeam particiapted in. One the few occasions I get an email reply, it is usually the same lies about waiting for a new CFO, who is totally uncontactable. The phone number on the website goes to a voice mail and there is no place to review them online. Super dodgy. But I am still going to follow them up.....
ReplyDeleteGiven the focus of your blog (lies and startup PR), I thought this might be of interest to you. I happened to notice the following article yesterday on the Forbes website, titled "The World Needs More Visionaries Like Elizabeth Holmes". It seems to have been since deleted from the Forbes website, but is still accessible via the Google cache or via web.archive.org.
ReplyDeletehttps://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:M_s-O7QMxtUJ:https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2019/10/13/the-world-needs-more-visionaries-like-elizabeth-holmes/
http://web.archive.org/web/20191014040552/http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:M_s-O7QMxtUJ:https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2019/10/13/the-world-needs-more-visionaries-like-elizabeth-holmes/&strip=1&vwsrc=0
Ubeam is now SonicEnergy. It appears Perry has been scrubbed from the website
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