All of this has happened before, and will happen again

I've been snowed under the last week or so and have had no time to write anything, so my various articles-in-process are just on hold for the time being. In the meantime, let me point you to another blog well worth reading - The Silicon Valley Way. It's an oldie but a goodie. Start at that link which is the first post, then read back through it chronologically, for another account of an engineer dealing with an insane startup and chronically bad management. It's told in a blow-by-blow manner as he experiences it, rather than remembered after the fact, which is a novel approach. Maybe for my next startup I'll keep a diary and then publish it starting a couple of years later...

Lions led by Donkeys

So here's another first for me, this story landed on Slashdot. There's not too much activity so far, possibly because it's the weekend, however one post in particular caught my eye. I have no idea who this person is, and I'm not inclined to go find out, but in my opinion it's mostly a very well written post. 

"The technology is real. Ish. It works, but was still in very early alpha stage. The power loss is high, the equipment is large, thermal issues, and there's a lot of other problems. The acoustic waves are highly directional. Otherwise, you'd need kilowatts to give microwatts of power to a device. So you need a number of steerable beams to transfer power. That's not easy. Big enough and it's not a problem. Getting it down to realistic consumer sizes takes serious engineering talent. Ironically she had it on hand. It's definitely possible, but admittedly with the level of funding it'd be hard. Possible, but very hard.

Problem is, Meredith either fired all the competent engineers or drove them out. Anyone that stayed did so because they were more agreeable than their technical merits. Meredith also had an issue with overstating capabilities of the technology. The theoretical maximums became the baseline. That's a niche engineering field. The engineers are not replaceable cogs, but Meredith gambled that they were. It's a very small field, and word spreads fast.

Essentially Meredith is a CEO without significant experience or engineering knowledge. The company will crater in two or three years, someone will buy the IP for pennies on the dollar, look up the actual names on the patents, cut them consulting checks, and you'll see functional equipment two or three years after that. The investors already know this. But they can't yank the funding or can the CEO over PR issues. Better to take a loss than be unsupportive of women in STEM. It's only $20 ish million, so probably the right call. Meredith won't change. She definitely won't retire, step aside for more experience leadership or somehow mend things with the original engineers she drove away."

There's something I want to take issue with though - and that's the comment on the quality of the engineers at uBeam. I can only speak to those who were there prior to my departure, however that engineering team (and I mean every engineer in it) was second to none, and the best team of size it has been my good fortune to work with. The weakest engineer could be described as "Excellent" and for a brief moment there were perhaps as many as 5 or 6 truly world-class engineers there. When we could concentrate on engineering, it was an incredible atmosphere, with challenges to ideas not taken as insult but instead used to become better, and a time when I found I learned an enormous amount from those engineers around me, even those with many years less experience.

I feel it's truly a tragedy the opportunity that was squandered, and what could have been.

I blogged early on about why I joined, and I want to repeat part of what I said there:

"In my opinion, don't take the presence of smart engineers as confirmation of a technology's viability (either way), and don't think the engineers at a company you find questionable aren't smart and are fully aware of the technical issues of what they're working on. They just want to play with fun toys."

To those who question why I stayed at uBeam so long, while it's a complex many-factored issue that I will cover in a future post, the simplest answer is that engineering team. Like others before me, leaving them behind, with the feeling of having abandoned them, was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I knew it was the necessary choice, but it did not make it any less difficult.

I hope I will find myself working with each of the engineers again at some point in the future, and would gladly give all of those I know a reference. To those of you commenting on their talents or their character - do not demean them, to me they are lions led by donkeys.

Well that was an interesting couple of days...

I think my blog may have been noticed...

Something told me that when it went from 1000 views total in three weeks to 2000+ views per hour that it wasn't just friends and family reading anymore. Of course it happens on a day when I have to get to multiple meetings, a multi-hour drive to the airport, and a long haul flight home that was delayed enough I finally got back in at 5am.

During this time my email was packed with requests for confirmations, interviews, and comments, and I grabbed a few minutes between each meeting and at rest stops to talk - you may have noticed some of the results of all that.

I had expected that at some point the blog would be noticed and that there might be some interest, but I never expected it this fast, nor the interest to be this intense. It's been something of a bizarre experience, and I'll discuss it in more depth another time. 

So to confirm, I am Paul Reynolds, former VP of Engineering at uBeam, responsible for transducers and acoustics. I was hired on as a consultant in the summer of 2013, was offered the VP position soon after, and like everyone else remained a consultant until our funding round in Sept 2014 when we all converted to actual employees. As part of the team that pitched the Series A round, I saw the company grow from literally working in a garage on a shoestring budget, to a total of around $23 million raised, until my departure in October 2015.

What am I here to post about? Going back to my first post almost exactly a month ago, I made it pretty clear that I wanted to cover "how the whole ecosystem of startups actually works". This seems to have been lost in the flurry of press, though understandably so. Of course I talk about uBeam, it's been a large part of my life for the last three years, but also Theranos and Energous, primarily as prominent but differing examples of the outcome of a system that incentivizes certain behaviors that I think most people know are detrimental to our society.

Once I've managed to get some sleep, I'll get back to talking about just that.

Unoriginal

Time to take a look at one of the other components of the whole VC/startup/biztech world - the Entrepreneurial Book. These are the books you see in the airport promising to teach you how to be a better leader, manager, inventor, or whatever you believe you are in 10 easy to digest feelgood chapters. I've read a few myself and usually they're like a sugary treat - makes you feel good when you read it, but no long lasting benefit, and might actually rot your teeth a little.

Recently Adam Grant published "Originals" about "How non-conformists move the world" and online put up part of one of the chapters to be read as a sampler - in this case it's the chapter about Meredith Perry and uBeam. I read it expecting to read at least part of a story I was familiar with.

As it happens, the bits I was around for, and I was around for a lot of them, I will politely describe them as "not at all how I recall them". Let's start with the biggie.

She (Perry) did something that flew in the face of every piece of wisdom she had heard about influence. She simply stopped telling experts what it was she was trying to create. Instead of explaining her plan to generate wireless power, she merely provided the specifications of the technology she wanted. Her old message had been: “I’m trying to build a transducer to send power over the air.” Her new pitch disguised the purpose: “I’m looking for someone to design a transducer with these parameters. Can you make this part?”

Let's continue with the obvious. About 10 seconds after you get someone contacting you to do work for them, their name or the company name has been Googled and you're reading all about them. In case you hadn't noticed, Meredith Perry gets plenty of publicity for uBeam, and the press coverage made it very, very clear what she was trying to do. So apparently us engineers are super tech savvy but can't Google some articles? No - before I'd even replied to the first contact, I knew exactly what they were doing.

Next is the practical. I'm being spoken to because I'm highly experienced in the field you're needing work in - I've seen a lot of different problems in this space. Once I get the general idea of what you're trying to do, I already know the rough specs of what you are looking for. If you give me specs that are different, I'll try to find out why, whether it's that I'm not understanding your requirements, or you're not understanding the issues. The converse is this - if you give me specs, I have a pretty good idea of what you're trying to do. I've shocked plenty of cold callers when I've worked out what their "super secret" project is from just a couple of questions.

Then there's the engineering side of things. If you give me a spec for something way, way different (let's say less difficult) than what you actually need, I'm going to make choices and compromises in the design to hit that spec, and not the 10x you really want. Like most engineers I pride myself on delivering a good product that meets (and maybe slightly exceeds) your needs in an economical manner - if I overbuild like that, you as a customer will likely be unhappy with the invoice, and reasonably so. Those design choices and compromises mean it's most likely not something that could ever scale to that further 10x. I probably will have to do something different for that, and then tell you that I have to start all over again. Give me something too simple and most times I'll point you to someone that already sells it, because pedestrian stuff is not something I'm interested in. 

I've taught this to people who've worked for me - If the person sitting opposite you is smart, experienced, and knowledgeable then don't bullshit them, they know what it smells like.

So that part from the book is not how it was pitched to me, nor is it how it was pitched to anyone else when I was present, in my recollection.

Then there's this:

It was enough to attract a first round of funding and a talented chief technology officer who had initially been highly skeptical. “Once I showed him all the patents, he said, ‘Oh sh*t, this actually can work.’ ”

Now I wasn't there for this part, however to me this does not sound like the CTO I came to know very well, nor does it resemble any of the 'origin stories' that I heard from him. I have to wonder, did the author confirm this statement with the CTO? Which of the engineers that work(ed) for uBeam did the author interview to confirm their initial skepticism, or that the pitch to them was anything other than what we all see in the press? Not me.

So in summary, and as a rehash of what I've said before - for me joining uBeam was principally because of that CTO, and that the engineering problem was hard. Had it been pitched any other way, I would have passed.

Adam Grant might want uBeam to be the story that's another proof point for his thesis, but in my opinion it doesn't hold water. And now I wonder that if I happened to know as much about all the anecdotes in these books, would I have the same opinion of all of them as I do this?

Abandon Ship

Today I looked at the LinkedIn profiles of the uBeam staff and was interested to see that Monica Hushen, the CFO, has left the company. Hushen was lauded in the tech press (I won't call it journalism) as a heavyweight and an amazing win for uBeam.

"Perry has hired some hardware industry veterans to whip the business into shape. Former Apple and Palm finance leader Monica Hushen will be uBeam‘s new CFO"

Now I need to first comment, that the engineering team was sorely pissed at the idea that we needed whipped into shape by two people who we felt had no idea what to do at a technical startup in the R&D phase. We were almost as pissed as when another article was placed in Techcrunch talking about uBeam achieving the physically impossible, such as charging through a pocket. In my opinion, the addition of these two "C's" marked the end of any hope of the company achieving anything - I left two weeks after that article was published, and I think history is proving my feeling correct.

But back to Catbert, as she was sometimes referred to. Bizarre that a person so critical to the company, so important, and so knowledgeable as to the state of the company and its dealings would leave, and maybe even leave prior to the 1 year vesting cliff. It's almost as if she has no faith that the company will ever achieve anything of value and it's best to leave now rather than waste time on a sinking ship.

This CFO is leaving at the exact time that, according to numbers published by Mark Suster the lead uBeam investor, that the company needs to start raising their next funding round - around 6 months prior to an estimate of their funds running out.

When I left it was an ugly departure, but was reported to the investors as "the VP Engineering left for personal reasons" - personal reasons being "sick of putting up with this bullshit". I wonder what uBeam's excuse for Hushen will be? "Spending more time with her family", "Having achieved everything she had set out to, it was time to move on to other things", or like me has she left for "personal reasons"? I'm betting on the first.

Note: Since this afternoon, Hushen has relisted herself as working at uBeam on LinkedIn, no doubt someone spotted it and she's trying to dodge the press. But she's left.

Note2: Now LinkedIn has the new position as "CFO at Wonder Workshop".

Must Have the Precious

How did Smeagol become Gollum?

For those of you who don't know, Gollum is a major character in Lord of the Rings. As a young adult named Smeagol, his relative finds the One Ring, an artifact of great power that can corrupt those who wield it. Smeagol demands the Ring from his relative, then kills him to take it. Initially he uses the power of the ring for personal benefit, thieving and antagonizing his family until eventually he is expelled from his community, spending most of the rest of his life in a dark cave, miserable but he had his "Precious". He becomes "Gollum", and Smeagol is forgotten. Eventually he loses "Precious", and starts the events leading to "The Lord of the Rings".

Part of the story of The Lord of the Rings is how the quest for this object cost Smeagol everything, and turned him into a vile creature, despised by all who know him. He uses any tactic to get what he wants, be it pretending to be someone's friend while plotting to kill them, lying, stealing, and justifies any action, no matter how vile, in that the Ring is rightfully his and it is his "destiny" to have it.

A briefer summary: Other people create/find something of great value, Smeagol takes it by force, proclaims it as his, treats even the closest to him so badly he is shunned, justifies horrible behaviour upon this lie, and ultimately is responsible for the destruction of that great value that others created.

This, of course, has nothing to do with uBeam, so here's where I segue. Far in the past, before I became involved in uBeam, there were two co-founders, Meredith Perry and Nora Dweck. Few have heard of Nora, but she's an important part of the creation of uBeam. My information is not first hand, it comes from court documents and speaking to key players outside my role in the company, so take what you will from what I say here.

Perry and Dweck ended up in an ugly fight - one ugly enough to reach court. The complaint can be found here and here. For those who don't enjoy reading court documents, let me summarize it for you:

Dweck sued Perry for "breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract, and fraud" following the initial founding of uBeam. They were both students at UPenn at the same time, and were roommates in 2010 and 2011. They both regularly swapped ideas for companies and inventions, and at one point Perry suggested 'wireless power using ultrasound' and the two brainstormed and collaborated to create 'uBeam'. Until May 2011, they publicly discussed the concept and presented themselves as equal partners in this endeavour.

In April 2011 they entered and won the "PennVention" competition with uBeam, which had required significant preparation not just on the technical side, but on the business side for marketing and sales as well. When they accepted this award, and several other prizes, they did so as partners and equals. Realising that they needed IP protection, Dweck engaged (and presumably paid for, since her family was quite wealthy) an IP attorney to prepare patent applications. Perry agreed with Dweck that the IP would be jointly owned, and that she would make sure the IP was transferred to a jointly owned company they would create. Dweck let Perry take care of that aspect while she spent her time getting a website, logo, and business cards done for them. Then came "All Things Digital".

"All Things D" is where it gets interesting. It's an invitation only conference on tech and business associated with the Wall Street Journal. You can get great access to potential funding and publicity there. Perry and Dweck presented a demo that wowed the non-technical audience, but proved nothing to anyone with any understanding of electrical engineering, and you can see a blow by blow account of that here. Still it was enough to garner more interest and apparently a uBeam product by the fall of 2011 (what year is it now?) and things took off from there. Reading them talking here, it's almost sad knowing what comes next.

The pair is trying to raise $3 million to get the product ready for release. “We’re in conversations with a few different companies,” Dweck said. “The future’s kind of bright.”

Now just days before this conference Perry had sent Dweck a company Operating Agreement, not a final one but "just to have something for D", and that "we'll do the real one later". Pressed for time, Dweck signed - and shockingly the document was an 80/20 split in Perry's favour. (Why did she sign you say? Well, she's 21 and doing cool stuff with a friend, why would she be concerned that her friend wouldn't do right by her?).

After All Things D, uBeam gets lots of publicity and people tell Perry that "it's a billion dollar company" and Dweck begins to be excluded from things. Suddenly, Dweck can't get company information, files, reports, and Perry is saying it's all hers. Not just the unfavorable 80/20 split, but 100/0. Perry threaten to dissolve uBeam if Dweck persisted in demanding information (the "shoot the hostage" tactic). It all descends from there, with Dweck as a company owner and officer demanding an investigation into Perry's wrongdoing, and the awesome response from Perry that she had investigated herself and found no wrongdoing.

And then the lawyers are involved, and a court case begins. Dweck sues Perry for 50% of the company. In the end it is settled out of court with Dweck rumoured to get 20% of the company, the title of co-founder, and a gag order to not talk publicly about the resolution. 

There was no court finding for the public to see, no judgement as to who was right. But I can tell you this - having worked with Perry for years, I believe Dweck, and in my opinion she describes the Perry I unfortunately came to know very well.

A briefer summary of the court docs: Multiple people create/find something of possible great value, Perry proclaims the company as hers, and alienates someone once a friend to the point of going to court. 

So back to the original question. How did Smeagol become Gollum? 

In my opinion Smeagol never existed, he was always Gollum, just with a thin veneer of civility. The Precious just showed him for who he really was.

Perry (left) and Dweck (right) from this article.

And another interesting 2011 article

Tilting at Windmills

The startup I left, uBeam, is tackling a complex technical challenge - to transmit power wirelessly and safely through the air using ultrasound, and convert it into a usable form at the destination. Difficult to do as even uBeam admit (If it were easy, everyone would be doing it), some would say impossible, and others say something like "In theory, it can be done in limited cases, but in practice cost and efficiency issues will likely render it impractical." 

The EEV Blog has some fascinating information and discussions on the matter, while the IEEE Spectrum Magazine ran a very well researched piece that covers many of those opinions mentioned above.

A question that's often asked on such blogs and forums is "It's never going to work. Why would any engineers work there?" while uBeam themselves point to the fantastic engineers that work there as evidence that they have a solid and viable technology.

So who is right? Well, I can't speak for other engineers, but I can talk about my motivations for doing so. And for me, neither is right, and neither matters - not even considered in my decisions.

As some background to this - I'm very experienced in ultrasound devices and acoustics. It's something I've spent over 20 years working on, am well known in the field, and have encountered pretty much every type of device out there and worked on in one way or another. I'm very good at what I do, and while not wealthy, I'm 'financially stable'. Finding work isn't an issue - but at times finding truly challenging and interesting work is.

So along comes a consulting gig - "Get paid to work on an interesting technical challenge." Of course I'll take it. At this point I start working with the other engineers involved in the project, primarily Marc Berte (the then CTO, who left uBeam in Jan 2015). When you work with a wide range of engineers over the years, you get a feeling for who you want to work with and who you don't. He's very, very sharp, and knows his stuff, and I'm finding I'm learning things from him - and that's pretty uncommon for me - to the point he might be the smartest engineer I've ever worked with.

We're making strides and building things, and sure it's a rollercoaster but this is the sort of thing that just gets to the heart of why you do engineering. Hard challenges, constant learning, being inventive on a tight budget, smart engineering colleagues.

Then the fundraising starts and you're sitting in the offices of big name VC's and rather than the usual 30 minutes of them reading their email as you go through your pitch before "So sorry, maybe in 6 months" it's extending the meeting to two hours and multiple callbacks. Fifteen years living in Silicon Valley and now I'm doing what everyone flocking there is desperate to be.

As an aside - I'd like to think the presence of this engineering team also somewhat swayed the VC's into funding. As the lead investor, Upfront Ventures, commented in a blog post:

"Here is where having Marc Berte and a team out of MIT who have designed systems like this for years gave one confidence we could do something others couldn’t copy and at price points that could make us market leaders over night."

And then you're funded, Series A. Offices by the beach in LA, top-of-the-line equipment you've always wanted, and hiring more great engineers to work with. And why do those great engineers come on? Well from what they all said after - "Hard challenges, smart colleagues to work with and learn from, cool equipment to play with."

Did I join because of the founder CEO and her amazing vision? Her technical savvy? Her management experience and amazing people skills? No, she figured into my decision with the single following factor: "Raises money way better than I can." (More on why engineers struggle to raise money in many future posts).

I joined because of the challenge and the CTO. The next engineer joined because of Marc and I. And so on for pretty much every engineer - and yeah, I ended up speaking for other engineers, so if any uBeam engineers want to pipe up and disagree, feel free. 

So if you're looking for someone to blame it all on, blame Marc. :)

And the point of this story? In my opinion, don't take the presence of smart engineers as confirmation of a technology's viability (either way), and don't think the engineers at a company you find questionable aren't smart and are fully aware of the technical issues of what they're working on. They just want to play with fun toys.