And in other news...

I've not been commenting much on uBeam lately - there's really no need, I've said pretty much what I felt needed saying, and I'll wait for the post-mortem to take much more time out my life to talk about them - but there have been a couple of events recently that warrant at least a couple of lines.

The first is an article that appeared in Epic Magazine in July, "Silicon is Just Sand", a sizable piece by author Stephen Elliott on Silicon Beach, regarding the growth of technology companies in the Venice/Santa Monica area. It's a nicely written piece that gives a great flavor of the people and culture in Silicon Beach, it reminded me of my time there, and his sarcastic responses to many of the more ridiculous parts lend the feel of "the only sane man in the asylum". Each of the many sections is devoted to a different person or company, with a particular thread running through it. uBeam, however, earned two sections to cover the extraordinary fit of self-destruction that an industry friend of mine described as "managing to shoot themselves in both feet with a single bullet". (Sections 8 and 9, but I encourage you to read it all.)

I'm not going to go line-by-line through the jaw-dropping hilarity of the article. It speaks for itself, just read it. My personal reaction to it was "Yep, sounds like a typical day at uBeam" and I laughed as he was taken from believer to skeptic and closed with "Fake it till you make it".

Second is an announcement from uBeam, which can be found here. The headline is that they've hired an SVP of Engineering, Larry Pendergass, who is a big name and is another tick-box in the needed list for Series B funding. Congratulations, I'm sure this means they are about to give a public demo and release a commercial product any day now, as promised.

What's more interesting, though, is what's not said. First of all, this was picked up by exactly zero press outlets that I'm aware of. A year ago this would have been all over the tech media news, but even Techcrunch didn't touch it. Was this deliberate? If you self publish seemingly important company news last thing on a Friday afternoon it's usually an attempt to bury it, but I'm also wondering if the services of uBeam's PR team are "no longer required" following the above "Silicon is Just Sand" debacle and it's the B-Team that are running press releases now. It's garnered a whole eight likes in the three weeks it's been up, which is about half the number of likes I have on my lowest viewed LinkedIn article and I'm a nobody. It seems the sparkle has dimmed a bit. 

Next thing hidden in there is that it sounds like my replacement as VP Acoustics has "graduated" to the advisory board after about 7 months in the job. Perhaps I can add "gives the company a less embarrassing exit route for departing executives" to the list for reasons to have an advisory board? I'm not sure who is on the team now that has any extensive ultrasound experience, it'll be interesting to see who my replacement's replacement will be. I'm sure he'll be the cream of the crop.

I do love the pictures of what looks to be a monster office in San Jose (8500 sqft or so given landlord data?) for what is now two employees. I'm sure that's been a necessary expenditure over the last few months in light of the imminent product release and huge expansion.

That's it, not much more to say here. Back to more important things.

Update: Rather than do a new post, I thought I'd add this in here:

uBeam are now advertising for a Director of HR. If you are interested, one of the key requirements is:

defining the couture (sic) best able to position the organization as the leader in the market place

so I guess a stylish uBeam uniform is the last thing the company needs before releasing their demo and product by the end of the year? There's a simpler way to ensure they get the job - don't come to the interview through the door, just break in through a window. And if you get rejected, turn up for your first day of work anyway, only losers take 'no' for an answer.

Bait and Switch

Raising money from any source can be difficult - you have to persuade whoever has money that you're the best place for it to go, and you're up against a lot of competition. Sometimes you can do that by showing preliminary work and persuading your peers you have a sensible rational approach to moving forward, and the end result is worthwhile - most grants from the government are done this way. Sometimes you can show existing revenue and that market growth will easily allow the money you need to expand to be paid back, and a bank or other lender will see the value. When you are a public company, you have to show returns and potential for growth that make your stock look appealing to retirement funds and the public. With Venture Capital, the goal is to provide outsized returns, billion dollar companies that give 10x or 100x gains or more, ideally to make up for all the other bad bets made and have their VC fund be profitable. It's this last one, and the behaviours it encourages, that we are going to delve into a little deeper.

What Drives Cheque Sizes and Valuations?

When raising from VC, there are multiple things a company needs to take into account. First, there's how much you need to raise, (Many Series A round are in the $3 to $10 million range) and how much of your company you are prepared to part with to get that.  The combination of those two tells you where your company needs to be in valuation to make that possible, for example if you want to give up no more than 20% of your company and to raise $10 million, you need a $40 million pre-funded valuation (that's the value before you take the money) - as the post-value will be $50 million ($40m pre + $10m investment) and then that 20% is the $10 million investment compared to the $50 million post.

Most VCs have an expectation of owning a reasonable piece of the company, usually in the range of 20 to 25% with 15% at the low end, and 30% at the high end. The range of cheque sizes they are prepared to write depends on the size of their fund - how many companies they want to monitor sets the lower bound, and spreading risk to be sure not all their eggs are in one basket sets the upper end. For example, a $200 million fund may decide that a minimum of $3 million and a maximum of $6 million for Series A companies is their comfort zone, leaving some cash over for seed investment and reserved for later stage funding. These numbers vary with each VC, and with time as their fund matures - they typically last 10 years and what they do in year 1 is very different than compared to year 7.

While normally you'd want to boost the valuation of your company to minimize the dilution of your company, setting your expected valuation as very high will immediately remove a number of VCs from your possible pool of funders. For example, if you want a valuation of $100 million with a $10 million raise, then you need to find a VC not only able to write that cheque, but willing to accept under 10% of the company in return (actually, more than one since often there is a lead and then additional companies that split the deal). With a raise of $20 million the pool of VCs willing to fund is even less, but the % of the company on offer is much more palatable. If instead the valuation moves to $40 million then you still have the same pool of VCs as originally, but they will be much more interested in owning 20% of your company than 10%.

Incentives for the Founder to Push Valuation
You as the founder/CEO want to get the most money for the least equity so the goal is to match financial needs, with the cheque size of a VC that is in your area and likes you, and with an idea/company that justifies the valuation to keep VC ownership in the 20% ish area. Seeing as there is an inherent need in people to both raise as much money as possible, and believe the external validation that your company is worth an enormous sum of money, there is pressure to give the 'rosiest' view of the possibilities for your company. As I wrote before, I have even been chastised by a possible investor for presenting a 'realistic' view of revenue and told instead to show the most positive view regardless of likelihood.

A CEO is under that pressure to inflate values, particularly one without a real grasp of the realities of their area such as those who have little or no actual experience in a technical field - Elizabeth Holmes and the like, for example. They can claim ridiculous things to potential investors that no-one who actually truly understands would say, and say so convincingly because they believe it themselves. If you read VCs talk of what they look for in founders, it's almost always a 'fundamentalist religion type zeal and belief in what they are doing'. Notice in that article it's the last 2 of 12 characteristics that what most people consider critical - Domain Expertise and Integrity - and I've found (to my own detriment) that most CEOs I've worked for utterly fail in both of those. 'Tenacity' is the most important to VCs apparently, after all you don't want your investment to be thinking about reality, there might be a sucker somewhere who eventually buys the very dead horse you've been flogging. (Sorry, I mean "overcome the great difficulties being a founder entails")

Basically, VCs set the terms and incentivize what would normally be considered lying or fraud - why are we surprised when that's what we get? Moreover, it weeds out those experienced in a field who simply understand enough to put realistic expectations on what's possible, or have the integrity to refuse to lie.

Exaggerating or Lying?
When does 'rosiest view' change to 'lying'? There is no sharp line before which it's exaggeration and after which it's fraud, it's a grey area. Sometimes you are smart (or lucky) and what you claim turns out to be true, sometimes it's completely wrong, sometimes it kinda does but not nearly as well as you hoped - very occasionally it's massively better than hoped and you end up a Facebook or WhatsApp. Sometimes you might believe you can reach a metric you are claiming, and only have the resources to know for sure post Series A, and when you learn what you are truly capable of you have to 'pivot' and refocus the company on a different, usually smaller, market you can actually address.

What is it, though, when the company knew for a long time that what they were claiming was never achievable? Maybe they always knew, maybe they learned later once they had the staff and funding, but they kept going because to do otherwise was to admit defeat, and give up any chance of that greater fool buying you. So what does someone like that do? Well if we look to Theranos and Energous, the answer is 'Bait and Switch'.

Theranos Poisoning the Well for other Blood Test Tech
Theranos recently Punked the AACC and managed to give a marketing pitch for a new platform rather than actually give results on their old one on which they had raised $700 million. The old system was supposed to have been able to run up to 200 tests on mere drops of blood drawn from a finger rather than a vein, which if achievable would have been a huge leap forward. They were the darling of Silicon Valley, with huge coverage in the press for the founder Elizabeth Holmes (and all on her, not the tech). It turns out that they were not being very truthful in their claims, and now both the SEC and FDA are pursuing criminal complaints against the company as well as eight class action lawsuits from patients who received false diagnoses from the company. These exaggerated claims allowed them to raise that $700 million while still allowing the founder to maintain a majority holding of stock, for a while making her a billionaire until the truth came out.

So what did this new system do? Capillary blood from the finger? No. 200+ tests? No. Cheaper than existing? No. Faster than existing? No. More utility from a single box? Maybe. Essentially everything that made the company viable and worth investing in was a lie, and now they are trying to pretend the company is viable with a far less interesting concept, and one that was stated by experts to not having anything that didn't exist elsewhere. Had they done this two or three years ago, before actually providing patients with false diagnoses, then it would have been a 'pivot' - a company that made a noble and commendable effort but didn't quite work out. But they didn't, they kept the illusion of capability going far beyond when any sane person would have dropped it, and fully moved to the realm of "Bait and Switch". Turns out they get to keep that $700 million despite at some point having moved from 'exaggerate' to 'lie' in their claims - way to reward bad behaviour.

That VCs burn their money (some of which comes from pension funds remember) on a stupid bet is one thing, partly that's what they do, but because they both allowed and incentivized Theranos' behaviour, that target of a fast, cheap, small, versatile, consumer friendly blood testing was the norm for anyone else raising money in that area for the last few years. Imagine you had a product that did literally half of what Theranos claimed, and you pitched to VCs who kept rejecting you because they expected and demanded a company that exceeded Theranos. An honest founder couldn't pitch that, a dishonest or naive one could. By Theranos continuing the charade of their viability they made it harder for those legitimate startups to raise anything at all due to unrealistic expectations. It's great for a company to kill their competitors but not what we as consumers or investors (or I assume LPs in a VC) want.

Energous and the Pointless Product
Energous are wireless power company who claim to use RF (like wifi) to power small devices like phones. No independent third party has ever validated their system or performance, and some claim they are simply using a "Time to Carrot" approach to constantly keep investors thinking that the pot of gold is about 12 to 18 months out, and just put more money in. They have claimed up to 4 Watts at up to 15 feet from the transmitter but there are so many skeptics, myself included, that look at the physics and maths and show that what they claim is simply not possible. After going through an IPO, raising millions of dollars and the top three executives paying themselves almost $5 million a year total with no product or revenue, how do they answer their critics? By releasing a product, but so simple and with specs so low that it is pointless, and calling it "mini" - and now they claim they have a product, and it's just "the big pot of gold is just around the corner...".

The mini-WattUp is a small USB sized device claiming to charge devices, that needs to be in contact to an inch away (not 15 feet), and charges at a rate that would take days at best to fully charge a phone, but it does have FCC approval (because it does nearly nothing). It's like making a car for a soap-box derby and claiming that next year you'll be competing with Tesla. It achieves the goal of continuing the illusion that there is real technology, real hope of a full scale version which will always be "18 months away".

Had Energous tried to IPO the company based on the mini-WattUp then they would have fallen flat on their face - nothing interesting, useful, or better than the competition (by far). If the goal though is to raise the cash, milk it for as long as they can, then a "Bait and Switch" keeps the money flowing, and that's the most important thing. <sarcasm>It's a pity as it destroys any market for real at-distance wireless power companies.</sarcasm>

Speaking of Other "At Distance" Wireless Power Companies
For some reason, I wanted to remind everyone of uBeam's claims of how they will be wirelessly charging at a distance, and by the end of 2016 (only a few months left to wait!). Released specs are:

• 4 meter range in every direction
• At least 1.5 Watts and often 'faster than a wire' (that's over 10W if true)
• Charges while in your pocket

I can't find anything on safety or efficiency that's public from uBeam, though there are some well written articles on the safety aspect. Just keeping this in mind for comparing to the product uBeam must be releasing soon.

Bait and Switch
So looking at Theranos and Energous, if you're wondering why they make the claims they do which have never been backed up by evidence, it's because they've been paid millions of dollars to do so. The system simply encourages it, and it's basic human trait that when you reward a behaviour you get more of it. VCs by their funding approach are selecting for founders and CEOs most willing to exaggerate, and in some cases willing to lie. If we want to see less distortions in our allocation of capital and see it more go to genuine, viable technologies, then something has to change. In large part, one of the culprits is the tech media, who simply reprint PR scripts they are handed, and give up actual ability to criticise in return for access. We need more willing to ask the hard questions in the way John Carreyrou did of Theranos or Lee Gomes did of uBeam, rather than just parrot a PR line handed to them without question.

Until that happens, expect more companies to raise large amounts on the unfeasible, and then finish the "Bait and Switch".

And finally
Just as I was to publish this, I read a fantastic piece in the The Atlantic by Adrienne LaFrance about "Access, Accountability Reporting and Silicon Valley" which says a lot of what I've been trying to say on the media coverage of tech firms, but far more eloquently. I highly recommend it.

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.

Couldn't have said it better myself

I'd been sitting debating what to write as a post tonight, when someone sent me a link to a blog post entitled "What Mark Suster Missed In His Blog Post Defending uBeam". After reading through it, I was amazed at not only how insightful it was, but how well written, and how quickly it appeared. I have no idea who this person is, but they did a better job than anything I could have written today, so I'll just quote this section below, and strongly encourage you to read the full piece.

"So the message to women in STEM from those like Perry seemed to be to not worry about getting Bachelor’s degrees let alone advanced degrees in a particular field of expertise relevant to a future career (or indeed in the case of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, another women-in-STEM inspiration, a college degree at all), but have a vision, be dogged and hire sheep like Scientists, Technologists, Engineers with PhDs and experience – all ironically male it appears for uBeam and Theranos –  to constantly prod them out of their unimaginative stupor to produce the idea in the visionary founder’s head.

Indeed what Perry (and Holmes) represent is symptomatic of an anti-intellectualism where advanced degrees and fundamental research instead of being seen as a progressive way to deeply understand and investigate issues in a systematic manner under the guidance of experienced mentors and peer reviews and communication, leading to the creation of new ideas, are seen as impediments to true progress."

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?

Wasn't Me

So I've been asked why I talk about Theranos and uBeam coverage. Well, it was first brought to my attention around Nov 12 last year when Meredith Perry retweeted a StartupLJackson tweet.

Theranos, blond woman running deep tech co. uBeam, blond woman running deep tech co. Hmm…https://t.co/OStYrWSHo5

— Startup L. Jackson (@StartupLJackson) November 8, 2015

So who first suggested the similarity in coverage? Not me.

Hypotwit

Following the CFO's departure from uBeam, I was reminded of a Tweet from a little while ago.

1/ There are just as many women on the planet as men. Just as pigment doesn't correlate w a person's intelligence, neither does a chromosome

— Meredith Perry (@meredithperry) December 4, 2015

Checking uBeam's LinkedIn info, it seems there are no women working at uBeam as either engineers or executives. I'm shocked to find that a CEO would say something that they themselves do not adhere to simply to get publicity. 

Edit: Someone pointed out, there might be women working there, they just might be hiding it on LinkedIn for some reason.

Acoustic Nonlinearity

I'm often asked "What is Acoustic Nonlinearity?" (No, really, it's actually surprisingly common. Bet you're jealous.)  Seeing as I have the smartest readers, both of them, I thought I'd do a basic explanation of it here. For something really detailed, I'd suggest these lecture notes, a book like "Nonlinear Acoustics" by Beyer, or "Diagnostic Ultrasound Imaging: Inside Out" by Szabo - I'll be borrowing some images from each of those in this post.

Nonlinearity means "not linear". Obviously. We tend to simplify things and think of them as linear - everything scales together. I kick a ball twice as hard, it travels twice as far - that's linear. I work 40 hours a week I get my salary, I work 80 hours a week and I still get the same salary - that's nonlinear. And stupid. The image below shows how this happens in real physical systems.

Every physical system is nonlinear, but we can often just simplify things and pretend they are linear, right up until they aren't. Once you have to include nonlinearities, things get really complex, really fast. Some smart people spend their lives working on this type of thing. With sound this can happen in a number of ways, some beneficial, and some not.

With acoustic nonlinearity, what happens is this: An acoustic wave travels through a medium - this can be through human tissue for a medical scan, or through air for a sound. You can keep increasing the amplitude of this wave, and as you double the amplitude the wave gets twice the size. At some point, there's enough energy in this wave that at the top half of the cycle it actually compresses (squeezes together) the medium, and at the bottom half it's a rarefaction (pulls it apart). The propagating medium gets denser at the top half, and less dense at the bottom. 

Once this starts to become significant, the density change actually starts to effect the velocity of the acoustic wave - the denser part goes faster, the less dense part slower - and so the wave starts to 'tilt' and one half catches up with the other. That's what you can see happening in the top parts of the image below.

Once the top part of the wave catches up with the bottom part, the middle row of the image, then you get a 'saw tooth' wave. What is happening is that energy that is at the fundamental driving frequency starts moving higher in frequency - for example in a medical ultrasound image if you send out at 1 MHz and nonlinearity happens, you create signal that's 2MHz, 3 MHz etc by 'sucking away' some of the energy at 1 MHz.

If you've had a medical ultrasound scan in the last 15 years you've probably benefited from this. You can use acoustic nonlinearity to get a much better resolution in your scan with that 2 MHz component without some of the difficulties of building a system to transmit at that higher frequency.

The downside to pushing all this energy higher in frequency is that if you need to use it at the lower frequency, well it's gone from there, and more critically the attenuation is almost always higher at higher frequencies. Attenuation is where you lose some of the energy of the acoustic wave over distance, so basically higher frequency waves die off faster. The bottom line of the image above shows the saw tooth wave getting smoothed out by attenuation.

Szabo, Chapter 12, has some more great images.This shows how the wave changes as it travels out, and the graphs on the left show the shift of energy away from the fundamental frequency to the higher harmonics.

How far can a wave go before this occurs? Well, there are some basic equations that can tell you when it does. If you don't like maths, I've put all of that at the bottom and I'll cut to the interesting example right away. For those of you who really like maths, see below, then check out the lecture notes linked to above, or go to Chapter 3 of Beyer's book.

TL;DR. Nonlinear distance gets shorter with:

• Increasing frequency
• Increasing wave amplitude
• Increasing nonlinear properties of the medium

Let's pick a couple of examples and test them. I'm going to take some acoustic numbers from here. Two cases, 45 kHz and 145 dB, and 75 kHz and 155 dB. (dB is a logarithmic way of referring to sound pressure, in this case that's about 500 Pa and 1600 Pa respectively).

For 45,000 Hz and 500 Pa in air, that's about 30 cm when nonlinearity starts.

For 75,000 Hz and 1600 Pa in air, that's about 5 cm when nonlinearity starts.

Wow that's a short distance (it's actually slightly longer than that in reality due to attenuation, but not much). And it doesn't tend to happen slowly - it ramps really quickly and within around 1.6 times that distance (48 and 8cm respectively), huge amounts of the energy are moved to higher frequencies. 

Then the increased attenuation in air removes that acoustic energy entirely, converting it to heat. To give you an idea of the degree of nonlinearity, if you look at the energy available at 1 meter at the fundamental frequency with 155 dB vs 145 dB, then you've driven 10 times harder, but you only get about half as much again (around 95% of the additional energy is lost as heat). Not very efficient. 

This is what's known as saturation - when you keep driving harder and harder, but you just can't get any more energy in. The medium (in this case air) is saturated and can't really absorb any more, most of what you add is lost. There are some basic equations to work this saturation pressure out, one is listed on page 510 of Szabo, it's detailed below. For air, at 45 kHz, at 1 meter, it's about 450 Pa, or 144 dB. Past that value of pressure, at that frequency, you're just running faster and faster to stand still, and getting very hot in the process.

So there you have it, a basic explanation of nonlinear acoustics. Here's a summary:

• Nonlinear acoustics are simple in concept, really complicated to fully understand
• Once you start driving an acoustic wave hard, eventually it becomes nonlinear
• Nonlinear acoustic waves start shifting energy from the fundamental to higher frequencies
• Attenuation converts that energy to heat, sometimes very quickly
• Onset of nonlinearity is sudden, and can happen very close to the source
• Propagating media such as air can saturate when you drive hard, which means it can't take any more energy

Stop reading here if you don't like maths.

Some equations (Beyer page 104):

Nonlinear Distance = 1. / ( Beta * Mach Number * Wavenumber )

Beta (for air) = 1.2
Mach Number = Pressure / ( Acoustic Impedance of Air * Sound Velocity in Air)
Wavenumber = 2 * PI * Frequency / Sound Velocity in Air

The Acoustic Impedance of Air is 410 Rayls, and the Sound Velocity in Air is 343 m/s.

So :
Mach Number = Pressure / 140600
Wavenumber =  Frequency / 56

And

Nonlinear Distance = 1. / (1.2 * ( Pressure/140600) * ( Frequency / 56 ))
Nonlinear Distance = 6500000 / ( Pressure * Frequency )

Finally (Szabo, Page 510)

Saturation Pressure = ( Acoustic Impedance of Air * Sound Velocity in Air ^ 2 ) / ( 2 * Beta * Frequency * Distance )
Saturation Pressure = 20100000 / ( Frequency * Distance )

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".

Toddler vs CEO

Someone sent this to me and asked if it was what it was like having Meredith Perry as a CEO. I told them no, it wasn't.

I don't recall Meredith ever having special made-up words.

Beat me to it

So I was going to do another amazing post about how poor journalistic standards are in part contributing to money being wasted in startups, but Vanity Fair and the Twitterverse beat me to it.

The secret culprit in the Theranos mess is the tech press, which may be as responsible as Elizabeth Holmes. https://t.co/RhcSov69nX

— Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) May 2, 2016

@nickbilton @paulvieira A similar story is Ubeam. Electricity transmission via ultrasound that's never been demonstrated to be efficient.

— Stephen Green (@StephenGreen82) May 3, 2016

True Genius

Maybe Elizabeth Parish should start this company with them?

We're pleased to reveal our partnership with ubeam. Soon you'll have your finger pricked ultrasonically while you're sitting in Starbucks.

— Not Elizabeth Holmes (@NotLizHolmes) February 27, 2016

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.

Scrappy Dog

A genius/founder/media-darling/CEO took to the stage at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday to talk about how the massive negative publicity her company had garnered, the growing list of scientific luminaries questioning the viability and safety of her company's technology based on well understood and proven physics, and the lack of a single public demonstration or validation point despite years of promises, was proof she is right after all! And for once, this isn't Elizabeth Holmes, but Meredith Perry of uBeam.

"If an idea is polarizing, it might just mean that you're on the right track." Perry proclaims in a new article (signup needed). 

Or some may say it might just mean that you are utterly wrong and those who have spent their lives working on this type of thing really do know better. After all, isn't that what "polarizing" means?

Here's the definition of "polarizing":

 to cause (people, opinions, etc.) to separate into opposing groups

and also

 to cause (something) to have positive and negative charges

There aren't groups here. There is a single person, Meredith Perry, who stands up in public and proclaims this will happen and is viable. Yes she has raised money, and "used 30 of the world's leading ultrasonic engineers, physicists, and electrical engineers", but we never hear them answering the questions. It's a single voice. Sticking with the "polarity" theme, let's call that the negative side. 

On the positive side, you have multiple people with decades of experience in ultrasound devices, electronics, and safety independently presenting well founded data saying (effectively) "While in theory it may be possible in limited cases, the safety, efficiency, and economics of it mean it is not even remotely practical.".

So here's the 'polarization':

• Negative - one person with no training in a highly complex technical field, making extraordinary claims, with nothing but their word that it works made to the public
• Positive - a wide array of people from multiple industries, academia, and location, with hundreds of years' relevant experience between them, with no personal financial stake in the outcome, presenting well researched information that there are major concerns and questions

It's another example of lazy journalism. There is a person, and then a group. One has infinite perseverance, one has publicly presented, well researched data. This is not polarization - this is Homer Simpson vs Drederick Tatum,  They are not equal. Journalists - just because it goes beyond the complexity of 2+2=4, stop trying to present it as an even "He said, she said" fight when the preponderance of scientific evidence is on one side.

And now she speaks for the poor, downtrodden, unrecognized geniuses out there that experts get together in their smoke filled back rooms to oppress:

"How many brilliant, game-changing ideas out there thought up by laypeople, teenagers, store clerks have been squashed by experts that said, 'That can't work'?" 

The 'oppressed' thing may work when you're fresh out of college, it gets old 7 years and $25,000,000 later.

You know, we all love the idea of an underdog who's a scrappy little fighter and in the end proves the big dog wrong. It makes for a great film. But here in the real world, most of the time that scrappy little dog is just plain wrong.

I'm confused...

I'm confused and don't know what to do. Re-incarnation of Steve Jobs and Theranos genius/founder/CEO Elizabeth Holmes tells me that backup plans are for losers, while the other re-incarnation of Steve Jobs and uBeam genius/founder/CEO Meredith Perry tells me the exact opposite.

"Always have 2 backup plans. Always try 2-3 approaches in parallel to increase your chance of success. "

So not just a backup, but a backup to the backup. And maybe a backup to that too.

So how do I follow the advice of these geniuses? Do I have to choose? I'm always hearing what role models they are, so they have to both be right!

And if it's not both of them that are right, one of them has to be. Because otherwise the only other option is that they are both just spouting utter nonsense they made up because it sounds CEO-ish, and it's been picked up by an unthinking and unquestioning press and simply repeated without thought.

How did we ever manage?

It seems I missed an update from uBeam earlier this week, as they strongly hint at the future of their technology beyond just mobile phones, just like they do on their website.

This tweet talks about how the first portable computer from 1984 needed to be plugged in to work. How primitive! If only there were a way to wirelessly power it! 

I'm guessing from this that we can expect uBeam to be powering our laptops real soon now. Well, I know there's nothing there that actually says that uBeam will power laptops, but that's the implication, right?

And I'm guessing there's been a major leap in the technology from the statements in Techcrunch last November about supplying 1.5W to a phone sized item, since most laptops are >45W. I'm not sure there's space for a receiver the size of 30 (45/1.5) phones on most laptops. Well, I'd left before then so I have no idea.

Now a cynic might say this is pure PR designed to give the impression of great capability without actually directly claiming it, but I'm sure this isn't just a mistake or incorrect, as a company like uBeam must carefully vet its social media presence for accuracy. If they didn't, the public might get the awful impression they were inaccurate in other statements, and a safety conscious consumer company couldn't ever let that happen.

And finally, I'm just a simple engineer, but wasn't 1984 more than 22 years ago? And I know there is some debate on the matter, but isn't it the Osborne 1 from 1981 that's regarded as the first portable computer? Meh, minor details. I guess I just don't have the vision to see the big picture.

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.

The Sausage Factory

Today is the 6 month anniversary of my resignation from uBeam, a startup I'd spent the previous two and a half years working on. I had gone from being one of the three engineers working in a garage to create the basic technology (literally), through fundraising nearly $23,000,000, and being VP Engineering in one of the hottest tech startups, to being willing to walk away from both a team I had built and was proud to work with, and any chance of recouping the income and opportunities I had sacrificed in getting there.

It marked the end of about four years of working on a several different startups, during which time I made a lot of mistakes, worked on some very interesting things, met some fantastic engineers and other co-workers, and got first hand insight into the workings of VC and startups in tech. It's the last part I find most fascinating - how the whole ecosystem of startups actually works.

I've watched all the recent publicity surrounding Theranos, about a young, media-darling, Steve Jobs idolizing female CEO, who defies the skeptics and without any training in the field apparently makes strides that promise to change the world. Who raises millions on promises of ground-breaking technology that's just around the corner, yet never makes public demonstrations or subjects their technology to third party audit. A CEO of a company that never answers substantial questions raised by veterans in that field, or criticism that they are doing nothing but playing a smoke and mirrors game to fleece the next round of investors, but is more than willing to speak to the press on their 'vision' (and nothing more).

I've followed that story and felt an odd sense of deja-vu about the coverage. How does a company, founded by someone with no realistic credentials or experience, raise so much money on what may never be delivered? Who decides it gets so much press coverage? Surely the VC's are performing their due-diligence and there are adults minding the store?

There's a saying: "You don't want to see how the sausage gets made."

Let's talk about how the sausage gets made...