But nothing about the crisis changes fundamentals negatively for at-home entertainment. Covid-19 is a convenient excuse here.
> Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks like their real business was selling feelings of excitement to investors.
This is a common phenomenon with build-it-and-they-will-come businesses. If you want to crate a good business, you need contact with reality early and often. You need to test your hypotheses on actual customers, because that's how you really learn to maximize delivered value.
If you want gobs of investor money, on the other hand, it's often better to have no proof at all. With $0 in revenue, investors just have to imagine the billions that await. But once you have $1 in revenue, suddenly projections get anchored to real data. Rather than reveling in dreams of what people might do with, say, Segway or Google Glass, people insist on looking at the dreary reality.
Living off the money of "believer" investors seems to be a tried and true tech business strategy. Why sell hard tech to lots of customers when you can sell dreams to a handful of rich investors? One can argue that Silicon Valley is simply an enormous apparatus for transferring wealth from investors to landlords by way of tech employees.
> Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks like their real business was selling feelings of excitement to investors.
This is a common phenomenon with build-it-and-they-will-come businesses. If you want to crate a good business, you need contact with reality early and often. You need to test your hypotheses on actual customers, because that's how you really learn to maximize delivered value.
If you want gobs of investor money, on the other hand, it's often better to have no proof at all. With $0 in revenue, investors just have to imagine the billions that await. But once you have $1 in revenue, suddenly projections get anchored to real data. Rather than reveling in dreams of what people might do with, say, Segway or Google Glass, people insist on looking at the dreary reality.