Humane Inc. started in 2018; it raised around $250M over five years before coming out of stealth mode with an AI pin that people did not like very much, and today they announced their sale (or, to be specific, the sale of their patent library) to HP for $116M.
I don't think we draw many interesting lessons from Humane. They feel like a relic from a younger, more Juicero-drenched era: even while they were in stealth mode there was an obvious perfume of vaporwave about them, and I think there's nothing inherently wrong with taking big, ambitious, VC-subsidized swings at gnarly problems that don't quite pan out.
The two relatively novel things that come to mind are:
- "Huge amounts of capital" is a good way to finance infrastructure, and a poor way to finance design. [1]
- Any company that releases a $700 product for consumers and then neuters it with two-weeks' notice for non-existential reasons is, in a meaningful way, evil.
At risk of veering into ad hominem, I think any company that releases a music video before it releases a product is obviously doomed — and one thing that a nigh-infinite runway tends to do is justify poor decisions under the auspices of long-termism. ↩︎
