Nonono, I'm actually curious if in harryh's nuanced view, Meredith Perry (not someone else) had this option open and could have done so once she realized the tech couldn't work. What do you think?
To what end? Not enough information for speculation. One of the nice things about HN discussions is that generally folks who comment have some line of reasoning that leads to their opinion. Unless someone was actually working at uBeam and a confidante of Perry, what ever they speculate is useless. And if they are an employee and confidante, what ever they say will no doubt lead to at least the end of their position and at worst legal action.
And the really relevant point is that uBeam hasn't, according to its current press, pivoted into anything other than its stated mission. So debating why not is like debating why you didn't ask out someone back when you were in high school and now has turned out to be someone you didn't expect. Kind of a waste of time :-)
She had a proof of concept that turned out didn't scale. If you think it's "useless" to discuss whether and how it's possible for such a CEO to pivot we have nothing further to discuss. I will say that I expect any and every world-changing CEO to be at risk of being in such a position now and in the future, and that the development of a game plan by the startup community for when (not if) this happens again is the difference between billions of dollars of value and the statement "unfortunately I have to say no to changing the world because I only have a working proof of concept. Personally I do not want to run even a 1% risk of ending up in the position that Perry ended up in - and in my conservative opinion I have a 20-90% chance of that. Oh well - I'll put this proof of concept aside and go do something else. "
Well, okay. But I hope it's blindingly obvious that we all lose. . That pre-CEO and the world.
EDIT: Whoever is downvoting me doesn't get it. She had a proof of concept. The proof didn't scale. She raised money - millions - anyway. To me this is all fine. The question is whether she HAD to stick with this non-working concept, or whether she could have pivoted, when she had all that money in the bank and learned that the concept does not work/scale. You guys just don't get the question.
Except a proof of concept that doesn't scale is explicitly not a proof of concept
The concept doesn't work because it's physically impossible and having a low power example is all you can do without severe issues. In this case having a small scale example doesn't tell you much if anything about the large scale behavior ( among other things nonlinear effects start happening at high power physically )
