“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
– Hunter Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
Congratulations to the four teams that completed the DARPA Grand Challenge course in the Mojave this weekend. It’s an impressive achievement in that harsh climate, doubly so when you consider that last year no team made it any further from the start line near Barstow than Hunter Thompson could have tossed a bottle of amphetamines.
Interestingly, there is a venture capital connection: The folks at Mohr Davidow were backers of the first-to-finish Stanford team. Good for them for supporting an innovative initiative: unmanned vehicles crossing a deathly and hostile landscale.
Then again, you might argue that backing a vehicle with no driver isn’t that far off a core competency of your average venture firm, given a typical VC’s fondness for “solving” every problem by firing the CEO.
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good analogy Paul. There is also a company over at http://www.solarsailor.com/ which makes unmanned watercraft vehicles. They’re even making stuff for the military. You gonna have unmanned boats safeguarding the US coast.
yeah, the way founders are fired is completely outrageous, and not for the fact that the founder was fired.
the problem is that venture firms make representations that it is very important for them to have solid founders on board who will stick it out for years with the company, and who have no intention for helping the financiers recruit a replacement and skipping out the first chance they get, to do the next startup.
people need to get on the same page and have complimentary expectations of each other. it’s unethical to lead the founders on and then dump them.
it’d be interesting to see how the venture business would work if venture firms had a pre-funding understanding with the founders that they’re going to be replaced and that both the parties were ok with it.
i suspect it wouldn’t work well. this area could do with a bit of research.