I’ve covered some news regarding Magic Leap a few times here on the blog. You can skim the posts here. I’ll pull a quote from something I wrote in the summer of 2018:
But I do think Magic Leap is playing a dangerous game with the hype machine. They should try to lower expectations before their consumer or business devices hit the market. This way when the press covers them the reviews will be glowing rather than lukewarm.
Rather than try to lower expectations they went nearly completely silent. And everything they’ve uploaded to YouTube was confusing, boring, and showed almost nothing. So odd.
Well, now they are trying to sell after trying to have a big exit to Facebook.
Just a quick rant regarding valuations, raising a bunch of money, and hype… if I may.
Magic Leap played this wrong from the jump. Yes, VR is an issue that has taken, and will take a lot more, money to solve. There is no way around it. However, you don’t need to blow the money into the wind either. You can get a core team, even a well paid team, and iterate. Oculus seems to have done that to some degree – even though they were able to secure a large exit to Facebook.
Second, if you raise a huge amount of money you very quickly eliminate the possible acquisition targets for your company (if you want to exit in that way). There are a lot of companies in the world that can afford to acquire a company for $10M-$100M. There are relatively few that can for $10B+.
Third, if you hype up your technology as much as Magic Leap has, almost any demonstration they were able to do would lead to a “this is what you’ve spent billions on?” type of reaction.
If Magic Leap has solved any big technical hurdles for VR I sincerely hope those solutions make it into the market in some way – either through a fire sale, open source, whatever. But I do hope the company itself goes belly up to show others this isn’t how you do this.