Wizards Wanted
Can a beautiful bold pitch be too much for the men with the cheque book?
Venture capitalists love to have a flutter from time to time. The game is to find something at high risk… that pays off. Google Ventures are the outfit tasked with investing some of their monumental profits into socially responsible startups. They have recently joined several others in making a combined investment of $542 million in Magic Leap, mainly for their cinematic reality system.
So far, we have seen Magic Leap present a series of beautiful images of a small elephant moving in someone’s hands, dragons flying overhead and seahorses in a classroom. All of which, as concept art, are stunning.
Quotes from their website such as, “the human brain is still the best display ever made,” worry me. Unless I have missed a point where mind control has gone far beyond playing pong with a brain reading headset to a time in which we can implant extremely high definition images into the mind, I feel they may just be getting ahead of themselves.
This technology could be considered a good step for Google who are already heavily invested in augmented reality with their much touted Google Glass. It’s laying the paving stones for a direction in personal computing and real life digital interaction that people thought would be decades away a few years ago.
My next fear, comes from the biggest hint that this is a dream far further away than the headlines would have us believe. Magic Leap leave some huge clues as to the work left to do on the jobs page of the website. Labeled “Wizards Wanted” (how much magic is there yet to be developed?), there are 68 different posts. Many, like the games developer section for example, will probably be posts for spin off uses of the core technology. But the hunt for everything from electrical engineers and light engineers through to core software roles and many more, hint at this still being a far from finished venture however.
This jumps out to me as history potentially repeating itself.
Cool Planet is a biofuel production company that produces biofuels and biochar to try and combat the issues of pollution and greenhouse gasses. For the mega investors like Google Ventures, BP and General Electric the promise of using plant leftovers to create a biofuel that “reverses global warming,” was just too irresistible- they jumped in along with others to invest somewhere around $100 million in Cool Planet.
The founder of Cool Planet, Mike Cheiky, knows all too much about obtaining the large cheques for arguably unproven science and flashy ideas. His CV does include however, Ohio Scientific (one of the early players in the PC market), 63 patents, being cited in over 700 others and projects working with 26 different fortune 500 companies.
Cheiky’s former employees have a take on this too, “He is either the world’s most unheralded genius, or he’s criminally insane,” says a former Transonic engineer. “One thing is for sure. He is undeniably very good at parting investors from their money.”
The more people look at this, there seem to be huge holes in the science behind Cool Planet- experts in the field claim that there simply isn’t enough energy in plant matter to carry out Cheiky’s system. This is not the first time Google has used its vast amounts of spare capital badly. Investments over the years in the likes of Clearwire, Current Communications, Orkut, Jaiku, Picasa - none of which, to date, have gone very far.
Back to the topic of Magic Leap. I just wonder if it is possible that a great idea, sold through beautiful visuals and flashy communications, having gone far too far and now there being a panic as to how on earth to make it happen.
Having been caught in a rare and negative space because of one huge investment that may have made me a little jealous, I am going to backtrack and dig myself out. We can’t forget, that here in London, and many other spots across the globe, there is a flurry of creativity spawning from coffee shops, living rooms and garages to the basements of fortune 500 companies. They too have realised that today, we, the little people are moulding the shape of big businesses tomorrow. After all, Google and Apple were mocked by my negative predecessors back in the day, and word has it, they are doing alright these days.
I will stop now to go and write my pitch for how I plan to use old shoe laces, a socially connected app and kickstarter to extract graphene from landfill sites.
