Opinion
Rosenthal: Apple's pre-Jobs return products were all crap
“The company was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had a ton of products. They were all crap.”
Insight
Rosenthal: Consumer hardware startups face an inherent supply-demand timing mismatch
“One of the worst things about doing a hardware company, particularly a consumer hardware company is that the timing and the visibility that you have between your supply and demand curves is a complete mismatch. You know, when you're building something new and …”
Assertion Supported
Rosenthal: Lytro laid off 55% of staff during VR pivot
“We had to start by laying off about 55% of the company in order to be able to go execute that plan.”
Assertion Supported
Rosenthal: Lytro cinema camera captures 400 gigabytes per second
“At our peak bandwidth on the cinema camera, we're capturing about 400 gigabytes of data Per second, which is close to a thousand times more than just a, you know, even a today's professional cinema cameras.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rosenthal: Lytro doubled margins by shifting to recurring B2B model
“We more than doubled our margin structure because again, with marketing and distribution and manufacturing, a one-time consumer sale is really, really hard. And we found a way to get to a recurring business rather than a one-time business.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rosenthal: Legacy media giants will not dominate virtual reality
“So I think if you look at any new medium, right. Be it the internet, or mobile games, or what have you. It's never been, ah, the companies that were dominant in the last form of entertainment or media that have become the leaders, ah, in the next form, and I t…”
Opinion
Rosenthal: VR has the potential to be the most social medium
“I think the bold case is that VR has the potential to be the inherently most social medium, kind of any form of technology that we've seen so far.”
Insight
Rosenthal: Virtually every successful tech startup undergoes a pivot
“Really actually every startup is a pivot and it's along this big spectrum from tiny pivots that, that happened at the beginning to much harder times. Bigger ones. If we take most, if not all of the biggest, most successful tech companies that we think about to…”
Insight
Rosenthal: Startups pivot away from disaster rather than toward certainty
“Very rarely at least in my experience, are you pivoting into something That you know is going to work or that you've got super high confidence in. You're mostly pivoting away from, you know, near certain disaster.”
Insight
Rosenthal: Company culture only truly matters during existential crisis
“In a lot of ways, I mean, a culture doesn't matter that much when everything's going great. Culture matters a lot when the shit is at the fan and people, whether it's employees or customers are running for the exits.”
Disclosure
Rosenthal: Lytro owed $4 million to suppliers upon taking over CEO role
“It turns out that for the first generation Lytro product that had already shipped, we owed an enormous amount of money to the tune of, I think about four million dollars to our suppliers who had pre-purchased all the parts and all the components needed for the…”
Disclosure
Rosenthal: Lytro pitched 83 investors before securing a recapitalization round
“83 investors later. 83. I still have that spreadsheet. You know, we found an interested investor. We basically changed the cap table, radically reduced the valuation.”
Insight
Rosenthal: Novel products must meet baseline expectations on standard features
“The problem was you also have to at least be good enough on the expected value. How do you do on the basic things that every other existing product does?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rosenthal: Exiting consumer market cut Lytro's cost structure by 70%
“Our cost structure, we cut by about 70% by just not being in the Consumer business.”
Insight
Rosenthal: VR is the first medium without pre-defined content formats
“One of the things that's super interesting about VR is it's kind of the first, ah, medium of media where the formats aren't defined and locked in from the very beginning. There's lots and lots of, ah, experimentation because it's kind of the first, ah, the fir…”
Insight
Rosenthal: Early AR and VR require the exact same infrastructure investments
“We're sort of in the stage of the medium now, ah, where, where everybody's working on the underlying infrastructure technologies and, ah, kind of the first experiences around those, and it doesn't matter, ah, you know, if it's AR or VR, ah, the investments tha…”
Opinion
Rosenthal: VR creates empathy unmatchable by traditional media
“It's the most human way to connect someone to what's going on in another part of the world, and you watch it, and you feel like you're there, and you have a level of empathy for what's going on that you just don't get from reading the newspaper or watching You…”
Assertion Partly supported
Rosenthal: LoudCloud grew from five to 650 employees within one year
“And from five of us to about 650 employees in the same time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rosenthal: Opsware early installs required physical server clones from HQ
“For the first over year of being in the software business after we've made the pivot the only way that you could install the software at a customer site was you had to bring along a server with you from our headquarters that was already running the software.”
