Engineer and Investor in Spat About Wireless Charging Startup UBeam
Someone will eventually do this, or at least something similar, just maybe not with ultrasound. Whether that company is uBeam or another company is hard to say.<p>I was a little surprised to see Suster&#x27;s response. One half of me says that is great to see an investor sticking his neck out for one of his investments and conveying the faith he has in that investment. Personally, I don&#x27;t get judging uBeam and calling them a failure quite yet. I think it is unfair to compare them to Theranos. At least with uBeam there is no claim they have faked results or compliance issues. There are no criminal investigations over falsified technology. The only issue really at hand with uBeam is an overzealous CEO who stated they would have a prototype available and they haven&#x27;t delivered yet. So what? They are behind, it is bleeding edge tech that will have a huge impact if they are able to pull it off. Is it because she is a female everyone is quick to judge her a failure at this point? Or because she is a young, first-time CEO? If Elon Musk was the CEO would the same negative press be surrounding uBeam about a failure to deliver?<p>Now on the flip side, even Suster&#x27;s post lends truth to Reynolds&#x27; statements. This part, to me at least, is a little more damning, and leads me to believe that Reynolds really was trying to put a stop to the hyperbole marketing.<p>Suster states, &quot;Throughout my many discussions with Paul over our time together, he never questioned the viability of uBeam and the technology that he was critical in developing. Instead he expressed concerns that we not overstate our capabilities or fall prey to hyperbole.&quot;<p>To me these are one in the same essentially. Reynolds apparently was concerned about the claims being made, said something to Suster, which Suster confirms in this statement, and now Suster is downplaying those concerns.<p>In the end this seems like drama over nothing to me. So what if they fail to deliver? Thousands of companies before them and thousands of companies after them will fail to deliver on a product at some point. That&#x27;s the nature of the beast. To me it seems the only issue is that there is a young CEO who is excited about a product that has yet to be developed. She makes exciting, dramatic statements about her company and product than she really should be making, and both Reynolds and Suster tend to confirm this. But I believe her statements and the Theranos situation are in two different ballparks, so I think the comparison is far from fair to uBeam.