It baffles me how a niche product that everyone loved could fail like this. Smartwatch competition seems like a barren field compared to smartphones, and Pebble had things no other rivals could do - double the battery life, true always on display and a great open platform. The functionality was there, an the hardware was good enough.
It would be really interesting to see what actually failed - much smaller companies with niche products like Flirc.tv are chugging along well.<p>I can only hope that someone picks the torch up and makes a Pebble successor - the userbase is still there, without any matching product to choose.
I still wear my pebbles daily (one at a time!). I'll be loath to replace them when the time finally comes, nothing else comes close to the perfect balance of including what I want in a watch and excluding what I <i>don't</i> want. So many other watches out there, including the Apple watch and every Android watch are packed full of crap I actively don't want cluttering up my wrist.<p>It takes guts to make a device with push-buttons in a touch-screen world, but in every way they're a better interface for a 1" screen, that is totally obscured by most digits.<p>It also takes guts to use a dull e-ink screen, but it's perfect - always on, battery lasts for a week (still!), and combined with the beautiful animations of the OS it looks fantastic.<p>I wish there were more device companies out there with the guts to use mature, if slightly dated tech to build amazing products, rather than try and make everything voice activated just because they can, even if it makes for a worse experience over all.
> I didn’t have that longer-term vision in mind necessarily when times got hard. I wasn’t thinking about the company’s world-changing mission, and that’s something I talk about with startups.<p>To me this was the number one reason Pebble failed, I don’t think anyone in the management ever thought of it as more than a series of individual products. They didn’t need a “world changing mission”, they needed a business model with some kind of long term strategy to get off the crowd funding platform. If you are asking your customers to pre find your manufacturing runs after 6 years then something has gone wrong.<p>Shame because it seemed like a great product and everyone I know who had/has one really liked them.
I'm extremely proud to be joining YC. PG, Jessica, Harj, PB and Trevor were the first venture investors to believe in me and the idea back in 2010. Over the following 7 years YC helped in innumerable ways. While neither I nor anyone else was aiming for the particular conclusion to the Pebble story, YC and the whole network gave support at every twist and turn.<p>Very excited to be helping startups full time!
I adore my original Pebble and Pebble Time Steel. I'm curious to see whether Rebble [1] can pull together a new ecosystem.<p>I was under the impression Eric and the original Pebble team had deliberately ensured enough openings for that to happen, when the Fitbit acquisition news broke. Thanks to them if so.<p>[1] <a href="http://rebble.io/" rel="nofollow">http://rebble.io/</a>
How much do founders typically get when their startups sell for less than what investors put in? Not a troll question, genuinely interested. Any data on how this averages?
A lot of people on this thread have praise for Pebble watches. I never owned one or any of its current competitors. Always got a a gimmicky feeling from those types of devices (i.e. no real added value over a regular watch and smartphone). Genuinely curious:<p>What value was added by a Pebble watch?
Hellishly expensive in comparison, but I found the Garmin Fenix 5 to be the perfect replacement for my dear departed Pebbles. It helps that I wanted a fitness watch too, but even just as a smartwatch it ticks every box that the Pebble did for me, and looks <i>way</i> nicer on the wrist.
I'm the proud owner of two Pebble Time's, battery on one is unfortunately not so good but I can get 6 days with the other one, and both are swim proof. Great for festivals etc.
VC funds is where founders go to retire. Im not sure why this is a big/good deal - afaik, its a waste of talent.<p>The only people who can sustain investor jobs are the MBA hacks driven primarily by money and fomo. I have yet to meet a single founder who was happy with the lack of control that such a job requires.