The Forbes website published an article recently describing the causes and consequences of the failure of the US drone company 3D RoboTIcs. Less than two years ago, the company's prospects are still bright, but now it has completely withdrawn from the UAV manufacturing field, and lost in the competition with China's drone manufacturer Dajiang innovation, becoming a struggle Survival software company. The following is the original content: On a sunny day in March last year, Chris Anderson took an American reporter to the outdoor venue at the 3D RoboTIcs headquarters in Berkeley, California to talk about the future of flying robots. 3D RoboTIcs was the largest consumer drone manufacturer in North America at the time, and Anderson was the former editor of Wired magazine and the author of the New York Times bestselling Long Tail Theory. He confidently told reporters that the drone market can reach billions of dollars, and 3D RoboTIcs is ready to seize this opportunity. Today, drones may still be a valuable consumer technology, like a personal computer or smartphone, but the future of 3D Robotics has become turbid and bleak. In the past 12 months, the company has fallen from the leader in the field of UAV pioneering in the United States to the point of struggling to survive. 3D Robotics has laid off more than 150 people, burned almost 100 million US dollars, and completely changed its business strategy. All of this is caused by bad management, failure strategies, and sloppy predictions. Silicon Valley Mania Forbes interviewed 10 former 3D Robotics employees and wanted to know the company's troubles. Many people said that until the beginning of this year, they discovered that the company had encountered difficulties. Sales were not good during the Christmas shopping season, and competitors were rapidly emerging, which forced Anderson and his management team to withdraw from the consumer drone field. Others said that at about this time last year, they felt that 3D Robotics was doomed to fail, when the company's first mass market drone was problematic in the production process. "This is the typical Silicon Valley arrogance. Because of incompetence, the company made a mistake worth $100 million," said a former employee. He still works in the drone industry and is therefore reluctant to be named. In its heyday, 3D Robotics has offices in the Bay Area, Austin, San Diego and Tijuana with more than 350 employees; Valuation, Richard Branson and True Ventures have valued the company. It is $360 million. Anderson believes that consumer drone space is less competitive and hopes to develop flying robots that appeal to the average consumer and the company. When he left Wired magazine and devoted himself to 3D Robotics, he sketched a picture of children playing flying robots in the park, and farmers and construction workers used them to inspect the cornfields and view the construction site. The Solo that 3D Robotics intends to develop is such a drone. It is a black quadcopter with an open source software platform for external developers to develop applications. But Solo, who debuted in April 2015, eventually became a loser. The reasons for its failure include production delays, more component problems, and competition from Chinese drone company Dajiang. DJI companies not only have lower product prices, but also develop new products faster. Failed strategy “We realized that a software-centric company in Silicon Valley would have to compete with a strong manufacturing company in China that is vertically integrated, which is inherently difficult,†said Colin Gwen, former chief revenue officer at 3D Robotics. (Colin Guinn) said. He left the company in September this year. And Anderson may have been too late to realize this. In order to develop Solo, 3D Robotics has spent almost all of its money, although it has now been transformed to develop software and service applications for partners like Autodesk. It is unclear how much money is left in 3D Robotics. In an interview last month, Anderson declined to discuss the company's financial situation, but he said that 3D Robotics is now fully focused on enterprise software. Anderson is 55 years old and has previously delivered keynote speeches on drones at industry conferences. “We have withdrawn from the hardware market and are no longer targeting consumers, in part because the market is too difficult,†he said. “Dajiang is an amazing company, and many people are planted in it.†Company's founding 3D Robotics was founded by Anderson and Jordi Munoz. Munoz is a young Mexican immigrant who has slammed his RC helicopter in his garage in California. Anderson founded the online drone enthusiast community DIY Drones in 2007, and he and Muñoz met in this community. At the time, Anderson was editor of Wired magazine. He liked Muñoz's autopilot system and sent him $500 to help him. The two founded 3D Robotics in 2009. Muñoz runs the company's business, selling homemade drone kits and autopilot's boards, and this pair is a sideline for Anderson. He continues to work full-time editors in Wired and manages the lively DIY Drone forum. In 2012, Anderson shifted his energy to 3D Robotics, and he wrote an article about how he is optimistic about drone technology. “Just as the rise of personal computers in the 1970s, personal drones will also rise in this decade,†he wrote in a cover story in Wired. “We are entering the era of drones. ". In November of that year, Anderson had received a round of $5 million in venture capital and also resigned from the editorial work. 3D Robotics has expanded its business, with Anderson as CEO and business in Berkeley, while Munoz has offices in San Diego and Tijuana. In the second year, the company raised another $30 million in funding. Competition from Dajiang When 3D Robotics started its operations, Dajiang, which is headquartered in Shenzhen, has become a leader in early consumer-grade drones. Dajiang Company was founded in 2006 and started as a flight control system. In 2012, the company launched the Phantom drone, a very mature device that later became the benchmark for consumer drones. And unlike other high-tech companies in China, Dajiang has set its sights on the global market early on. With the help of drone enthusiasts and former TV reality star Colin Guinn, Dajiang The company has an office in the United States. Jean became the marketing image of Dajiang Company. He took the Elf drone to participate in various trade fairs and sold it to retailers. By the end of 2013, the relationship between Jean and Dajiang deteriorated and he was forced to leave the company. Dajiang also closed the Austin office. Jean sued Dajiang and joined 3D Robotics in February 2014 (Dajiang and Jean later reached an out-of-court settlement). Jean brought in former US employees in DJI and became the company's chief revenue officer, and established the 3D Robotics office in Austin to handle the company's marketing and sales. “At the meeting, Jean always said, 'I want to kill Dajiang,'†a former 3D Robotics employee said. In short, in the vision of Jean and Anderson, Solo will challenge the dominance of the elves. In terms of color matching, Solo abandoned white and used black. It also has some high-level functions that DJI did not have at the time, such as writing flight routes, providing developers with open code and providing responsive customer service. Although the company's DIY components business is relatively stable, generating $10 million in annual revenue, 3D Robotics has concentrated all of its resources on new drones. It acquired Sifteo, a consumer-grade video game maker with no drone experience. The employees brought by Sifteo form the core engineering team of Solo. In April 2015, 3D Robotics launched Solo at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas. The technology media The Verge said it was “probably the smartest drone ever,†and praised the autopilot feature of the device. Not a mouthful (which is tricky, please see later). UAV enthusiasts also cheered on the emergence of elf substitutes, which made 3D Robotics' main competitor, Dali, worried. In the spring of that year, Dajiang founder and CEO Wang Wei and Anderson met. A participant at the time said that Wang Hao expressed his willingness to buy out the company. Anderson rejected the proposal. At that time, Solo was about to start shipping, and 3D Robotics had to do a big business. Problem outbreak Former employees told reporters that they noticed that Solo’s problem was that when it was on sale at Best Buy in June 2015, “after Solo’s launch, things were off track,†one employee said. The Solo drone's GPS system sometimes has connection problems that affect the stability of the flight, so the drone sometimes flies or crashes. The camera stabilizer unit also faces production delays, so the first batch of Solos were not equipped with universal joints and were not suitable for taking photos and videos, which was the main use of most consumer drones. “It’s harder to make a universal joint than to make a drone,†said Jean. The universal joint was shipped on Solo for two months before it was shipped, and it was already August. However, 3D Robotics executives are still optimistic about Solo's potential and expect it to be sold out during holiday shopping. According to one employee, chief financial officers John Rex and Anderson have already signed a contract with the foundry PCH International to make 60,000 Solos, and by mid-June, they have been in less than a month. Based on the sales data, it is decided to add 40,000 orders. This is a major decision, a former employee said, because the cost of production for each drone and its joints, plus the cost of shipping to retailers, totaled more than $750. Informed sources told Forbes that although the company raised $64 million in 2015, most of it was spent on manufacturing costs. Many people have accused 3D Robotics of the sloppy predictions that led to Solo's failure. For example, a former employee said that the fatal mistake of the leadership was based on the number of "selling" rather than "selling". The inventory shipped to retail channels (such as Best Buy) does not show the consumer's needs, because the retailer can return it to the company if it does not sell the product. However, the company's forecast is based on the inventory of the retailer, not the quantity actually purchased by the customer. Everyone except Dajiang is a loser. A former employee of the 3D Robotics marketing team also questioned the company's practices in media relations. For example, in the spring of 2015, the company provided a demonstration to the technology media The Verge that a drone was “retrofitted†and not the same as the Solo you bought in the store. "We know that the drone used for the demonstration will perform very well," he said, adding that the enhanced GPS component used by the drone is not available on ordinary Solo. However, the media’s praise did not save Solo’s fate. By the end of 2015, 3D Robotics sold only about 22,000 units, half of the original forecast. The rest of the inventory is backlogged in the factory floor and shipping containers. And Dajiang has also begun to act. Solo, which has a universal joint and a GoPro camera, costs more than $1,700, while the vertically integrated DJI company has its own factory, and its Elf 3 Pro package is comparable to Solo, and costs just $1,300. By 2016, the price of the Elf drone with a universal joint and a camera dropped to $1,000. "I have never seen a market that has seen such a price cut," Anderson said. "In addition to Dajiang, everyone is a loser." Falling The actions of Dajiang gave Anderson and his executives no room to breathe. At the end of 2015, they canceled a small racing program called “Nemoâ€. In January of the following year, after going to Las Vegas to participate in the CES Consumer Electronics Show, they realized that they were once empty consumer-oriented drones. It will soon be crowded with dozens of competitors from China. After returning from the CES show, the leadership of 3D Robotics changed its course, canceled the "Blackbird" industrial drone program, and began planning how to exit the hardware manufacturing field. Due to the excessive concentration of resources on Solo, in less than a year, 3D Robotics has been badly hurt. In February of this year, the company had more than 60,000 drones that had not been sold yet, but the funds had been exhausted. They had to close the office in San Diego and the Tijuana factory and silently sent the co-founder Muñoz. (Munios is still working in the drone industry today, and he declined to comment on it.) 3D Robotics was unable to repay the purchase price of the factory PCH, and had to sign an agreement with it. Anderson declined to disclose the details of the agreement, but two informed employees said that 3D Robotics had handed over the remaining Solo stocks to PCH and needed marketing and sales assistance for the drones. Most of the proceeds from the sale of Solo are paid directly to the PCH. Moreover, PCH also obtained a partial share of 3D Robotics and an observer seat on the company's board of directors. A spokesperson for PCH declined to comment on the matter. In March of this year, 3D Robotics laid off about 30 people, including CFO Rex. Jean was also laid off shortly. The engineers who entered the company through the Sifteo acquisition also left. In an interview, Jean said that he knew he would leave early this year and the Austin office would be closed. Lessons learned Anderson said that most of the employees of the 3D Robotics consumer project have left, although Tijuana has some Solo customer support staff. Now 3D Robotics is transforming into a software company that serves the enterprise. He estimates that about 80 people have stayed, and most of the employees now belong to the Site Scan software team, which is designed to help companies capture and analyze aviation data. 3D Robotics' new project may be able to bear fruit, but it also faces competition from a number of Silicon Valley startups, such as Kespry, DroneDeploy, etc., some of which have raised millions of dollars in developing enterprise software solutions. 3D Robotics now has to catch up and may not have enough resources to support it. "We don't make Solo anymore, and we don't plan to make drones anymore," Anderson said. He said 3D Robotics will begin developing software for other drone manufacturers. "Other companies are doing hardware, so we don't have to do hardware. We can focus on providing software and services. I like this idea. We are a Silicon Valley company, we should do software, and those Chinese companies should do hardware." All In One Intel I5,I5 All In One Pc,All In One Desktop I5,I5 All In One Guangdong Elieken Electronic Technology Co.,Ltd. , https://www.elieken.com
