They built a legitimate product that some people wanted and managed to get it manufactured and shipped. That's a lot farther that most go.
The product sales weren't able to get to enough volume to support the company and the needed lowering of costs that comes with volume manufacturing. That's not uncommon. Sometimes hardware devices do better with large corporate backing because they can afford to take a loss longer while they build up a market. For small operations, this is the perfect case for venture capital where outside money is needed because of high costs of doing real manufacturing.
I see no need to hate on them like the article does. It's sad the founders turned on each other at the end, that can't have helped things. If these guys pull out, have the right insights about what they have learned, and do another round at something else, their chances of success will be much higher than someone without their experience and ability to actually envision and execute a product that people wanted. Just not enough people this time.
Baffling with all the publicity they have surely this character would have been better off with an open and honest kickstarter? Stating they realise they made mistakes in the past how they are going to correct them and what is different or better about the new product. I would have probably contributed because I think its a really interesting product.
I'm reserving judgement until we hear both sides of the story.
Obviously, this could simply be blatant bad behavior, but as even Arun said in his post, he doesn't really know what's going on. I could easily envision a situation where the company has run out of capital and one of the founders decides to take things into their own hands to keep the idea going simply driven by passion.
Of course, if that was his motivation, his execution was remarkably poor.
It's pretty clear cut-- if Milife is a new corporation, with new owners, then the only way they should have had the list is if they paid WakeMate for the list. Any other use is theft from WakeMate shareholders. I think the odds are very good there will be legal problems for Milife, possibly criminal.
Greg took Pincus's lie cheat and steal message too seriously.
The shareholders are the VC investors. If they want to rip apart one of the few people around that managed to execute manufacturing a real hardware product and getting it shipped rather than stay on good terms and get in on his next idea, that's their decision. Foolish, but it's their life.
It seems fair that they wouldn't want to encourage this sort of thing; founders/employees of a company can't just start a new company and use information from the existing one to start it up. Criminal charges seem pretty heavy, but it seems like what was done here wasn't right.
I have seen former employers get the FBI to come after ex employees who used lists, data, etc. expropriated from the company. All it takes is a phone call. Really, its not the company's choice anyway... if the law has been broken, the authorities pursue it at their own perogative.
Has a law been broken? I don't agree with all the people stating a law has been broken without saying which one. Smells like smearing someone. Accusing someone of committing crimes is very serious.
He was still the President and founder of WakeMate when he sent an email about a new thing he was getting into. He didn't hack into an account he had no access to - it was his account. The article claims he didn't "get permission". Get permission from who? It was his account.
Claims this is "criminal" are absurd, ridiculous, and libelous.
On the other hand, the story discusses that the code that is owned by what is left of the company is going to be open sourced, essentially given away to the general public. This code is the real value of the company and likely cost millions to develop. Was this move approved by the shareholders? It does not say that it was. This move is something that the company owners could object to. It's blatant theft of company property and transfer of it to others. Have the VC owners of the company and thus the code signed off on it? Even if they have, it might not be relevant. Since it appears they are out of money, is the company in bankruptcy court? Do they owe suppliers? Are they going to go through bankruptcy or not? Transfers of the core company assets at this point should not be done without the approval of a judge, not even the VC "owners". If they have debts and assets (the source code) and reallocate those assets to others knowing that they are going to have to declare bankruptcy, that is fraud. The code usually would be sold at public auction and the money then used to pay off debt owned by the company, which may include unpaid bills, but may also include salary owed to the principals to wind down the company in a way so that assets can be sold for a reasonable amount. I see no indication that anyone involved in preparing this code for open source release is going to be paid for it. They are under no obligation to do so without pay even if such a move was approved by VC owners and/or a judge.
More to the point: the customer list is the intellectual property of WakeMate, and has commercial value to the company.
Using the customer list without reimbursing WakeMate (or some other arrangement, including for example WakeMate contributing the customer list to MiWhatever in exchange for stock) is essentially theft of IP. This is a crime in some states, but generally just means that MiWhatever owes WakeMate a check for licensing (or purchasing) the IP.
I don't think there's much question as to the legality here.
Rather, I think the degree of maliciousness is a bit unclear at the moment, i.e. was this driven by a conscious attempt to screw over his investors and cofounders, his desire to realize his vision, or some combination thereof?
The cheap charger may have sparked it, but it was the lack of current limiters or heat cutoffs in the device that appears to be the actual problem. Electrical inputs should be treated much like form inputs on a web page. Never trust them to be what you designed for.
The product sales weren't able to get to enough volume to support the company and the needed lowering of costs that comes with volume manufacturing. That's not uncommon. Sometimes hardware devices do better with large corporate backing because they can afford to take a loss longer while they build up a market. For small operations, this is the perfect case for venture capital where outside money is needed because of high costs of doing real manufacturing.
I see no need to hate on them like the article does. It's sad the founders turned on each other at the end, that can't have helped things. If these guys pull out, have the right insights about what they have learned, and do another round at something else, their chances of success will be much higher than someone without their experience and ability to actually envision and execute a product that people wanted. Just not enough people this time.