Humane AI Pin disaster: How a $1 Billion dream fell short of expectations

Hey, I'm really excited for today's episode. I'm going to break down what's going on with one of the most talked about companies in recent times, Humane AI. This is the Humane AI Pin. AI Pin. What is this thing? It's been blowing up the Internet over the last few months. Game changer in wearable technology. And everybody, it was the whole Internet freaked out. But this type of product will have no use. This device outside is pretty useless. Really, really, really bad. Now.

All right, before we dive in, here's a recap of exactly what you need to know about this company. They were founded in 2018 by ex Apple employees. They've raised over $230 million. Yeah, that's a bunch of money. And six months ago, after five years, they finally announced their first product, the AI pin, which started shipping on April 11, 2024. And at that point, you might have noticed a ton of chatter about it because everyone had the product in their hands, at least all of us first suckers. And then finally, it's been reported that Humane is looking to get sold. I really didn't want to do this video. I really didn't want to talk about this company because these founders have spent five years of their lives, including their team, to work on this, what seems like an amazing device when it comes to the features and the specs and the hardware and things like that. But now that everyone's had their opinion and we have some new news about the company, I felt like I had to say something and just give feedback. Almost as if the founders are right in front of me. So here's the thing that I want to say about this. We already know by now that this product literally fails at the vast majority of use cases it purports to do extremely well. The one that sits in my mind is this idea of being able to do real time translations between different languages as you're like, let's say, a tourist in a foreign country and things like that. I don't think that's a daily use case, but I think it's a very valuable one. You could even imagine at work or even at home, if you have someone coming in, they speak a different language or grandma's speaking a different language and the kids want to talk to talk to grandma and all these kinds of things. This is an amazing potential use case. But here's the problem. It fails at that. It's almost like nobody actually tried using the product for these things. And here's the reason it fails. It fails because there's A massive lag time when you start asking it something and it responds. And so that's not going to work in a real time world where everything needs to happen really fast. So I know this is a complicated problem, but you should be highlighting use cases that your product can deliver on, not use cases that it's going to fail at once someone opens the box and tries to use it. This is my problem with this entire product. It's that they have made promises that the product completely fails at. How is that a business.

Where I believe the company went wrong with this product as a whole is pretty simple. It's one word, trust. Everything about this company now makes me feel like I don't trust them to deliver a product that I'm going to love. And the place they came from, Apple, is the exact opposite. We trust them through many years of their launches and their products to deliver a product I'm going to love. And I am damn sure there are use cases here where people would love the product, but those weren't highlighted. And even if they were, they weren't actually use cases this product could deliver on because of all the limitations of latency and all these things we've heard now. So if I were to give feedback to them, I'd be wondering, hey, did anyone get an opportunity to actually figure out what the reliable use cases were at this time with the device? Because what I would have done, and this is a wacky idea, is I would have highlighted those use cases and then I would have said the other use cases are in beta or early access and you got to deliberately turn them on because then you would have a win on what this product is perfect for in terms of use cases today. And if it was as simple as you got a question, ask it anytime it's going to answer the question, ask it anything, and it's just an AI powered device and then everything else wraps around it, that probably would have been fine. That being said, I think that this idea of who it's for and what use cases that match up for who it's for was completely lost. So if I were pitching this thing, I would do this completely differently. And this is the advice I'd have for folks. And it's not just pitching it, it's actually what would I do now that I'm in this mess if I were CEO? Number one thing is I would go figure out how we screwed up. What is it about my company, our culture, that let us ship this thing in this way? Number one thing you need to do, I would Be really hard pressed on getting that answer. And then I would make all the changes related to the problems that led up to this kind of product in market. That's the number one thing I would do. Because that's what you need to do as a great leader. Figure out why you screwed up, figure out and get the whole company involved in that in this case, because the massive screw up. Second thing, let's say you do that, you don't do that. Whatever. I would just get to hey everybody, clearly this product does not hit the mark. Okay? So let's go figure out again, I'm a broken record on this. Let's go figure out what use cases we can nail and then let's go tell everyone we screwed up. But we're going to tell you now what we believe it's great for. And then I would have everyone do a re review on those use cases. If that means you need to update your software or ship some things and things like that to make it so that it works well for those use cases, that's what I do. But here's the thing. There's no reason the company can't step back and restart the shipping the whatever they want to do with that intention of hey, we need to learn what this amazing hardware device can do for people. And that's the pitch I would do. I'd be like, hey, I think we got ahead of ourselves. We thought the technology was further along than it really is and so we screwed up. So guess what? We're going to do X, Y, Z to fix this. And XYZ should be focused on how you find the use cases together with everyone who's bought the product. So now I'm going to talk about what I think again, pure speculation. So grain of salt, what I think is going through different people's heads that are involved in this company. Let's talk about the team members of the company. I will bet there are team members that either said something or wanted to say something and for whatever reason didn't do anything about it. About these issues, the reliable use cases, all these things and more. And for whatever reason, I think a lot of folks don't realize that shipping the product and getting customer feedback is all that matter. Until then, you're in this awesome world, literally this awesome world where there's only hope and there's all this hype for especially for a company like this. And so you can imagine all the great things, but nothing survives the customer. Nothing. Especially the first exposure to customers. So I'm sure there are Team members that are pretty bummed out right now. Cause they, they knew this and for some reason they couldn't help and they couldn't help fix this. So some of them might have left, some of them might still be there thinking there's hope and to fix it. But that energy of like, early, intense, we're working on this, we're working on this. Oh, we shipped it and then now we're working on this. But the response is terrible. What do you do? You lose faith. You lose faith in everything, unfortunately. Leadership, company, your equity, all kinds of things. And I've seen this happen over and over again, unfortunately. So what you really need to do is galvanize the whole company around the problem. As I mentioned, if you galvanize the company around the problem, you might be able to solve it, but you need to galvanize the company around the problem. I don't see that happening with this company. I do see them trying to reply on social media and be positive and try to give, you know, people some, you know, hope, but it's not working and people don't have hope about this anymore. So that's the problem. So first I talked about the team. Let's talk about the founders for a second. They have to be devastated. And I really feel for them. And I'm not the person to say why'd they raise this much money? Why'd they ship this product? You know, they're bad people or they don't know what they're doing. No, they absolutely know what they're doing. They were involved in some of the most popular products, hardware, devices on the planet. And from what I've heard, they were involved deeply in those things and they invented all kinds of cool things that we use now on a daily, maybe minute by minute basis. Holy crap. This is an amazing team. I don't think there's any way to take that away from them, and we shouldn't. They're probably really bummed out. They're probably tired and they probably just want out to be honest, because this is a huge problem. But if it were me, I would go back to what I said. I will galvanize a team around this problem and make a commitment to solve it, hell or high water. That's the only way out of this. And you got to just kind of suck it up and go do that. But it can be such a devastating thing, especially if, and this goes back to the next set of responsible parties, in this case the stakeholders who do. I meet the investors and the board members. I can't imagine the kind of pressure that the founders are under now and the executives that are still there because of this problem of shipping a product that nobody loves after spending five years on it and building all this hype and adding AI to it because you think that's going to solve a bunch of problems. Or maybe the board members really wanted you to add AI to it for a number of reasons. I mean, they got a lot of money from OpenAI too. I think the board is probably like, hey, founders, what do you want to do? What are you going to do? And they probably have ideas. And I believe these are first time founders. And so first time founders, when board members have ideas and investors have ideas, it's a very big input that isn't always going to be best for you. Instead, you should be directing as founders what you do next. And that's back to my original point. The best thing to do is galvanize a whole company around this concept of we're going to fix this, we're going to do right by everybody and figure out what that looks like. And honestly, that might be why they're going for an acquisition. There's probably a place that can figure out all the things that the team wasn't able to figure out so far. And if they make the right pitch, they might even get that sale. But I'm not here to speculate on the price or any of that because it is what it is. This is all rumors. And at the end of the day, I really feel for these founders because they spent so much time and energy and all in good faith. It looks like they're very talented. I'm sure their team is very talented, but it flopped and maybe it's just time to move on.

The show is produced by SupermixX. Thanks for joining.