A Bay Area startup that promised to give music lovers state-of-the-art wireless earphones is instead closing its doors, becoming the latest in a string of crowd-funded companies to take customers’ money and shut down without shipping a product.
San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received. The company emailed customers on Wednesday to break the bad news, directing them to a letter posted on the Kanoa website.
“This is not the outcome we had foreseen, and with the quick turn of events, we are emotionally overwhelmed,” the company’s website stated. “We know you are disappointed, and can only ask that you understand that we genuinely tried.”
This article is a good reminder to people that investing in a company or worse just a guy with an idea is very risky and I see similarities of these crowding funding projects to ICOs in the crypto currency realm. I watch Jsnip4 and Bix Weir pumping these ICOs and I hope people that are living pay check to pay check aren't putting thousands of dollars into these things hoping to make $90,000 like Jsnip4 did with Veritaseum because these ICOs are very risky. What happens when the big boys like Microsoft and Apple get into the blockchain club a month or two down the road? How many of these ICOs are going to survive and push a product out to market before the big boys come in and gobble it up? It probably won't be good for the people holding these ICOs for the long run and on the internet a life time of events can happen over the course of a few months or a year.
So if you're spending hundreds or thousands on a product that doesn't even exist yet. I hope that's just your extra play money this month you have to throw around to waste on random crap. For me personally money is kind of tight right now so I've only been using the money I've made on Steemit to invest in some of these ICOs with some success but nothing crazy like Jsnip4 talks about. I thought about selling off some non-preforming stocks that I own and invest that money in cryptos but I'm not sure if I want to gamble with a few grand. I think I would have to put half in silver just to hedge my bets and make sure I can't loose all of it.
Only time will tell how these ICOs are going to pan out. I'm sure some will be great successes but I'd be willing to bet most will fail over the next few years. So invest your money wisely, do your homework and look for red flags that you would normally be looking for in real life that would make you avoid that company.
And if you're interested in how bad this Kanoa product sucked you can check out the review video below by the youtuber that supposedly made this company shut down.
In agreement with you @wakeupnd. Every startup brings with itself it's own share of risks. Of all those that open, few succeed. However, it is worthy to note that startups are hot grounds for innovation, and if we stop investing in the start-ups, technology will stagnate.
That being said any kind of investment always has it's share of risks, and investors are aware of this. We should not stop investing in startups, but should rather be curious, informed, and cautious with our investment approach.
My vote goes to funding startups. That is how we will get the next Google, Amazon, and Facebook.