Comma was always riding the tailwinds of the underdog effect.
When Tesla ships an autopilot on mass market cars that fails in edge cases, commenters are up in arms that it wasn’t tested to perfection in every scenario. Big companies are punished if they don’t deliver perfection.
When an underdog company hacks together an autopilot proof of concept and takes a reporter for a ride with it, they’re heroes for pulling off a technical feat like that. Underdog stories will always draw applause.
The challenge with a company like Comma is that they can’t maintain underdog status forever. The product is very impressive in the context of an underdog hacker success story, but outside of a few early magazine shootout wins it just can’t hang with the efforts of the big companies throwing huge budgets at their own solutions. This puts them in a difficult spot because the underdog-hacker story can’t scale forever.
Is this why Argo AI (legacy funded startup from the ranks of CMU, system set them up for success) just shut down their entire company and Comma is still selling devices? No? Ok.
I'm not sure what you think this proves, but Argo's shutdown is indicative of just how difficult driverless is. GP's comment is entirely about how Comma needs to mature beyond the hacker underdog shipping some devices to DIY tinkerers, and that's an incredibly challenging task.
It proves that comma is making money today by being an “underdog” while Argo never made a dime and is now out of business by being the opposite of an underdog. Would you rather be an underdog or be unemployed?
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