I’ve been giving a talk on the importance of learning from failure to every YC batch for last few years. I wrote this post in 2017 but never published it. I dusted it off for the 10 year anniversary of Pebble’s launch on Kickstarter.
Eric Migicovsky, ex-CEO Pebble
tl;dr: lack of longterm vision, driving up OPEX too fast, excess inventory because of overestimating growth.
I loved the original Pebble and was disappointed by Pebble Time. A bland color display just made no sense. Either way, Pebble would have been squeezed out by Apple from the top and cheap Chinese knockoffs from the bottom.
Interesting reading for everybody familiar with Pebble.