Lily Camera

» see lily.camera as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ how it landed ~

in may 2015 a uc berkeley pair named antoine balaresque and henry bradlow posted a promotional video for a small white quadcopter called lily. the pitch was one sentence. you throw it into the air and it follows the tracking puck on your wrist while filming you. waterproof to ip67. no controller, no pilot skill needed. preorders opened the same day at $499 with a promise to ship that year. by the time orders closed they had taken about $34 million from roughly 60000 customers.

the camera in the promo video was not lily. it was a gopro hero mounted to a dji inspire flown by a professional pilot. the footage of the drone catching itself out of a river was staged with a different prototype that did not match the production unit. the san francisco district attorney would later cite this directly in a fraud complaint, and fortune would compare lily to theranos in a headline two days into the shutdown news cycle.

three shipping deadlines slipped, from late 2015 to summer 2016 to spring 2017. on january 12 2017 the founders posted that the company had run out of money and could not finish the product. they would refund every preorder. the same day the san francisco da filed civil fraud charges. on february 27 2017 lily filed for chapter 11. by may 30 2017 the assets had been bought out of bankruptcy by mota group, which kept the brand on a different drone that was not the one the preorders had paid for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

under the throw-and-go concept, the actual engineering work was tracking and autonomous low-altitude flight under weatherproof housing. the prototypes did some of the tracking, badly, in calm conditions. the production weight target kept slipping because the batteries needed to fly the unit through wind and follow a moving subject were heavier than the chassis had been designed around. by the time the company shut down the prototype could not reliably keep up with a person jogging.

the gopro karma launched in october 2016 with a built-in follow mode for $799. the dji mavic pro shipped the same month at $999 with active track. lily had been crowdfunded against a market that no longer existed by the time it could have shipped, and the market the dji and gopro entries had created assumed the user would tap a tracking icon on a phone, not throw the drone like a frisbee.

~ the long tail ~

refunds did go out, slowly, to most of the 60000 preorder customers, paid in part out of the bankruptcy estate and in part out of citi card chargebacks that customers initiated when the company started missing self-imposed refund deadlines. the case became a reference point in subsequent crowdfunding-fraud reporting and in arguments for kickstarter-style "no shipping unless funded" structures rather than open preorder collection on an unfinished product.

lily sits in a 2015 to 2020 cluster of crowdfunded hardware deaths beside juicero, jibo, kuri, essential phone, humane ai pin. each one had a slick promo video and a real funding total against a product the company could not actually build. the throw-and-go drone is the only one where the video itself was the fraud.

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