I heard actually read in FORBES that DJI china has fired ALL the staff at LA .. hence no reply to my e-mail too for the last 3 weeks!!
here is the link http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryan ... -china-billionaire/
It was in Muncie that Wang first met Colin Guinn, a well-built Texan, whose angular good looks once graced reality TV show The Amazing Race . Guinn, who ran an aerial cinematography startup, was looking for a way to shoot stabilized video from a UAV and had reached out to Wang by e-mail to see if the young Chinese company had a solution. Wang was working on exactly what Guinn needed, a new kind of gimbal that used onboard accelerometers to adjust its orientation on the fly so the video frame remained still despite a drone’s shaky flying. Wang had gone through at least three gimbal prototypes–and one incapable intern–before he had a decent one. Wang figured out how to connect the drone’s motor to the gimbal so it wouldn’t need its own motor, cutting down on parts and weight. By 2011 the cost to make a flight controller had dropped to less than $400 from $2,000 in 2006. After initially meeting DJI executives in Muncie in August 2011, Guinn flew out to Shenzhen and eventually formed DJI North America, an Austin, Tex. subsidiary aimed at delivering drones to the mass market, with Wang’s blessing. Guinn was given 48% ownership of the entity, with DJI retaining the remaining 52%. Guinn was put in charge of North American sales and much of its English-language marketing, quickly developing a new motto for the company: “The Future of Possible.” The relationship initially went well. Wang remembers Guinn as a “great salesman” whose “ideas sometimes inspired me.” By late 2012 DJI had put all the pieces together for a complete drone package: software, propellers, frame, gimbal and remote control. The company unveiled the Phantom in January 2013, the first ready-to-fly, preassembled quadcopter that could be up in the air within an hour of its unboxing and wouldn’t break apart with its first crash. Its simplicity and ease-of-use unlocked the market beyond obsessed enthusiasts. Yet things had already started falling apart between Wang and Guinn. DJI’s founder didn’t like that Guinn was taking credit for the development of the Phantom and was calling himself CEO of DJI Innovations, a title that still stands on his LinkedIn page. Sources also say that Guinn would often rush into setting up partnership agreements, particularly one with action-camera maker GoPro, which would have been an exclusive camera provider for DJI’s drones. Wang got cold feet in that deal and went against Guinn’s advice, subsequently angering GoPro, which is now rumored to be developing its own drone. Initially DJI was planning to only break even on the Phantom’s $679 retail price. “We made an entry-level product to prevent competitors from entering a price war,” says Wang. The Phantom, however, quickly became the company’s bestselling product, increasing revenue fivefold with little marketing. More important, it sold around the world, a trend that holds today as the company derives about 30% of revenue from the U.S., 30% from Europe and 30% from Asia, with the remainder from Latin America and Africa. That’s a source of pride for Wang. “Chinese people think imported products are good and made-in-China products are inferior. We’re always second class,” he says. “I’m unsatisfied with the overall environment, and I want to do something to change it,” he adds. By May 2013, DJI attempted to buy out Guinn’s stake in DJI North America, offering DJI Global shares that would have given the American a paltry 0.3% stake, according to court documents. Guinn demurred, pointing out that it was his office’s work that led to 30% of Phantoms being sold in the U.S. DJI did not leave room for negotiation and by December had locked all of DJI North America’s employees out of their e-mails and redirected all customer payments to China headquarters. By New Year’s Eve the employees had been fired and arrangements were being made to liquidate the Austin office’s equipment. DJI ended that year with $130 million in revenue. Guinn subsequently sued in early 2014, though the parties eventually settled out of court in August for an undisclosed amount under $10 million, according to sources. (DJI disputes this figure but declined to give an actual amount.) That’s slightly more than what the share-exchange deal would have been worth at the time, given that Sequoia Capital invested a little more than $30 million in mid-2014 at around a $1.6 billion valuation. “To say I had nothing to do with the Phantom would be hilarious, just as it would be to say I was the inventor of the Phantom would be hilarious,” says Guinn, who with many of his former colleagues joined 3D Robotics to take on their past employer.
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