Let’s take a magical tour together, shall we?

This is Part 1 in a series of posts on Magic Leap. After $2.3B in investment and 7 years of secrecy, I’ve developed a sort of low key fascination with what might be happening down in Florida. Oddly, over time, I’ve become more interested in the story of the company and the people involved than the mystery device itself. A small part of me suspects that this particular journey might be more vividly remembered by history than the destination.

So…. in order to get it all out of my system, I’m going to do a bit of digging and see where it takes us. Therapy for me and hopefully something interesting for you.

Let’s start with the low hanging fruit.

Magic Leap requires NDAs to be be signed by anyone who has tried their hardware demo, I expect being a Magic Leap employee also comes with a hefty NDA agreement. I don’t know what the consequences are for breaking this particular NDA but they must be rather severe as many years have gone by and we’ve had surprising few leaks. Magic Leap makes Jobs era Apple look like an open book. These legal trappings s have always struck me as being at odds with the way Magic Leap tries to portray itself as a company: A place of fun, adventure, childlike wonder…. and… monstrous legal consequences.

Glad you are having a good time but remember….. don’t talk about anything you’ve seen here…. or else.

I did some poking around Glassdoor.com and was pleased to see that Magic Leap has a rather active review section. Now, I must warn you the rest of this post is going to seem very negative, but I fear I’d only bore you with a series of reviews like this one:

Or this one….

Not a lot to be gleaned from this happy preening and there are only so many happy instances of of the word “Magical” that I can stand so…

What follows is a curated list of only the NEGATIVE reviews of Magic Leap. Why negative? Simply, they are appear to be far, far more interesting than glowing praise and appear to offer some genuine insight into the inner workings of the company.

There are currently 55 reviews on Glassdoor for Magic Leap and about a third are negative. Keep in mind, dear reader, it is well possible to post fake reviews on Glassdoor that are gushingly positive or horribly negative. I do however get the feeling that a lot of this is genuine feedback and that a pattern emerges among them.

Here are some of the standout quotes. [ spoiler warning! ]

Either management doesn’t appear to have a clue, or they are in on a very giant scam.