In June 2016, Antoine Balaresque, the cofounder and CEO of the hot new startup Lily Robotics, stood before a room of business students at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, ready to reveal the PowerPoint slides that had made him an instant startup celebrity. Wearing the ubiquitous Silicon Valley uniform of a T-shirt and jeans, he appeared slightly bashful, with unruly hair and a boyish face still round in the cheeks. He seemed self-conscious about being feted by the room of business school students.

Jessica Pishko is a San Francisco-based journalist who writes frequently about incarceration and social justice issues. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

The presentation began like most of Balaresque’s talks, with the Lily Drone promotional video: A slick film showed the drone swooping through the air, capturing footage of users engaged in a series of outdoor adventures. When the video finished, Balaresque began to recount the origin story of his “flying camera.” It started in 2013, with a family trip to Yosemite National Park, during which Balaresque’s mother took a group photo. His mother, he said, was always behind the camera, so “she was missing all these memories.” His mother’s absence from the shot inspired him to create a selfie drone—the Lily Drone—that would be portable and easy for novices, like his mother, to use.

There are many camera drones on the market, but along with cofounder Henry Bradlow, Balaresque had created a product with a unique attribute. “It flies itself,” Balaresque told the Haas crowd. Using a combination of a GPS tracking system and visual recognition, the pair designed the camera drone to follow users wherever they went—like magic, without the need for a remote control. It was lightweight and portable, designed for both the novice traveler and the hardcore adventurer.

Balaresque was solidly at the helm of his story, and it seemed like his company was going stratospheric. The previous year, Lily Drone had enchanted Silicon Valley and beyond. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal put it on its list of products “that will change your life.” Balaresque and Bradlow were named in Fortune’s 30 Under 30. Facebook buzzed with excitement, and people eagerly placed $499 preorders, imagining the drone on family trips and skiing adventures.

Just a few months after this presentation, by January 2017, the headlines had changed. “Drone Startup Abruptly Shuts Down.” “Is Lily Robotics the Theranos of the Drone World?” Lily Drones was now “hyped,” “collapsing,” and “failed.” Preorder customers bemoaned their losses on the internet. Those who hadn’t ordered gloated. In early 2017, the company declared bankruptcy and was sued by the San Francisco District Attorney’s office for false advertising based on claims that the promotional video—the same one that elicited applause less than a year ago—was fake. The DA’s office accused the founders of publicizing a product that they knew wasn’t possible to make in the timeframe advertised.

Over 60,000 Lily customers are still waiting for their drones. But was the Lily Drone, as the headlines suggested, all a con? The trajectory of Lily Robotics is a cautionary tale for the young and adventurous enchanted by the latest technology dreams. Though 3D printers have revolutionized at-home manufacturing, there’s still something profoundly difficult about rolling out a phalanx of sleek flying drones without experience and expertise. The story of Lily is about two ambitious college students with smarts and personality who wanted to change the world—or at least photography. But they didn’t have the right tools, and didn’t listen to those who did.

The story of Lily Drones starts at the University of California, Berkeley, where Balaresque and Bradlow were students. As a teenager in France, Balaresque was inspired to apply to UC Berkeley by the cousin of a classmate who attended. At Berkeley he was first exposed to robotics and science—an interest that solidified when, as a Business Administration major, he met his cofounder Henry Bradlow, another undergrad studying computer science.

The duo arrived at Berkeley at a precipitous time. Where Stanford University had dominated the Palo Alto tech scene since there was one, Berkeley had largely failed to produce the kind of high-profile startup wunderkinds flooding the Bay Area. When the pair arrived on campus in 2010, the university was ramping up its investments in seed funds and student-run startup competitions in an attempt to generate more entrepreneurial drive on the free-spirited campus.