They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
I still have most of the things I bought from Massdrop - pocket knife, leather belt, headphones, etc. Those products lasted.
It's both a lot more interesting and a lot more risky than Massdrop used to be in the sense that there is lots of stuff that even the old Massdrop never would have offered but you're sending a random person on the internet money (sometimes hundreds of dollars) and hoping to receive a product many months later. They have added a "vendor trust" program in recent years to better help inform buyers but there is always risk.
I too would like to know. I bought many keyboard build kits from massdrop back in the day as well as my terrific Sennheiser headphones.
Gandalf wept...
They even sent me a gift box because my blog post about the keyboard had driven so much traffic. It had a CST mouse in it (among other things).
Still using the mouse.
Nowadays you can buy awesome small batch keyboards from small vendors.
https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/sennheiser-officially-d...
It's actually much worse than the linked article though, since it's corporate BS style AI generated slop.
https://www.sonova.com/en/sonova-presents-renewed-strategy-e...
There is no way that MassDrop was ever going to justify that kind of capital investment. VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment at this point -- they have no idea what they're doing. It ironically looks a lot like central planning, where the VCs themselves invest with the intention of picking the winners and losers themselves.
This company should've bootstrapped and remained small-and-manageable. Not every business, not even most businesses, should raise money with the intention of becoming a "unicorn," it is nonsensical and this model has a lot of deleterious effects for our society, namely and most obviously enshittification when the outcome doesn't justify the investment.
Can you suggest other saner forms? For example, having experts pick, government pick, or only one single debt instruments all have problems with the kinds of investments VC funds, not to mention that they also have their share of ludicrous and bad investments.
Also please suggest how you’d stop VC as is at its core a private investment club - you and other investors get together to invest capital into a profitable but risky venture. The only way to stop it would be to either ban private capital or to ban coordination of capital which on net ends up significantly worse.
1. Large firms investing in early r&d instead of aquisition.
2. Its a symptom of decades of poor economic policy rewarding speculation, to a scale that impacts society by disencentivizing stable investments that benefit humanity. Main lever causing this is through Federal reserve poor policy since 200
It’s also what Xerox and Bell labs were doing in the 70s and what Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc are doing today but it took smaller more nimble players to actually do anything with the research. Case in point: transformers came from Google.