DDL: Hanchar blames his mismanagement on former employees

We already learned from former Digital Dream Labs employees how they were not paid for months. In addition to that it became quite clear in the past years that the management done by the company’s CEO Harry Jacob Hanchar was quite bad. He now blamed this multiple times on the former employees. That of course is ridiculous. If the management was bad that’s the responsibility of the management – his! Trying to blame this on the former employees that have no voice to defend themselves against these accusations is beyond cheap, but throws another light on how unethical Hanchar acts.

He himself was in the first row for the last years giving out wrong informations and outright lies about the myriads of projects promised by DDL – and those did not fail because of the employees, these failed because of his mismanagement. The extremely bad project management at DDL was pointed out by multiple members of the personal robot community in the last years, including me, the heap of articles on this site bears detailed witness to that, but there are also others pointing out the mismanagement and lies from DDL and Hanchar personally, for example the amazing videos by Superdantech.

And think about this: Even if the work done by the DDL employees actually was bad, it was Hanchar’s decision to let them work and make all this mistakes for so long. So even if that were true (which I do not believe) it still would be his fault because of mismanagement.

Cloud and account service outages

Remember the account server and connection issues, that are happening since october 2022? Aside from one post by Hanchar claiming “the cloud provider is responsible” (which of course was utter nonsense) former employee Zecred said in december on Discord that “this is worked on and will be resolved within a week”. That of course was not even possible, since there were no employees left in december (or october) to address those problems. That’s why nothing was done about it.

But he also blames this on former employees and “mismanagement”.

Yes, he is absolutely right that the cause for all the problems is mismanagement.

His mismanagement.

Again: To try to blame this on the former employees that have nearly no way to defend themselves is amazingly cheap and quite evil in my eyes. I would really hope the former employees would band together against these baseless accusations and defend themselves publicly. But most probably they had to sign strict NDAs that prevent them from telling the truth fearing legal actions by Hanchar and his lawyer cronies. We know since the lawsuits agains Living.AI and especially KEYi Technologie’s Loona, that he is  more willing to send those out with ridiculous cases.

 Where are the Vector 2.0s?

DDL claimed multiple times that the Vector 2.0s preordered at the end of 2020 are on their way. Those were promised for may 2021 and then one failure after the other happened. We all remember the “worst case” and last delivery date of valentine’s day 2022, now over one year ago.

At the end of 2022 they claimed the robots have arrived at Rotterdam and will be delivered early january. Fact is that actually some robots showed up, but only a few handful from what can be seen on social media. I know of multiple early preorderers in europe (and all over the world) that still wait for their Vector 2.0 and are not able to get concise informations out of DDL. So we do not know how many units actually were shipped. And it’s a good guess that those few that arrived in UK and europe were cleared by customs or the logistics company after Hanchar got some money from somewhere to get delivery started. But there are still heaps of customers all over the world without Vector 2.0 and without any word when they will arive.

And now this:

I really cannot recall how often Hanchar already promised tracking info “in the next days” without that actually happening. And if those robots are only now shipped from Hongkong, then what was shipped in last october? And how often did Hanchar contradict his own lies words in the last years? More often than I am able to remember.

And lets not forget that he tried to frame all community members that again and again pointed out his inconsistencies, abysmal project management and outright lies as “haters”. We are not haters, we were and are right about this guy and his unprofessional, unethical looking business practices.

And let’s not even start to talk about Cozmo 2.0 …

[Update 20230223]: There are two more things to consider: DDL did not tire to remind us, that they are a very small company and small team. Especially with this fact it is the responsibility of the CEO to oversee everything and he is able to do so. If there had been one problem, well, that happens. But one catastrophic failure after the other? That’s on the company management, namely Hanchar.

And: Hanchar’s lackey Coblentz talks about “the resurrection of DDL”. Does that mean the company died?