The terms of the agreement were simple: 10-10-10. To ensure that happened, he made a deal with TrackingPoint staff in the summer of 2012. McHale, according to former employees, wanted to bring the first weapon to market as quickly as possible. He assembled experts from across disciplines to create his new machine, and began developing the "precision-guided firearm" - the gun that couldn’t miss. Already wealthy from early bets on the telecom and internet industries, McHale certainly had the means to fund a new venture. He would create a new gun, put "fighter jet technology in a firearm," and change the industry. TrackingPoint’s origin story is nearly unverifiable, a disruption tale bordering on the mystical, but according to company lore, it goes something like this: McHale was hunting gazelle when he missed a 300-yard shot, an event that jolted him with an epiphany. With virtually every employee gone, TrackingPoint is now nearly finished, but for a moment, it looked, to anyone watching, like the company was devising a plan for a brave new world from a Texas office. As the company made stratospheric predictions about its future, forecasting growth and earning fame with media tours and demos, former employees say they dealt with long hours, hostile work conditions, and broken promises, often before losing their jobs entirely. In public, TrackingPoint always put a smiling face on its prospects, while internally, the company’s situation looked increasingly dire. "Something spectacular would’ve had to have happened for us to survive that," the former employee says.Įmployees say they dealt with long hours and hostile work conditions After the company’s CEO ditched the system, according to a former engineer, McHale replaced him with someone else, despite the fact he was widely admired by employees.
"Something spectacular would’ve had to have happened for us to survive that."īut John McHale, the mercurial entrepreneur behind TrackingPoint, had already made his bet on the BRS. Worse, if the BRS wasn’t working, you couldn’t fire the gun at all. The device could cause more trouble than it was worth, and engineers were spending as much time putting together the BRS as all the other parts of a rifle combined. According to former employees, the system was a mess.