Last month, Ivan Reedman, the CEO developing Zano, abruptly resigned, citing "personal health issues and irreconcilable differences." The company had already been way behind in developing its product, and it appears as though the drone will never ship.

On Monday, a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found that 9% of all Kickstarters could be deemed "failures." (Kickstarter invited Wharton to conduct the study, but did not fund the research.) For the purposes of the study, a campaign was termed a "failure" if backers never received their promised rewards.

Kickstarter is generally not legally liable in the event of these failures, but nevertheless the company seems interested in analyzing how and why these implosions happen. It's asked Harris to probe into what went wrong, asking him to examine what, if anything, Zano's creators could have done differently to keep the project from being a failure. As Harris wrote in a post to Medium: