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In hindsight, many failures seem ridiculous. But they're ridiculous in part because they failed. You could have written basically the same thing about Starbuck
by nordsieck 7y ago
In hindsight, many failures seem ridiculous. But they're ridiculous in part because they failed.
You could have written basically the same thing about Starbucks if it had failed.
But it didn't.
It went on to become one of the great success stories of the modern era.
- dcolkitt 7y agoI'm always reminded of how the founder of FedEx got a C+ on his project when he presented the idea for the company in his business school class.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoHe also saved the company by betting the last of the company reserves at a casino when they were near insolvency during the early days.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoSomeone claiming to be an early employee that wrote the first scheduling software showed up here a few years ago and said that story is BS, FWIW.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago/u/graycat, although I’m unable to find any reference that the story is inaccurate from a quick HN and Google search. If you find it, feel free to reply with a link to correct me. Sidenote: epic thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9281466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9281466
- reitzensteinm 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5405903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5405903
- toomuchtodo 7y agoThank you! Now I just need to find it somewhere canonical besides HN so Wikipedia can reference it. Appreciate the myth busting!
- reitzensteinm 7y agoI never would have got it without the name, so thank you too!
- thom 7y agoIf Alfred Peet had pitched the founders of Starbucks on a bunch of robot baristas in the back of vans who would deliver your coffee, but which spilled half of it before it got to you, it would have been right to pour scorn on them.
- oldgradstudent 7y agoI would think the failure and the ridiculousness are not unrelated. > You could have written basically the same thing about Starbucks if it had failed. Not really. Starbucks started as a coffee shop, and started expanding when they became successful. There's a limit to how ridiculous that can be.
- ansible 7y agoYes, the basic business model of a coffee shop worked. What Starbucks did was codify best practices, and worked on efficiency to scale-out.
- mumblemumble 7y agoI guess. But, in this case, it sure seems, in hindsight, like it should have been predictable. My first thought when I heard about the company was, "How do they keep the toppings from flying all over the place if the truck hits a pothole or has to make as sudden stop or something, and the cheese hasn't softened enough to stick it in place? And how do they keep the cheese from sloshing all over the place after it melts?" It would seem, based on what I'm reading now, that my error was assuming that they had thought of something clever and wondering what it was. Because the answers turn out to be (1) skimp on the toppings, and (2) you can't, it just plays out like a scene from Astérix chez les Helvètes† back there. I can infer from this that I, a person who was just sitting on their armchair having a knee-jerk reaction, still managed to think more deeply about this business plan than any of the key figures or investors. Starbucks, on the other hand, seems to have always had a basic grasp of how coffee behaves vis a vis Newton's First Law of Motion. †(DDG image search seems to do a better job than Google at turning up the cheesiest panels.)
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoGoogle gets it if you add fondue.
- wolfgang42 7y ago> turning up the cheesiest panels I didn’t expect such a literal interpretation: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/random-raves-xxvii-and-what-in-the-blue-blazes-is-a-roflcopter.489405/page-33#post-12321992 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/random-raves-xxvii-an...
- Barrin92 7y agoI don't see the comparison. Starbucks is a successful, 50 year old, company with a good brand and always had a sane strategy. Failure or success aren't random. What the author is alluding too is the fact that putting a bunch of robots into a pizza store isn't going to turn you into a technology company worth hundreds of millions, that is absurd right from the beginning.
- rhizome 7y agoWhat did Starbucks do that McDonalds hadn't been doing for decades already?
- mumblemumble 7y agoComfortable seating.
- edoceo 7y ago$6 for a cup of mostly water.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoNot burn their customers so badly they were put in the hospital.
- rhizome 7y agoYou still believe that take on the story?
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoAbsolutely
- rhizome 7y agoOK that's weird. I was wrong to dispute it, but I think the story has gone around and around on my radar so many times that I was confused as to which was the right story. Kind of an "eggs are bad" "eggs are good" depending on which decade you're talking about. Mea culpa!
- dboreham 7y agoMake drinkable coffee? Starbucks success imho was due to their having a sufficiently well controlled process to make a consistently decent (if not excellent) cup of coffee in _all_ their stores. Their competitors are all over the place in both the time and location axes.
- diego 7y agoYou may want to check out the Starbucks timeline. They did not raise an astronomical amount of money right off the bat. Blue Bottle is a closer comparison. They also grew organically for many years before raising a serious round. There must be an example of a successful food chain that raised a ton of money in their first few years but I can't think of it off the top of my head. https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/starbucks-company-timeline https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/starb...