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"A tenant with a meal kit company wanted to automate filling a container with a few ounces of sauce, so Albrecht says they bought a giant machine to squeeze sau
by keenmaster 6y ago
"A tenant with a meal kit company wanted to automate filling a container with a few ounces of sauce, so Albrecht says they bought a giant machine to squeeze sauce into cups. It came in on a big pallet, and it was a huge operation to assemble. Albrecht says they were really excited about this machine.
But when they finally got it hooked up, it didn’t work as expected. She can’t help laughing while she tells the story. “When the sauce comes out of this machine and lands into the little saucer cup it doesn’t land 'pretty' enough. So they just stopped using it. They just left it there.” The giant machine sat hulking on a pallet, unused, for months."
You can't make this stuff up. Silicon Valley season 8 material right there.
- dbancajas 6y agoi mean somebody has to hire minimum wage worker for 1000+ hours before it probably breaks even with equipment cost. It seems like the business is in scamming everyone with the skyrocket valuations and pocketing the salary. Then rinse and repeat.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoWho did the business scam? The investors not doing their due diligence? I invest in businesses, and my responsibilities go further than signing a check.
- catalogia 6y agoMaybe it's your responsibility to not get scammed, but if you get scammed the fact remains that there was scamming going on, regardless of whether or not you were to blame.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoThis word "scam" gets thrown around so much these days that it's basically meaningless. It's really unlikely that the failing startups described in TFA developed a food tech idea, pitched it to investors, rented space in a kitchen, etc just to scam people. It's far more likely that they were just clueless.
- catalogia 6y agoBe that as it may, I was addressing the curious "if it was my fault, then it wasn't a scam" logic. If scamming isn't scamming when you to it to clueless investors, does that mean Elizabeth Holmes should be a free woman? The people she scammed didn't do any due diligence, but that doesn't make her scam any less a scam.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoElizabeth Holmes falsified data and made false representations. That is a scam. Buying a machine that turns out to not do what you need it to do is not a scam.
- quantified 6y agoScale, baby, scale
- jjeaff 6y agoIt's such an ignorant, yet arrogant way to run a business, especially considering many of these startup founders were likely pretty young with little to no industry experience. Having an experienced business owner running an actual, profitable business in your midst should be treated as a gold mine of information. I have actually seen an attitude of "don't listen to or hire industry veterans because they are stuck in the old way of doing things and if they knew any better, they would have already disrupted the industry." Few if any highly successful "disruptive" companies completely reinvented their segment. Uber wasn't the first taxi company, it wasn't even the first ride sharing company. Heck, they weren't even the first app based taxi service. Airbnb was preceded by VRBO by about 15 or 20 years.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoTo double down on your examples, AirBnB was preceded by Couchsurfing, which proved that people were willing to host strangers in their own house.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoCouchsurfing was a completely different arrangement though and that's why it was free. It's like comparing staying at your aunt's house for a weekend to booking a room at a motel, the expectations are just a lot different.
- inopinatus 6y agoIf only it was piping onto a pie.
- gwbas1c 6y agoReminds me of every unreasonable product manager I've encountered.