6 ms·

How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iterat

How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-functional item to see what the real world roadblocks would have been before a deep investment? This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why are we progressing so fast to build first?

carbadtraingood 4y ago
They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with. It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down. So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.
  - truffdog 4y ago
    Probably they want to handle wheat waste and corn waste long term. Seems like there should be plenty of both to go around
  - liminvorous 4y ago
    They want to be able to process both the material they prototyped with and the material they started with (straw) and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs), and probably any kind of plant matter that has less structural integrity than say, timber.
  - pkrein 4y ago
    Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
    - rexreed 4y ago
      If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?
      - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
        Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
        rexreed 4y ago
        John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour, IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from starting an agtech company where the resources are if they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.
        stonemetal12 4y ago
        The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.
        4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ComputerCat 4y ago
    Yeah it's definitely a bit peculiar. You'd think they could have done some more research into the makeup of the material they'd be processing, get a good understanding of the needs of the machinery...
  - carbadtraingood 4y ago
    Wheat straw is a common agricultural waste product across the US, and if they can solve processing that they still win. It's not that they tested A for a product that will only process B. They tested A for a product that will eventually process A and B and C and... Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now they've done that?
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I’m starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything completely careless to the historical realities of business where you have a product and process before investing tons into a system. It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't they be where their customers or resources are? Building something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and experience. This seems more like a university research project than a serious concern?
    - tclancy 4y ago
      Wouldn’t the reverse question then be, why hasn’t someone in the Midwest done this already?
      - sumtechguy 4y ago
        They may have already used that material for something else?
        seunosewa 4y ago
        Like animal feed. Or tilling it into the soil to increase organic matter.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        There are other companies working on similar things in the Midwest. It is a complex problem that farmers are very interested in because they see potential dollars. https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-iowa-pyrolysis-project-progresses/ https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-iow... https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid
taneq 4y ago
Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask for samples, no matter how careful you are. I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop. Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind of thing you could rely on rolling nicely. Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest examples they can find, because they think you might buy their product... Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real product when you really aren't.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =]. What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
  - taneq 4y ago
    Oops, I meant to come back to this but stuff happened. It certainly was a lot of work to get it halfway reliable. I think they were working on adding a vibrating motor to keep things moving even if they weren't rolling - while I was there they just had a guy poke it with a bit of rebar every time things hitched up. A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/ https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!
coryrc 4y ago
I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe sticking with wheat instead of corn?

carbadtraingood 4y ago

They discuss a bit in the article, but the material they had prototyped with was very different than the material they tried to scale up with. It sounds like their scaled up plant accepted a wide variety of materials, but this one specific input stream slowed them down. So they weren't shut down while they figured this out, they just processed the material they knew they could process until they had a solution here.

rexreed 4y ago
Why would you prototype with a material that's substantially different from the real-world item? I read the article and this bit puzzled me. The differences clearly matter, and the $300M bankruptcy they reference in the article even makes that point.
- truffdog 4y ago
  Probably they want to handle wheat waste and corn waste long term. Seems like there should be plenty of both to go around
- liminvorous 4y ago
  They want to be able to process both the material they prototyped with and the material they started with (straw) and the material they tried to scale up with (corn cobs), and probably any kind of plant matter that has less structural integrity than say, timber.
- pkrein 4y ago
  Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state. Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
      - rexreed 4y ago
        John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour, IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from starting an agtech company where the resources are if they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.
      - stonemetal12 4y ago
        The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.
      - 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ComputerCat 4y ago
  Yeah it's definitely a bit peculiar. You'd think they could have done some more research into the makeup of the material they'd be processing, get a good understanding of the needs of the machinery...
- carbadtraingood 4y ago
  Wheat straw is a common agricultural waste product across the US, and if they can solve processing that they still win. It's not that they tested A for a product that will only process B. They tested A for a product that will eventually process A and B and C and... Scaling up means testing with new inputs at scale. So now they've done that?
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I’m starting to believe the idea that long term zero percent rates have made MBAs in charge of almost everything completely careless to the historical realities of business where you have a product and process before investing tons into a system. It seems to me that with “endless free money” we miss things like “this one input stream will be a nightmare, let’s not do it”.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Absolutely agree. Also, how is this firm based in Silicon Valley / San Fran where the customers are primarily in the midwest? If they were serious about this problem, shouldn't they be where their customers or resources are? Building something in isolation and then "shipping" it to where it will be used seems very inefficient and they're clearly missing out on valuable on-the-ground information and experience. This seems more like a university research project than a serious concern?
  - tclancy 4y ago
    Wouldn’t the reverse question then be, why hasn’t someone in the Midwest done this already?
    - sumtechguy 4y ago
      They may have already used that material for something else?
      - seunosewa 4y ago
        Like animal feed. Or tilling it into the soil to increase organic matter.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      There are other companies working on similar things in the Midwest. It is a complex problem that farmers are very interested in because they see potential dollars. https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-iowa-pyrolysis-project-progresses/ https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/frontline-bioenergys-iow... https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/12/20/rapid

taneq 4y ago

Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask for samples, no matter how careful you are. I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop. Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that you'd get in even one tonne of balls, and when you're feeding 5 tonnes per hour, that's a lot of jams. We had balls with big craters in them, half-balls, balls with two halves offset by 50%, and everything in between. Not the kind of thing you could rely on rolling nicely. Also, of course, when you ask a mill ball manufacturer for a sample, they might be inclined to send you the very nicest examples they can find, because they think you might buy their product... Anyway, unless you're super careful about sourcing legitimate feed samples it's easy to think you're testing against the real product when you really aren't.

orthecreedence 4y ago
I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =]. What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
- taneq 4y ago
  Oops, I meant to come back to this but stuff happened. It certainly was a lot of work to get it halfway reliable. I think they were working on adding a vibrating motor to keep things moving even if they weren't rolling - while I was there they just had a guy poke it with a bit of rebar every time things hitched up. A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/ https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!

coryrc 4y ago

I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.

rexreed 4y ago
Did it though? As far as I can tell they only have part of the problem worked out, and the rest of the problem may indeed be a show-stopper. How many more show-stoppers before they run into the same issues that bankrupted the $300M company? If you don't know what the show-stoppers are, then what is the best approach for plowing ahead anyways? Maybe sticking with wheat instead of corn?