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That amount of money is absolutely nothing compared to the waste that goes on in the startup industry. Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven deliver
by fnimick 3y ago
That amount of money is absolutely nothing compared to the waste that goes on in the startup industry. Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van?
- barbazoo 3y ago> Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van? What I find hilarious about our industry is that this could be completely made up ... or not.
- bookofjoe 3y ago>Pizza robot truck startup Stellar snags $16.5M from Jay-Z https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/Stellar-pizza-robot-truck-startup-snags-165m-from-jay-z/633303/ https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/Stellar-pizza-robot-truc... >Stellar, which was founded by former SpaceX employees in 2019, uses a robot to cook mobile ordered pizzas which are then delivered by the truck driver.
- gruez 3y agoThat's nowhere near the $445M claimed though. Crunchbase lists them as having only having raised $25.5M. The $445M if real, must be the valuation. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/steller-pizza https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/steller-pizza edit: looks I'm looking at the wrong company, see replies for details
- bookofjoe 3y agoAlso, the vehicles have a human driver rather than being self-driving.
- retzkek 3y agoThe $445M figure is for another mobile pizza startup, Zume. https://www.axios.com/2023/06/12/softbank-pizza-robot-shuts-down-zume-445-million https://www.axios.com/2023/06/12/softbank-pizza-robot-shuts-... Discussed last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293636
- ilyt 3y agowhataboutism
- Nextgrid 3y agoStartup waste is generally funded from investors though. This seems like it might be funded by government grants which are funded by taxes.
- COGlory 3y agoInvestors using 0% interest loans funded by taxpayers.
- gruez 3y agoAre you referring to quantitative easing/ZIRP or specific government programs that give favorable loans to specific industries?
- COGlory 3y agoQE
- gruez 3y agoThe Fed is the cause of QE/ZIRP, but it's not "funded by taxpayers" in any meaningful sense. The mechanism by which QE is done is that the fed prints money and uses it to buy government bonds and other assets, which pushes bond prices up, and consequently yields (and therefore interest rates) down. All of this doesn't cost the fed anything. The money is printed by them, after all. It's not like they're borrowing money from some other bank at 2%, and then distributing to the wider economy at 0%.
- calderwoodra 3y agoDomino's has a near $14B market cap. Disrupting pizza delivery is a worthwhile venture!
- henryfjordan 3y agoIf you could get that robot-cooks-as-you-drive idea right, even without the self-driving bit, you can out-compete Dominos by saving half the trips (back to store from delivery address). The technology was immature but the fundamentals were there, and they'd save a not-insignificant amount of gas.
- Eisenstein 3y ago> they'd save a not-insignificant amount of gas I wonder the efficiencies of cooking in a vehicle as opposed to a fixed pizza oven.
- henryfjordan 3y agoIt all comes down to insulation I'd assume
- Brusco_RF 3y agoIt will necessarily be worse than the fixed oven.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tetraca 3y agoThat's easy. Put it on treads, and add a tree cutter/stripper, and a hopper, so that it can pick up all the fuel it needs to wood-fire the pizza off the side of the road before it goes to the next destination.
- Eisenstein 3y agoVertical integration. Great idea. It could also have a grain mill so it can stop by some wheat fields and make its own flour.
- fomine3 3y ago
- b112 3y agoWait... so the pizza would be delivered, fresh from the oven?? Is... do you know ... are they taking investors?
- jrockway 3y agoYeah, that startup doesn't sound terrible to me. Like the other comments say, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you cook the pizza while you're driving it to the destination, then you change the time 15 minutes cooking + 15 minutes driving to just 15 minutes cooking and driving. Twice as fast. But of course, you could offer the same latency by having a non-customizable menu and having pizzas ready to go when they're ordered. If it's 6:30PM on a Friday night, odds are someone wants the Pepperoni pizza that just came out of the oven. No fancy hardware required. The pizza is technically less fresh, but are minutes of freshness worth millions in VC? I don't know.
- alphazard 3y agoThe "waste" in the startup industry has corrective mechanisms built in. Investors can pull their money out and take their business elsewhere. Taxpayers cannot pull their money out of the NSF and reallocate it to a different government agency.
- janalsncm 3y agoSure. In theory, investors can behave as rational actors. In practice, you get all sorts of chasing the Next Big Thing because there’s too much money flowing around to too little fundamental research. So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research. That’s like 5 developers for one year who would otherwise be allocated by the invisible hand into effectively useless endeavors like high frequency trading or ad tech. Cut to the alternative universe where they’re working at Blackrock and a car thief is driving their car away.
- boobsbr 3y ago> So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research. I'm not. Where do I opt out of funding government grants? At least I can decide not invest in something if I don't want to risk losing money.
- fnimick 3y agoYou don't get to, because you don't get to opt out of the social benefit that they result in. (remember that government spending basically created transistorized logic, microchips, and computer networking as we know them today. would you have opted out of those too?)
- tstrimple 3y agoYou can opt out here: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expatriation-tax https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...
- dralley 3y agoGovernment funded research gave us computers, the internet, EUV technology, GPS, lasers, and all sorts of other shit. If you're on HN in the first place, there is an approximately zero percent chance that the few dollars of your tax money spent on this kind of research hold a candle to the benefits you've gained from it.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoPeople get irate about government spending here's a big difference between someone wasting your money and someone wasting their own money.
- mcpackieh 3y agoHow could one justify the other? Justifying waste by pointing to more waste is insane.