11 ms·

Half-Baked Product

• Jeff9James 3mo ago
  i am completely new to this stuff (just made a mobile app). thanks for explaining (in 5 year-old kiddo style) how funding and corpo slop works. WOWOW
• schnatterer 3mo ago
  What would you say are the main lessons to be learned here for all sides?
• pradeeproark 3mo ago
  Can’t say this is fiction or non-fiction. Totally depressing. Too good.
• sscaryterry 3mo ago
  Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)
  • k7peak 3mo ago
    I gave up, how did this make it to page 1 jeez.
    • worik 3mo ago
      I loved it. Different tastes
    • bayindirh 3mo ago
      I mean, it's read time is 20 minutes at most. I don't think it's long or tasteless or anything.
    • weli 3mo ago
      I've been experimenting with writing longer-form content. I do agree the main point could be condensed a lot and I'm not the a great writer by far. This is kind of a rant and really cathartic for me to write after working more than 5 years on startups. Just wanted to share it.
      • edu 3mo ago
        I read it full and I loved it and bookmarked it. It resonates with my personal experience, and your writing style is fresh and dynamic. Thanks for sharing it, and it deserves to be on the front page and #1.
      • jaapz 3mo ago
        It's fine, don't worry about it. It's hard for me to read long form on a computer and I read your entire story. You can't please everyone
      • drunkboxer 3mo ago
        I loved every paragraph
      • bravetraveler 3mo ago
        Glad you did share, really enjoyed this... and I've never worked at a startup. Rings true to my hollowed corporate soul. The main difference: your peers might think they're founders; tend to forget they were acqui-hired.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
        I enjoyed it, but it is uncomfortably realistic. Some folks want to gripe about everything. Life's too short to worry about them. They need to live in the world they make; not me.
      • achenet 3mo ago
        Personally, I really liked both your writing and the fact that you took the time to flesh out the main point. Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
      • telchior 3mo ago
        You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.
      • otherme123 3mo ago
    • ares623 3mo ago
      Not enough "key insight", "smoking gun", "this closes the gap", "kicker" huh.
    • vultour 3mo ago
      Do you need a 7-second TikTok summary?
    • realo 3mo ago
      I would guess you are in Sales ...
• HelloNurse 3mo ago
  Brilliant autobiography.
• serhack_ 3mo ago
  It's flabbergasting how this story is close to the reality. Bookmarked, I would love to see it printed.
• clan 3mo ago
  This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum. There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning. I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls. Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)
  • smugglerFlynn 3mo ago
    Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.
    • pockybum522 3mo ago
      Agreed, I have no experience with VC anything, but I was still nodding along the whole time as I was reading.
      • restlake 3mo ago
        same. substitute VC with upper management and I (corporate dev through and through) became more queasy as I read. product and strategic mismanagement is the real deal regardless of the source of capital
    • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3mo ago
      Yeah because developers never wrote a line in POC which made it to prod ;)
  • alias_neo 3mo ago
    Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp. - Mario
    • 3mo ago
• ArcHound 3mo ago
  Brilliant. What I liked are the characters - it's hard to make every character motivation reasonable and so well communicated. What I think is a bit of a missed opportunity is for the product to fail with "the pizza|cake|pastry is half-baked" and so customers still have to do the rest of the job anyway.
• richardfey 3mo ago
  The more I read into it, the more pain memory flashbacks I got. Bravo
• Chyzwar 3mo ago
  This is such European take on startups. Tesla was making shitty overpriced status symbols/value signalling cars and selling FSD for 10k knowing very well that it will not work with car hardware. It took them 10 years to "fake it until you make it stage". If founder keep iterating and hyping his ovens with enough capital he could become big player in oven maker space and disrupting industry. Learning from this article was that he lacked capital and vision.
  • contrast 3mo ago
    I'd argue the spirit of entrepreneurialism and salesmanship in the story is more American! I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder. Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver. Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research? "If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.
    • Chyzwar 3mo ago
      He diluted his vision to garbage on the first enterprise customer. Because he needed to sell now. From OP, there is visible urgency to do sales even when the product is not ready. Tesla was overhyped in the first decade after acquisition by Musk; it was bleeding money for 15 years. Arguably, the first Tesla cars were worse and pricier than traditional cars. My point is that compared to the US, in Europe you have very few stories of successful stealth startups or startups that have needed lots of money for many years. That is a main reason why we cannot create a frontier LLM lab.
  • isoprophlex 3mo ago
• bickov 3mo ago
  [dead]
• abrookewood 3mo ago
  Brilliant. Brutal.
• reactordev 3mo ago
  This is so well written. What would really be icing on the cake would be for Mario to join another oven company that had the same premise (or similar vein) where he got to experience that all over again. Either way, there’s always a starry eyed graduate that thinks this is my ticket.
• Xotic007 3mo ago
  [dead]
• ssenssei 3mo ago
  my favorite blog post of all time... this should go in a museum
• orliesaurus 3mo ago
  This was actually so good to read. It really reminded me of so many of my past experiences at startups.
• nostratas 3mo ago
  This one hits a little too close to home. I left my company around 9 months ago due to being "Mario" at my old company. It was a good decision because it ended up being a sinking ship. I wish I left much sooner, but I didn't know the red flags at the time. An expensive lesson for me
  • denis-stable 3mo ago
    Do you mind sharing why it was expensive lesson?
    • nostratas 3mo ago
      I think the opportunity cost for not moving to a different gig really hurt me, since AI/LLMs were just about to explode at the time I noticed the red flags. I chose to stay because I strongly believed in the mission of my last company (aka really wanted to make that perfect oven), and had some misguided sense of loyalty. I ended up staying a few years. A wiser version of myself would have cut my losses after at most one year, or much sooner, especially after noticing the red flags. This is something I'm keeping in mind for my next gig.
      • dijksterhuis 3mo ago
        learned a similar lesson at last company. should have left after six months as "lead" engineer (of two people, not really much to lead there... which is related to why i crashed and burned out, funnily enough) i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
• mishellaneous 3mo ago
  for me, the moral of the story is that it's easier to promise things than to deliver them. or, engineering was the bottleneck. in my experience, this is not particular to start-ups, or even software engineering. why does this happen though? i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time. also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...
  • ares623 3mo ago
    > engineering was the bottleneck to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • skydhash 3mo ago
    Because engineering is where ideas get materialized in reality. And reality has a surprising amount of constraints, unlike imagination. It’s “draw the rest of the horse” turned to eleven.
• sixtram 3mo ago
  Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.
  • moffkalast 3mo ago
    I hope it's not the approach of using less water by not rinsing properly in the end, so people have to either eat soap or rinse everything manually afterwards, wasting far more water. I swear Bosch is so terrible at this.
    • afandian 3mo ago
      The innovation here is clearly edible soap. And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
      • jodrellblank 3mo ago
        from L'Affaire Siloxane? ( https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane ) (subtitle: "How antiperspirant fumes nearly got NASA to evacuate the space station")
        • afandian 3mo ago
          Wow! (No, from dry-cleaning)
      • pyrale 3mo ago
        Edible soap?! The solution is clearly edible dishes!
        • afandian 3mo ago
          Too late, already been done! https://stroodles.co.uk/collections https://stroodles.co.uk/collections I bought some edible cups out of curiosity a few years back. Nice for coffee. I did end up eating them all, although some of them were still dry at the time of consumption. I think edible soap has better behaviour-adjusted shelf-life here.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• avsn 3mo ago
  Too close to the home, ouch. It’s such a microcosm of things. I can imagine people reading this going “ah, the founder was right, it’s those damn nerds” or “at least WE generated sales” and so on. The more you do startups the more it seems that the time is indeed a flat circle.
• Mizza 3mo ago
  Ouch, that hits close to home, and it seems like it does for a lot of others out there as well. So what's the solution? Is there a playbook that avoids these pitfalls, or is it just the cost of the spin. Ideally, something early engineers can point to when we see non-technical founders falling into familiar traps.
  • adithyaharish 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  • weli 3mo ago
    If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster? For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment. Take it as a mental exercise.
    • dijksterhuis 3mo ago
      > Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster? for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them. i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessmen, big brain dev, co-founder etc. etc. thank you for writing this. i'm still trying to come back from crashing and burning at that place. i might read this a few more times as it felt like my story too. the another Engineer part touched me. that's who i was in my story. it hurt. edit -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774444 hits the nail on the head with their last bullet point. bad leadership innit.
      • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
• rcgs 3mo ago
  Enjoyed this – very entertaining!
• Angostura 3mo ago
  Reading this made me hyperventilate
  • sbinnee 3mo ago
    Same here
  • alooPotato 3mo ago
    same
• thevillagechief 3mo ago
  Brilliant! And this isn't really just about startups. Large companies are operating the exact same way.
  • pockybum522 3mo ago
    Small ones, too!
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• phikappa 3mo ago
  I mean sure, but look, I will not make the same mistakes. Also my context is totally different. And MY oven concept has none of the drawbacks of their oven and Claude tells me I'm definitely on to something. I'm off to the notary to sign the docs for Oven.ai (got the domain for only 300k!!) See ya on my yacht!
• mpetrovich 3mo ago
  The classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem. If the founder had started by talking with people in the problem space, he could have discovered what problems were actually worth solving before investing any money and effort into a product. Everything after that happened were downstream effects of creating something without a defensible reason why and for whom.
• marvinstrauch 3mo ago
  Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
  • sgallant 3mo ago
    Agreed. This could be a story about my last startup... A good reminder.
  • BalinKing 3mo ago
    Welcome to HN. Just a heads up that, from the site guidelines[0]: > Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. (I'm not a mod or anything; I just noticed that most of your comments have been flagged/killed, and I suspect this might be why.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • vntok 3mo ago
      From the same guidelines: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
      • johnfn 3mo ago
        I don’t see anything in there about not commenting on whether the author is using an LLM?
        • fragmede 3mo ago
          That's covered under > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. If there are specific tells that the text has been AI generated, point them out! A lazy drive by of "that's AI!" doesn't teach anything.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• burnout_eng 3mo ago
  [dead]
• virajk_31 3mo ago
  No cap
• ogoffart 3mo ago
  Similar story here. Even though our ovens actually work fine, the problem is a new competitor: OpenOven. Their oven is completely free, and on the Italian forum everyone talks about them. It has even way more buttons than ours (most don't work very well, but the community loves it). We almost sold to MrBaguette, one of the biggest bakery chains in the world, as they wanted new oven supplier for their next generation of kitchen. Their chef tried our oven and loved it. But in the end they went with the pricier one from Corporate Oven, because some VP thought we were too small and worried we wouldn't supply them in 20 years.
  • hwh 3mo ago
    I started OpenOven in my free time of which I had a lot when I was still studying law. Ovens were always something I was interested in and I created FunkyPizzaHeater, as it was named when I started it, only to play around with the tech. I published it on the Italian Oven forums and it really hit a nerve, there were immediately 2 people who took the design a bit further. People tried building them and posted photos, there was a lot of discussion and eventually we agreed on a new name and moved the OpenOven project to github. It was still a project for oven enthusiasts who liked lots of buttons, until it was miraculously featured by a slightly weird but lovable YouTuber with 2 million subscribers who suggested OpenOven to anyone to finally get rid of corporate big oven.
    • jenadine 3mo ago
      I just saw the news that you raised another 1.2 billion. Congrats! If I may ask how do you actually plan to make money? Because as far as I can tell, you're still losing a lot of money on every oven you give away.
• imjonse 3mo ago
  While the majority of comments are absolutely right in recognizing and lamenting such situations plaguing our industry, let's not forget this is an ultimate first world problem. It can be stressful and frustrating but we are a privileged bunch to be able to call this 'pain'.
  • ludamad 3mo ago
    Startups and this kind of business trap are not unique to the first world. As well, your comment is sort of generic isn't it? I could imagine it on virtually every post here
  • micromacrofoot 3mo ago
    it's a more complex version of what happens in the third world too, it's not about class it's about people
  • groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    What? Bro, this is our life. You don’t have to be beaten and starving to have a perspective and story to tell.
  • oenton 3mo ago
    Yes, whatever your situation there's always someone who has has it worse than you. Your comment does not add anything of substance to this conversation. It's also flawed. Sharing and talking about (first world) problems like these is important, lest they become the 'norm' and no longer a 'problem'. Anecdotally I remember 1 hour to 90 minute lunches being the norm 10 years ago. Now, taking more than 30 minutes feels like I need to play 'catch up', primarily because the workload and expectations of SWEs has increased dramatically since then. The pay? Not commensurate. And that's even if you include the short lived post-Covid spike in salaries. "Be grateful for what you have" gets old quick, especially when leaders (and I use that term loosely) use any opportunity to take more and more.
• ac50hz 3mo ago
  s/oven/cms/g
• user1338 3mo ago
  this is the best thing i've read in a while. it's both triggering and prophetic at the same time. really captures the essence of what happens in startups. well done.
• AJRF 3mo ago
  If I didn't laugh i'd cry.
• alansaber 3mo ago
  Entertaining, very AI prose though.
  • weli 3mo ago
    Really? Didn't use an llm other than to do a quick grammar check because english is not my first language.
    • alentodorov 3mo ago
      doesnt sound ai at all to me. great read.
    • Planktonne 3mo ago
      It's worth checking that your LLM actually did just do a quick grammar check, because you've got really quit a lot of LLM tells in the prose. If it didn't make more changes than you're aware of, then you should be aware that some features of your style are common amongst LLMs, and over-use of them will alienate some percentage of your audience (even if unfairly). Key ones to look out for: - Staccato prose: repeated runs of short sentences (e.g. "The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.") - Negative pivots: anything with the structure of '!X; Y' (e.g. 'it’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it') These are valid linguistic features, but if you use them a lot, it sounds like AI writing, and people are wary of AI writing (because of the tidal wave of malicious, spamming & extractive actors using it). It will impact your audience.
    • ImHereToVote 3mo ago
      LLMs are often trained and evaled on English speakers in Africa so this checks out.
  • aetherspawn 3mo ago
    Disagree, I assumed it was a 10 year old story because it was written in the personable style of the old internet…
  • Sheeny96 3mo ago
    I disagree, this read very non-AI prose to me. No "its not x - it's y", or em dashes etc.
• saadatq 3mo ago
  Has anyone ever experienced the alternative? to building products from scratch, growing a business, without the drama?
  • __s 3mo ago
    I did at peerdb
    • saadatq 3mo ago
      Sai? What do you think was the difference?
      • __s 3mo ago
        Sai is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=saisrirampur https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=saisrirampur Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254 https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features
• vjsrinivas 3mo ago
  Great story. Reminded me what my professional nightmare would look like. But, I think at the end it started to thin out its allegorical premise when it started including SWE terms like Kanban and retros.
• dzonga 3mo ago
  you know the pamphlets passed to soldiers before war. your article needs to be passed to engineers & I guess everyone before graduating college. in all the satire - what our industry forgot is - how did people build/fund companies before Venture Capital ?
• sebastianconcpt 3mo ago
  I was waiting for the plot twist and it didn't come, so its genre is: horror.
• gherkinnn 3mo ago
  > A month later, Mario leaves the company. [...] In the retro, it gets written down as a “learning.” That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
• xg15 3mo ago
  I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting: > The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams. That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way. Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company. (I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)
  • nikanj 3mo ago
    It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better
    • stickfigure 3mo ago
      This situation does exist though; otherwise startups and new products would never succeed. Big companies have blind spots. Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.
      • iamjackg 3mo ago
        How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb). I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.
• certyfreak 3mo ago
  Well written and it perfectly describes reality, it got me hooked and nodding from start to finish.
• Galus 3mo ago
  A legend in the making.
• sbinnee 3mo ago
  Wow I was laughing internally. I couldn’t dare to laugh out loud because this story is too real to me. The moment I noticed that I just had to look back my life. Good read
• SilverSlash 3mo ago
  This was such a great read! Thank you! Too bad Oven Inc never got more headcount. Otherwise the engineers could've had a day hackathon week while the managers and founder went to a retreat for a strategy offsite.
• move-on-by 3mo ago
  I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion. I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.
  • chasd00 3mo ago
    I work in consulting and have been in many projects where the client was sold promises and features that don’t exist in reality. If I had a firm I would have a rule that whoever sells a project worth > $5M would also be responsible for delivering it.
    • _matt_ 3mo ago
      And consequently, you'd most likely have no projects worth > $5M :)
      • germinalphrase 3mo ago
        Or link sales commission to delivery success, and have no sales people...
  • DANmode 3mo ago
    > There seems to be no downside. If you don’t see the value of your own word, I can’t give it back to you.
    • move-on-by 3mo ago
      This is just one of the many reasons I don't have the disposition to be in sales
  • dolebirchwood 3mo ago
• anonu 3mo ago
  > When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is The most resonant line for me. This line for me is about how good project management meets team culture. You want a high performant team: one that remains focused and motivated - but the goals are carrots, not sticks.
• tiohijazi 3mo ago
  I made an account just to reply to this post. Happened to me. Word per word. From the start until the end. Exactly like it is.
• satisfice 3mo ago
  This is inkblot test. Some will read it and see fundamental irrationality. Others will read it and say “it could have worked out if a couple of things had gone their way.” The story could be change with just a few sentences in the middle that would turn it into the founding myth of how Globoven took 100% of the market for energy efficient portable emergency ovens for NATO military use.
• hitekker 3mo ago
  > When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth. This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
• abraxas_ 3mo ago
  This was an absolute delight to read. I have tried to build so many ovens in my life…
• m3kw9 3mo ago
  Every feature you add to you product really explodes the amount of new states you have to take care of, in addition to the risk of diverting the core product vision
• baud9600 3mo ago
  Daft! And very strangely true. I recognised several moments and events in the story
• TrackerFF 3mo ago
  One important part of the story is in the very beginning: The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy. You see this in the startup world a lot. Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise. There’s then a big mismatch between what the founder thinks is possible, and what the domain expert thinks is possible. The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not? Another defense is that blindingly naïve optimism is sometimes needed to move the needle, as the concept “that can’t be done” simply doesn’t exist to some people. I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts. EDIT: The very latest happened only a couple of weeks ago. A startup had reached out to my employer as they’re developing a platform in our domain. Higher ups liked what they’d seen, enough to arrange a real meeting. Startup is only 3 months old, and the moment I opened the platform I recognized a vibecoded (likely using clause) platform identical to almost all other launched on a daily basis. So I probed a bit about data sources, serious questions regarding security, etc. but the guy was pretty fluent in consultant (turns out he had worked as a management consultant before launching), and the CTO was just nodding along. In the end they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features - but as mentioned, I’m sure the whole product was entirely vibecoded.
  • smallnix 3mo ago
    > I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts. And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
    • lionkor 3mo ago
      Not OP, but overconfidence is not a quality I would invest in.
      • sph 3mo ago
• groundzeros2015 3mo ago
  > Engineering stops trying to build a good oven and starts adding buttons and features. Nobody made that decision. It just happened I’ve found that most people hate making tradeoffs. They don’t recognize that the things they do like don’t do everything. So If you focus too much on a customer or worse an internal stakeholder who hasn’t designed or built things, it can became a Homer Simpson designing a car situation.
• lilerjee 3mo ago
  Interesting story. This seems a true story of the author? The author understands the characters of the people in the process of business. Understanding reality is not easy.
  • weli 3mo ago
    Not a situation that happened to me per se. More of a mix of situations that have happened to me and I've seen happen to people close to me aggregated into a single metaphor.
    • rpdillon 3mo ago
      I've been working in startups since 2012 and this was a superbly crafted narrative that articulates so many of the odd circumstances that lead to inscrutable decisions in early stage companies...really well done!
    • orliesaurus 3mo ago
      Amazing job writing this up!
• shahzaibmushtaq 3mo ago
  The founder should have visited China's oven manufacturing market/industry after raising 5 million. This could have solved their first major client Pepepizza feature problem.
• liquid64 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• murphomatic 3mo ago
  > “But this is a startup. And startups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sacrifice. You have two weeks.” If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.
• jickmao 3mo ago
  MCP for browser automation is interesting because Safari's WebKit engine is the one most AI agents can't easily drive (Playwright and Puppeteer are Chromium-first). Having an MCP server for it could fill a real gap in cross-browser testing for agent workflows.
  • ImHereToVote 3mo ago
    Wrong thread
• jickmao 3mo ago
  [dead]
• brap 3mo ago
  We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be? I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas. The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run. I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.
  • terminalbraid 3mo ago
    > The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. This is assuming there IS a way to keep the business afloat. It's this framing of thinking that has caused more suffering, frustration, and bad will in all the places I've worked at which are just reskins of this article. A business is entitled to it's model but it is not entitled to success. This story which is more than just a strawman or anecdote gets it right: The engineers are doing their job the best they can with unreasonable expectations set by people who do not feel they need to be constrained by reality and just have dollar signs in their eyes. The engineers do not share the same type of blame as everyone else at the company. Their failure was enabling nonsense and greed.
    • icedchai 3mo ago
      Yep. I've worked at a couple startups where engineering built a thing, sales was able to sell it but had to give a huge discount. The resulting economics just didn't work. But, each sale was seen on its own as a success even though the generally lost money. Often there was a discount plus some promised bespoke feature that required additional development to close the sale. There was never enough volume and often that additional engineering work never applied to another customer. Nobody wants to say "maybe this deal just isn't worth making" and move on. In a couple of these cases, the company was ultimately sold in a fire sale. The early investors, founders, and employees got nothing. The acquisition is still celebrated as a "success", of course.
• themightyquinn 3mo ago
  I’ve felt like this before but I think the responsibility of the founding engineer is underestimated. 20% of the company is a cofounder and a partnership. The failure was compromising on the buttons. An engineer who can say “no” is far more valuable than the one who will grind out features for a sales call.
• dzink 3mo ago
  Here is another story: A baker who bakes for her kids every day makes an oven. She spends years perfecting it by herself with details only someone who uses this product would notice. The nuance of gold baked details in just the right places on the bread, the infusion of essences for the cakes. The precise charring on the pizzas. She goes to young founder events to meet likeminded makers and they talk about space ovens and OvenCrunch incubators fund them just on school name and ideas. But the oven maker with the kids doesn’t even get an interview. She applies with a working product and increasing sales year over year for 10 years and no interview. Her over becomes an organically growing best seller and she doesn’t need the seed money anymore. Incubator founders have spend their seed funding on fancy trips and conferences and flying over the Egyptian pyramids on instagram. The Incubator partners say they don’t fund oven makers anymore because the business is too slow to grow and consumer stuff is a tarpit.
  • weli 3mo ago
    But slow organic growth is not a hyperscaling unicorn. Who wants to invest money for a mere 50% return? We need to x100 or x1000 it for it to even be worth to invest.
    • dzink 3mo ago
      Without a large funded team the founder who knows what they are building will not build an expansion line into other areas because they can’t support the growth solo. Somebody once said funding is kerosene. You want to pour it into working fire pits, not sparklers hoping one of them will be a dynamite stick.
    • invictati 3mo ago
      The sad part isn't that the mom with the kids didn't get VC funding because her startup idea isn't hypergrowth enough. It's that she ever thought she needed it in the first place.
    • carlosjobim 3mo ago
      Slow organic growth doesn't need investments. It pays for itself from revenue. If you need investments, it means the business is gearing up to become bigger, and will have jumps in both expenses and income. So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
• ngm7 3mo ago
  Being able to say no, across the company! Having an engineering team which is allowed to say No the founder. Having a sales team which is allowed to say No to the customer. Having founders who are allowed to say No to themselves, sit patiently and figure the root-causes.
• tatsuya-tamaya 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• jwsteigerwalt 3mo ago
  Well written. This applies much further than just equity raising startups.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• phtrivier 3mo ago
  This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.) What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.) Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?") Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?") More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?
  • engeljohnb 3mo ago
    I'm a healthcare worker, so I'm not immersed in this world at all. I can only speak as person who has to use the oven, but doesn't get to pick which oven is purchased. My bosses don't buy the ovens that are the most dependable, the most efficient, nor ones that are even compatible with the other steps in the cooking process. They're impressed by the AI oven that cooks the pizza mostly right 30-40% of the time. "It'll be more consistent if you let the oven decide how long to cook." But we ignore that because of how stupid it is. They buy ovens that suck because sales people impress them with baking jargon they don't understand. At least, that's how it comes off when they talk about it. I'm sure getting a good deal is a much bigger factor than they say. They don't eat pizza. They can't even tell whether it's burnt. They tell me "soon the oven will do everything for us and you won't be needed." They don't seem to comprehend that an oven can't knead dough or mix ingrdients. And that's even ignoring the fact that the auto-cook features are wrong except in the best of conditions. The ovens break constantly because of the humidity levels needed to keep the dough nice. They spend more on repairs than they ever did on the ovens. We keep telling them to get the moisture-resistant ovens. They say it's too expensive.
• skeletonwebs 3mo ago
  Spoiler: this is not about ovens.
• skeletonwebs 3mo ago
  Spoiler: This is not about ovens.
• arnvald 3mo ago
  [dead]
• pullrun 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• Wowfunhappy 3mo ago
  > The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers. Why did the engineer "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens" not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but the engineer's salary wasn't great anyway; the real goal was to build "the oven of his dreams". To do that, he very much needed to understand the algorithmic complexity involved. What I assume happened is the engineer wasn't sure whether the idea could work, and the only way to find out was to try. Well, he tried, and he found out. Oh well. Isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes. There was nothing wrong with the nine founders who failed. They were just unlucky, and they can try again. I think what went wrong in the story is very simple. The company didn't "fail fast".
  • metalrain 3mo ago
    In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it. This clearly is first point where they could "fail fast", but they believe they can improve and they do. I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
    • Wowfunhappy 3mo ago
      > In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it. Oh, that was another problem! The story says: >> In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP. No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP! If your product's core functionality—baking stuff, in this case—only works one third of the time, then your product is not viable! It is maybe a proof of concept, but certainly not a product.† So the company never should have released an MVP, they should have kept working on their reliability problems. Which is when the engineer should have realized "alright, this isn't going to work," and the whole company needs to pivot or close up shop. Alternately, if they ship a real MVP that can produce perfect cakes with reasonable reliability, and the customers don't like it, that would also be time to change plans. What happened in the story is they shipped a product that obviously doesn't work, customers dislike the fact that it doesn't work, and the obvious conclusion is "well, they didn't like it because it doesn't work yet," which is true but also obvious. You didn't learn anything. This doesn't really answer your question and I don't think a definitive answer exists (and I've never worked in this space). But, obviously, this company should have stopped sooner than they did. --- † The only exception I can see is if you can come up with a potential customer for which "an oven that bakes correctly one third of the time" would still meet their needs. Under the scenario in the story, I don't think this exists. For, say, an AI coding agent that can run automated tests and throw away bad results, a one third success rate may still be useful in some scenarios.
• nilirl 3mo ago
  Honest question: Does the founder end up making money this way? Can you really get rich building a failed business?
  • metalrain 3mo ago
    Usually no. And I have to say that no one tries to build a failed business. Founders can be really earnest about their intentions, work harder when they see the cracks, but often it just doesn't work, they don't find the right way before it's too late. Maybe just before the end someone tries to siphon the funds into private account or assets into their next venture, but you tend to get caught doing so.
  • jppope 3mo ago
    Totally depends. Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc). The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.
• steelebillings 3mo ago
  How on earth did this post get so many points and comments lol
• madradavid 3mo ago
  I have started a number of (failed) companies and this, this article summarizes the last 15 years of my life. A software dev trying to play startup founder. To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
• HelloNurse 3mo ago
  Considerable arrogance is required to think you can improve on mature products enough to conquer a large market share. Such arrogance should be supported by having, if not a demonstrably fantastic prototype, at least an obviously good idea; otherwise you are following the example of Juicero or Theranos. In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).
• miyoji 3mo ago
  > The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight: manufacture a more efficient oven using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want to work more efficiently? Buy our oven. End of pitch. Are you kidding me? Here's my business plan: manufacture faster computer chips than anyone else ever has before using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want faster computers? Buy our chips. End of pitch. Here's my execution strategy: I'm going to hire the person who comments the most on Hackers News discussions about new chips and let him loose, then come back with a million new requirements because I never bothered to understand anything about how people want to use computer chips or how they're sold today. My company eventually loses its only customer when it turns out that we don't know how to build faster computer chips at all. The founder is not "very good", he's a moron who doesn't make a single good decision in the entire story. His failure is absolutely predictable because he doesn't add any value for anyone else at any point in the story, he doesn't understand his customers, he doesn't understand the market, and he doesn't understand his employees and their motivations. The only thing he ever does is raise money, and he's able to do that because his investors also know nothing about the customers, the market, or the potential employees. Great business parable! This matches how reality works 100%, including the delusion that guys like this are "really smart".
• James_K 3mo ago
  This could have all been solved if they added a setting for bread, pizza, or cake.
• Razengan 3mo ago
  Unrelated, but does anyone else remember halfbakery.com? Oh cool it's still around!
• muragekibicho 3mo ago
  Is this how they view us? Like yeah. I'm going to spend all night arguing with the Haskell lovers (that's a slur in my books) on Reddit, but it's not my hobby. Rather, responsibility demands I direct these functional programmers away from the devil.
• stymaar 3mo ago
  Oh, that one hits hard on the nail.
• thr0w 3mo ago
  > The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight Premise is laughable right out of the gate.
• z3ugma 3mo ago
  This is like a punch in the gut. Holy buckets. How do you prevent this? Bootstrap?
  • metalrain 3mo ago
    Only functional startups I've seen solve actual customer problem and don't try to solve all problems. Usually they have tried several things before they found one that actually is worth solving. But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
• ivansmf 3mo ago
  The technology is amazing. The marketing around it is a decade ahead of its capability, and the pushiness to make LLMs do what they still can't is just irritating. The question to me is "who is seeing the goal posts?" And the answer is "the marketing department of whoever sells it".
• icegreentea2 3mo ago
  I like this part: The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.” It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break. I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers? I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues. But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here. Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?
  • rdbl27 3mo ago
    He's coldly rational: The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk. Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk. If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million. If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.
    • icegreentea2 3mo ago
      From a rational standpoint, I don't understand how investors could feel betrayed by a pivot that involves creating two ovens to eventually allow the founder to capture 10% of the market. Functionally, I can't imagine a single investor actually caring about these details. They don't care about the number of buttons, or if it can do wedding cakes, or whatever. They care that the founder and team demonstrates competence in their decision making and execution. If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal. More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.
• rdiddly 3mo ago
  This was exquisitely cringe-laden and I think I may be the Luigi figure
• tinyhouse 3mo ago
  This is so well written. Well done!
• annjose 3mo ago
  Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol. I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.
• synapsehire 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• podgorniy 3mo ago
  This writing is too realistic to feel joy about it. Thanks for putting it together (and then to the HN)
• wxw 3mo ago
  Slow clap… matches my experience in startups. And honestly, big tech as well. I think you can consider an enterprise to simply be a collection of many startups with shared revenue as funding.
• 9p 3mo ago
  I LOVE THIS!! well done.
• sandeepkd 3mo ago
  > He offers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of freedom, the perfect oven. This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.
• matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Now I remember why I noped out of tech a decade ago...
• MagicMoonlight 3mo ago
  [dead]
• emilsayahi 3mo ago
  The mistake was when they didn't just switch to selling two types of dough. They had a genuine innovation and should've squeezed as much juice out of that and moved on to finding some other innovation. You don't need to build exactly what you described to your first investors, you just need to build a valuable business for them.
• breadsniffer 3mo ago
  Why do I feel like this is the story of the average B2B SaaS YC startup?
• Karthick81 3mo ago
  The best tools/businesses are coming from domain experts who vibecode, not anyone who can vibecode — because the ones who are not from that domain have not really experienced the painpoints to know what the industry needs, even when they work with a dev team requirements get lost in translation. The catch: domain experts don't know what they don't know about shipping. The fix — vibecoders build it, dev team hardens it for production.
  • sumitkumar 3mo ago
    Can you please give some examples of the best tools/businesses which are being built like this? Genuinely curious. I know the vibe tech is really good but I don't know of any upstarts using it, everyone cool is building/distributing the vibe tech. There are some games/copycats but nothing production grade in my radar.
• mdavid626 3mo ago
  It’s very simple. Everbody just wants to make money. Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place. It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.
  • notatoad 3mo ago
    I don’t think that’s true. Some people really do have product ideas that they want to share with the world. The problem is that those people are really bad at making money, and have a hard time competing with the people whose motivation is money.
    • mdavid626 3mo ago
      That’s exactly what I mean as well. Of course behind startups the basic idea is to innovate. But this gets lots, because most of people just want to make money. VC-s don’t care about innovation, they care that the money they put in, comes back. It’s not evil, it’s just how money-oriented society works.
• thesurlydev 3mo ago
  Best line: "Engineering has no time to stop and rethink their approach, because stopping isn’t in the backlog."
• SaltyAstronaut 3mo ago
  We get so obsessed with shipping shiny features for the next pitch deck that we forget the oven actually needs to bake bread.
• stevetron 3mo ago
  He should have started his own pizza restaurants with his own ovens. Maybe then he'd learn more about baking. Especially pizza. Restaurants wouldn't even need dish washers if they switched to paper plates. The pots and pans have to be washed by hand anyway. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant when I was only 14. I'd work a 12-hour shift on Saturdays because none of the 'real' dishwashers were available. The only perk I got was that I could have an occasional pipsi on-th-house. I also worked as a young adault in my father's restaurant. I'd come home from 'my' job every day, working on an electronics production line only to be shown the huge pile of dishes that had accumulated during the day. The production line paid me $2.50 per hour. My dad didn't pay me anything. But he let me park my 20-foot trailer in his back yard, which was adjacent to the restaurant property, and in the winter I had to refill my propane every 3 days.
• bgultime38 3mo ago
  [dead]
• ryanmarsh 3mo ago
  Ok that hurt, but seriously what's the right answer.
• neilv 3mo ago
  Unrealistic. There's no way a contemporary tech founder would offer 5% of the company to an engineer that late in the game. It would be 0.5%, and it would be ISOs at worthless pricing. Also, for all the founder's Leadership contribution that warranted owning more than half the company, apparently they didn't know that those VCs could pressure/pay all their other companies to buy ovens. And then you simply ride that growth signal to a successful exit. Building and sustaining a viable business is a problem for seasoned professional managers, not brilliant innovators.
• davidbhead 3mo ago
  This horror story is what happens when you prioritize growth before anyone loves your product
• probotic 3mo ago
  [dead]
• dstanko 3mo ago
  kind of reminds me of this: I want to build a teleport. it should look like old time phone booth, have a screen with a world map on it where I can chose the destination, and a big button with letters TELEPORT on it. when the button is pressed user is instantly transported to the desired destination. the teleport mechanism is built in into the base of the booth, so it does not affect overall design.
• tomdow 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• owlguy_11 3mo ago
  > In standups he says “no blockers” and everyone moves on to the next person. I've seen this Luigi in my standups (are people still doing these? whole other topic). Hell, I've been Luigi. Is this unavoidable? - feels like it requires increasing amounts of deliberate concerted effort to avoid this kind of season. When the glitter of "total freedom to build the perfect oven" patinas into the ground-hog's-day of endless tickets and breathless status updates, how do engineer-folk keep hopping back on the hamster wheel of birthday-cake features? Asking for a friend .
• sherlock-holmes 3mo ago
  holy shit this is the best thing i've read in a while. > The founder offers him 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven the slow dilution of the core vision and the engineer's freedom is the saddest thing in this i'm gonna read it 2 more times at least.
• silexia 3mo ago
  Don't forget that they get awarded 3 patents early for very broad things like "heating" and then proceed to sue dozens of legitimate companies and get six figure settlements because fighting it would be even more expensive.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• arendtio 3mo ago
  I am always a bit pissed when I see people using 'MVP' in a different way than how Eric Ries uses it (I know there are other definitions, but I never saw one that made more sense). > First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort or in other words building the most minimum version of their product that will still allow them to learn. [1] There is no hypothesis to be validated or learning connected to those prototypes in the story, and I think using the definition by Eric Ries would change the story quite a bit. [1]: https://leanstartup.co/resources/articles/what-is-an-mvp/ https://leanstartup.co/resources/articles/what-is-an-mvp/
• WeakSpeller 3mo ago
  This was a brilliant read and almost like a playbook in startup world. Reached the end of the story and realised I am the young engineer.
• coolvision 3mo ago
  this is brilliant! I just went through a few years of this, very relatable
• itomato 3mo ago
  " Ovens Inc. doesn’t live off selling ovens (for now). It lives off raising rounds. And rounds are raised with projections, and projections are manufactured out of whatever sales promises. The “No problem” people are also the only life raft." Ever try make a product using Google Glass?
• clicktabweb 3mo ago
  [dead]
• artyom 3mo ago
  Painfully accurate. I've been "the engineer", "the new engineer", Mario and/or Luigi at some point in my career. I can attest, this kind of behavior is pervasive across the industry.
• zftnb666 3mo ago
  Shipping half-baked is fine as long as you call it MVP. Ship half-baked and call it MVP? Genius.
• Aaron_NW 3mo ago
  Nice storytelling! The leader never made the hard choice about who the product was for and what problem actually needed to be solved. A smaller product that works well for a market is usually better than one that is trying to solve for everything.
• Fondly6045 3mo ago
  This has been one of the few perfectly resonating and well written tech blog I have read. The other that comes to mind is Taste by Sarah Guo [https://x.com/saranormous/status/1929982495644365161 https://x.com/saranormous/status/1929982495644365161) Quite the interesting part here is that if someone adheres to taste, the oven story would never happen. The question though is does taste matter more, or the oven :)
• azhenley 3mo ago
  This is the best article I’ve read this year. There’s so much truth in this.
• keynesyoudigit 3mo ago
  This story is so common, and while this post was a very eloquent write up, and it’d be easy to pile on “all those silly non-engineers”, it’s unhelpful for all involved. In keeping with the metaphor, how could Engineer, Mario, or Luigi have negotiated better trade offs? I mean, working for a baker as the founder or at least on the board is huge. But what else? Someone who’s had success critique my draft here:: I want to respect expertise without “caving”. “I understand the goal of the organization is 10% of the oven market, and I believe in that goal, but if we focus only on pizza for a while, we hit 6%, and gain at least 25% NPS. The garlic bread, calzone, and sweet pastry markets would be easy to tackle, getting us closer to cake. Alternatively, we start with cake. If we deliver Pepepizza a cake solution that absolutely thrills them, would that buy us credibility and time?”
• zftnb666 3mo ago
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