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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 ove
by xg15 4mo 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 4mo agoIt'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 4mo agoThis 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 4mo agoHow 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.
- stickfigure 4mo agoGoogle was definitely "exact same product, but better". It was a search box. However, I think Anova would be a better direct counterpoint. They started in sous vide, replacing existing products that did the same thing but better. But now they are literally trying to replace ovens. That effort started after the Electrolux acquisition in 2017, but they do seem to be pretty successful. A friend of mine really likes their steam oven, and if I had more space in the kitchen, I would be tempted.
- nikanj 4mo agoBut what were the huge, established companies that had refused to deliver a better product before Google came along?
- fragmede 4mo agoAltavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite.com, something Rocket. It was a long time ago and I've forgotten the rest.
- ShroudedNight 4mo agoLycos
- esprehn 4mo agoYahoo. They very nearly bought Google too, but refused the initial $1m offer and then bid too low the second time. Kind of hilarious to see how that played out over time. Yahoo had two failed attempts to acquire Google; in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.[37][38] In 2002, when Terry Semel entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo
- iamjackg 4mo ago
- ValentineC 4mo agoThis comment reminded me of the James Hoffmann video on the Philips Baristina coffee machine [1]. Philips is in no way strapped of engineering talent, but they can still design the occasional bad product, when there are many alternatives at similar price points that are better, like the Sage Barista Express. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcoDb_4s4y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcoDb_4s4y8
- highfrequency 4mo agoThis is very insightful. I would be interested in reading an elaboration of your thoughts on this, particularly the role of BigCos and startups and the core nature of the problem in striking out on your own.