In 1973, I invented Baileys | Hacker News Reader

In 1973, I invented Baileys

irishtimes.com

221 pointsjohnny313104 comments

> We mixed the two ingredients in our kitchen, tasted the result and it was certainly intriguing, but in reality bloody awful. Undaunted, we threw in some sugar and it got better, but it still missed something.

> We went back to the store, searching the shelves for something else, found our salvation in Cadbury’s Powdered Drinking Chocolate and added it to our formula. Hugh and I were taken by surprise. It tasted really good. Not only this, but the cream seemed to have the effect of making the drink taste stronger, like full-strength spirit. It was extraordinary.

They iterated, but not because they thought the product would taste great, but because it fitted nicely with business and marketing considerations: tax breaks and diary connotations. I guess it's serendipity that they found the combination so quickly, and would have otherwise given up after a while.

Quitters never win and winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.

Some people only win big in the last few years of their long life. Were they idiots for not quitting?

In some cases, definitely. Some people play the lottery their entire lives and win in the last few years of their long lives. They were still wrong for not quitting, even though they happened to get their pay out.

Some people I know that play the lottery just view it as entertainment. It's not really for me, but I can see their point.

Obviously it's not entertainment in any concrete form. It just takes 1 minute every week or so to play the lottery, and that's about it.

It's wishful thinking and daydreaming more than entertainment.

Daydreaming is a form of entertainment. They take a minute a week to play, but can take hours imagining - or discussing with others - what they'll do if they win.

I wouldn't recommend it, but I can understand it.

> "They were still wrong for not quitting, even though they happened to get their pay out."

That makes no sense. When someone plays the lottery they don't put their life on hold until they win. Nobody seriously plans their life around a big lottery win, most people just play it for fun, the feeling of anticipation just before the draw. After a draw takes place and they've not won, they just go back to whatever plans they had before. Gambling addiction is more serious, but many people are casual gamblers, including those that play the lottery every week. I don't play the lottery often, but I can see for most people it's a harmless activity.

There are definitely people out there who spend large sums of money on lottery tickets or scratch cards they probably shouldn't be buying and consider it their retirement plan. Many of them have no other viable path to an actual retirement, many just don't know any better. But they do exist.

>That makes no sense. When someone plays the lottery they don't put their life on hold until they win. Nobody seriously plans their life around a big lottery win

You'd be surprised. Especially if we expand the "lottery" to cover betting (horses, etc), gambling, and such stuff.

Obviously we can find a few cases that are the exception to just about any subject above physics. I was also hoping that, on a place as entrepreneurial as hacker news, I wouldn't have to explicitly exclude big wins where your chances of winning don't substantially increase with increases in experience. Nor did I think I would have to explicitly include things that take up less than a percent of a percent of your life.

Those people didn't "never win" did they?

Depends on the opportunity cost.

If they could have much better results putting that energy to another use, then, yes, simplistically we can say that they are idiots.

Totally worth it. They'll be able to afford that gold-plated coffin they always wanted.

Often it's the journey, not the destination, that holds the most fulfillment.

Winning isn't strictly about money.

> Quitters never win and winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.

That is pretty much the definition of survivorship bias, in that you never know which of those groups you fit into in advance (or possibly ever).

As someone once wrote: Most successful startup advice is tautology or survivorship bias.

On the other hand, the failure rate for those who never try is 100%.

Never doing a startup != failure.

I wouldn't call getting a large steady paycheck at a nine-to-five a 'failure'.

neither would the person you responded to; clearly they're talking about failing at a successful startup

I'm not sure. Why would people "who never try" end up at a startup, successful or otherwise?

EDIT: Hmm, I guess you meant "fail at having running a successful startup?" Yeah, probably.

Since I've never tried swimming, I drowned.

Only if one doesn't account for the opportunity cost.

E.g. if one tries and fails 5 times and ends up nowhere (or in debt), another person that never tried but used the same time and effort and got to a 200K salary has it better.

That's the tautology part.

>fitted nicely with business and marketing considerations: tax breaks and diary connotations.

They didn't know about the tax breaks at the time.

> Over the years I have come to the conclusion that the real heroes of ideas are not the people who have them – they are the people who buy them.

I love this quote. That was a great read.

As a person with a lot of ideas and very little money, I don't like it as much.

NOTE: This isn't about what makes money. It's about what makes heroes.

It takes money to make money.

You don't have to like it (most ideas guys" wont).But you do need to acknowledge it's inevitable financial truth.

If you don't have ideas that someone else buys, you'll remain the person with all the ideas and none of the money.

(And if your ideas are "heroic", it will 100% take a hero to fund them...)

I really like that phrase, because it takes the "conventional startup wisdom" that "ideas without execution are worthless" to the next and obvious-to-outsiders step - even a well executed idea than nobody will pay for - is, by definition, worthless.

Even without the money angle, you still need to convince people that your idea is good in order for it to have "real" value (as in: be used).

Ideas are mostly worthless without proponents.

All fair points here; nothing I don't agree with. I'm not sure they counter what I said, though.

As an artist, most of my ideas are artistic and don't require money for the translation to value, but they still require time and skill. I constantly face the reality that I still have to make the art.

However we downplay ideas, it remains diappointing how many people lack them, and how often money undermines them.

For an idea-buyer hero, how about Licklider? https://amzn.com/0670899763/

So true when it comes to founder logic - must have a co-founder or some team to get anywhere in Y Combinator world.

It also applies to cults, the mad guy that claims to be Jesus is ignored until his first fan comes along and 'believes' him, this then enables others to 'believe' too.

>People nowadays often ask me how much money we get per bottle sold. My answer is that we were paid about £3,000 all-in for the development

This is an awful part of a great read.

It’s the same for graphic designers, make a logo and get paid once, no matter how large the company...

Sometimes you get paid more than once.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004273/Woman-design...

Outlier, had her in my mind her when I was writing my previous response. That’s why Basecamp(37 signals) stopped doing graphic design.

Because swoosh?

They stopped doing graphic design because one designer got 500 Nike stock shares?

Similarly, Brooklyn Brewery’s branding was done for a 5% stake in the company back before they had any money

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3059055/the-true-story-of-milto...

Same for anyone who works on contract, in any industry. Designers will obviously charge more money depending on the size and budget of the client...

I was an engineer at Boeing, designing airplane parts. Was I ripped off because I don't get an ongoing royalty for every 757 sold? Engineering is creative work, too.

Per-plane sold? That's underselling yourself. Go the song-writer way: demand to have your royalties calculated based on flight-hours or per-passenger ticket /s.

I like the cut of your jib!

I honestly think that in a just society, you would deserve a fraction of the profits, yes. Even if it's some percentage of a cent.

I was paid for my time spent there, an amount freely agreed upon by myself and Boeing. How is that not just in every way?

I did want a piece of Boeing, though, and I did it the usual way - I bought BA stock. It's now worth something like, 100x what I paid for it.

Anyone can get a "piece of the action" of any public corporation by buying shares of it. It'll cost you less than $10 in commission if you use one of the online brokers.

Many corporations will also sell employees stock at a discount (usually called an "employee stock purchase plan"). Or they may grant you some stock options.

You made a thing that is now part of someone's capital. That person is getting exorbitantly rich far out of proportion both to the effort you put in and to the risk they took in bringing you on. In what ways would the world not be a better place if some of that capital defaulted to its creator? Would this arrangement be any stranger than some of the Byzantine corporate laws we already have to deal with? I'd say that a great number of our societal ills are caused by the top 1% hoarding over 40% of the wealth, and it would be great if we could take steps to correct this injustice systemically. Maybe not even with new laws. Maybe by simply incentivizing more companies to organize as cooperatives. I dunno! But the current system seems unfair, and even if some employees make bank, most of that bank is only human scale — not corporate profit scale, which is what the executives see.

Shares aren't really the same thing since they don't grant you royalties; they're really more like supplemental income.

IMO.

Shares give you a cut of the profits.

> That person is getting exorbitantly rich far out of proportion both to the effort you put in and to the risk they took in bringing you on.

Investors are always looking everywhere for deals like that, which means in reality they are pretty rare.

If you believe you are unfairly compensated for your efforts, you can:

1. quit and get a better deal elsewhere

2. negotiate for a better deal

3. borrow money from a bank/friends/relatives and exploit the opportunity yourself

4. join a workers' collective/cooperative/commune

All those are perfectly legal and possible in the US, and people do it all the time.

..and for everything else. Several of companies that I have worked for are still using code that I wrote without continuously paying me for it. That was what we agreed on so I don't see any injustice.

Well that's the trade. You get a guaranteed pay, the company assumes the risk and gets the reward. In dollars today it would be about $45,000- and think of all the times they would have done that development and the product didn't take off.

Ideas aren't really worth that much. Everybody has ideas. It's the execution, and the risk taking, where the money is.

My professor always said:

"ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some"

It reminds me of the scene on The Wire with the chicken mcnuggets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A

If you want to get paid more than a one-time flat fee, don't sell your IP. It's that simple.

Despite appearances, there's no IP in a recipe.

You can keep it as a trade secret -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret.

Let the potential buyer taste it without sharing the recipe, then negotiate the terms of sharing how to make it, plus your not disclosing it.

Though be careful, some people are crazy good at telling what's in some food just by taste and smell.

(I know some. In a restaurant they can tell you exactly where the kitchen staff put in the extra work to do things 'properly', and where the chef took a shortcut.)

Yes, that's the other option. But secrecy is contractual, fragile (see other reply above) and only really protects you vis-a-vis the sampler, not the wider world.

You missed the second part of the sentence... * ...though the company did keep employing me for another 30 years.*

Sounds like he parlayed the Bailey's idea into a career-spanning contract (or full-time gig, not sure which). That's far from a bad outcome.

My cousin convinced his wife that once you open a bottle of Baileys you have to drink it all or the cream will spoil.

Hah, I wonder how many times that's been pulled off. It reminded me of something in Arrested Development:

    Michael: And you finished off the whole bottle?

    Lindsay Funke: I had to, it's vodka. It goes bad once it's opened.

    Michael: I think that's another of mom's fibs, like "I'll sacrifice anything for my children".

Kinda reminds me of a line from Dogtooth:

"If you don't drink your orange juice while it's fresh, it's no use."

That one rings true: https://www.homesciencetools.com/vitamin-c-test-experiment-k...

Though the time frame is probably greater than casually sipping

Oh it goes bad. Even closed. Found an old bottle (unopened if I recall) and poured out clumps of clotted cream...

It's supposed to last at least 2 years, regardless of whether it's opened.

https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/9420/why-doesnt-...

We once found a bottle of Baileys in my grandmother's basement. It was probably 20 years old and had completely solidified into Baileys Irish Cheese.

"Hugh looked at me with an almost earnest stare. “What would happen if we mixed Irish whiskey and cream?” he said. “That might be interesting.” He sat back and waited for a response.

“Let’s try it,” I replied. Where Hugh was more likely to intellectualise and think through the appalling consequences of dropping cream into Ireland’s beloved whiskey, I was all for doing it there and then."

Now, I ain't no lawyer, but to me this sounds like Hugh invented it, no?

He may have had the original idea, but Macpherson refined it into the specific formula that became Bailey's. There is a distinction to be made.

"Idea's are worth a nickel, execution is worth..."

That’s what people who never have any decent ideas like to say to those who do.

It's also what I tell myself to excuse never acting on any ideas.

Hear you load and clear. Cheers

Ive never seen anyone make a dollar off an idea. Its always execution

You've never seen successful patent suits?

Those are only successful after someone else performs the execution.

I’ve seen plenty of people lose hundreds of millions because their ideas were garbage.

They lost millions trying to execute on a bad idea, the idea is still worth a nickel.

The idea in those cases was worth a negative hundred million dollars.

Doesn't change the fact the idea itself is worthless, if no one acted on the idea they wouldn't have lost any money. Just as if the idea is brilliant, it's the execution that makes the money. It's quite possible bad execution ruins a good idea as well.

What you’re saying is that without good execution ideas are worthless. What I’m saying is without good ideas execution is worthless. Often good ideas are not really this momentary and ephemeral thing. They’re a culmination of significant insight and experience. Kind of like that old engineer who charged a company “$4995 for knowing where to tap”. Overnight success takes decades of work.

Pet Rocks

I think if it was something patentable, they'd have both been listed as inventors. And the same goes for other achievements, like the Nobel Prize which can have three shared winners in a year, but no one says "I won 1/3 of a Nobel Prize"

> He sipped at the muddy brown liquid with absolutely no enthusiasm. And then, it is said, he pronounced the immortal words “That shit will never sell!” Nevertheless, he launched it into the US later that year...

Love this. I too find Baileys disgusting, and in that position I would probably would never have launched it. What a big mistake that would have been!

Would be interesting to know more about this particular guy: did he come to like it eventually, or did he listen to somebody else, or did sales numbers in other parts of the world change his mind?

> I too find Baileys disgusting

I clicked the link hoping for an apology for having invented Bailey's. At least now I have an explanation.

If you mix it with, e.g., toffee Frijj[1], then you can't taste the Baileys at all. But you will wake up 36 hours later wondering what happened to your weekend and the rest of the Baileys.

[1] Thick milkshake kind of stuff in the UK

> We needed what they called an “Anglo-Irish” name. We were sure that a family name might be better than a “thing” or a place name. That was the popular convention of the business in those days. After all, many drinks were named after the people who made them.

> We were still struggling to find a name for our revolutionary new drink and there it was; above the door. Baileys. Was it really right in front of my face? It was certainly Anglo-Irish and in a flurry of post-rationalisation I managed to dredge up from my memory a dairy of that name in the Port Elizabeth of my youth in South Africa. This gave it a kind of relevance in my head.

> Another “Baileys moment” was the discovery of an attractive, traditional restaurant in Dublin called The Bailey. I could imagine our drink being enjoyed there a long time ago. It gave a gentle nudge of support to our off-the-wall idea.

> The headline mentioned R&A, golf’s governing body, and I instantly blurted “How about two initials? How do you like the sound of R&A Bailey? ... Yet as I thought about it after our conversation, a fantasy began to form in my mind. I could see them: R & A Bailey were two brothers, one a distiller and the other a dairy farmer. They had disliked each other for decades. Their father looked to bring them together...

He begins with "many drinks were named after the people who made them", and proceeds to follow up with works of complete fiction when creating the Baileys brand. Perhaps I'm a bit too left-brained to understand this creative work, but how does imagining something that didn't happen lend a gentle nudge of support to an idea?

IN this podcast there is an interview with one of the creators from the ad agency. It's short and worthwhile.

http://www.modernmann.co.uk/new/2017/2/28/43-the-impossible-...

It intrigues me that the experts and their market research told them it will fail. Did they just do a lousy research or was the idea too innovative? How is it possible to distinguish between those cases (bad research vs no one will buy it vs innovative idea people don't understand yet)?

He also mentions that it took several years to really take off. If it was a product launched today, it would probably be killed if it took 3+ years to take off. Look at Hollywood movies judged by their opening weekend or the career of Alex Ferguson, who almost got fired early in his tenure at Manchester United, then went on to become one of the greatest managers in any sport, ever.

Maybe the times are different now than in the past or the food industry works on different timescales before they kill off something. Possibly because the investment is much bigger than software - they mention building a whole new factory for an untested product - that made me shiver. I might be just spoilt by ease of pivoting in software, but what led them to believing into the new drink - were they acting just on a hunch and feeling it tasted good?

> Possibly because the investment is much bigger than software - they mention building a whole new factory for an untested product - that made me shiver.

But if businesses are not willing to take on risks in the world of atoms/hardware, not just in the world of software, things stagnate. This is why the world of software moves so quickly and is much more exciting than the world of atoms in general. It's also why someone like Elon Musk is so remarkable - he is willing to take enormous risks in the world of atoms (Tesla, Solar City and especially SpaceX). Almost nobody is innovating like this in the western world at least, and of course Wall Street (or at least some parts) hate him for it. More examples of the lack of innovation in the world of atoms - sectors like construction have been really anti-innovation for a long time, at least until the proverbial wrecking ball in the form of software-powered bricklaying robots come along and disrupt everything. I was at a motor show recently, and I was struck by how unremarkable all the new models from the premium manufacturers are. A button that closes the boot lid automatically is not innovation, neither are interior panels that the customer can customise with their own design. Again, no wonder they are nervous about Tesla.

> but what led them to believing into the new drink - were they acting just on a hunch and feeling it tasted good?

Sometimes you just have to go with your gut. Focus groups and customer acceptance testing won't give you a full picture. There's a reason why by 'design by committee' and 'analysis paralysis' are considered negatives, not positives. 1970s Ireland was a totally different business climate to the quarter to quarter, Wall-Street driven thinking today which kills any long term horizons for taking on new ideas or projects. Having a clubby business environment where "everyone knew everyone" probably allowed for more breathing space to run with a new idea.

> A decade of experience kicked in and delivered a great idea.

This reminds me of that quote from Monty Hall about it taking twenty years to become an overnight success. Great read.

This was the first alcohol that my mom let me have and I still cherish it and often have stock at home — although now I have the Costco version.

I would be curious to know when "Bailey's + Coffee" became a thing (i.e. drinking it warm versus cold)

Because they are a perfect combination.

Coffee usually needs sweetener + cream. The thick cream + sweetener + special taste + alcohol of Baileys make it a perfect for coffee.

It's the easiest, dumbest, best drink possible in a Canadian winter.

Plus Irish Coffee (just whiskey) has been a thing since forever too.

Does the alcohol evaporate?

Based on USDA research [0], it seems like an alcoholic spirit will retain 85% alcohol content after being heated by stirring into a hot liquid.

[0] https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/Data/retn/ret...

Beats Tim's any day

Hmmm im not used to seeing articles this interesting in the Irish Times, good read.

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