Where I'm from all the big grocery store chains have a variant of a Blue Apron style service. Seems like a feature not a product.
Pump it with cash, then dump it on the public market with an ipo to all the less sophisticated investors that aren't reading the financials.
Sure, every once in a while, you'll come across a Facebook type business that ends up being profitable, but in the meantime you can still make money on the losers when you cash out.
Do these actually exist? My understanding is that retail investors aren't significant and I don't believe that institutional investors don't look at financials.
Many don't, like indexed funds. They just try and keep their shares ratios inline with the market and rely on it always going up overall.
What you're talking about with IPOs is not quick or easy, and definitely not guaranteed in any way. Taking a company public essentially counts as an exit for most funds, and if it was that easy to just sell up everything then the entire VC field would look different. That process is more for private equity and banking firms who maneuver through financial engineering rather than early and mid-stage VCs.
(1) https://steveblank.com/2018/09/05/is-the-lean-startup-dead/
Bullshit idea crashes, trashing the livelihoods of the developers and later investors, but you and your money are long gone.
This can look suspiciously like the slower and more professional version of a pump 'n dump stock scheme - although historically it's sometimes written off as "irrational exuberance".
If by some miracle the bullshit idea actually flies, your remaining stock gives you a slice.
If you don't like it then go write software for bigco and shove your money in an index fund. Nobody is forcing developers to work for trendy startups or forcing investors to invest in freshly IPO'd startups.
Yup.
Shameful to admit, but I only this month finally got around to read "Lean Startup". I'm in a process of copying notes and writing down some thoughts, so I have this fresh in front of me: the book frequently talks about the goal of a startup being to "discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision" (emphasis mine).
But then, it shows to build unsustainable growth and keeps portraying companies that got sold as examples of success. Such is the double standard, and the only way I can reconcile those two views is by concluding that the goal is for you to make money via the discovery, and for someone else to use that discovery to build an actually sustainable business. But if it is so, then there's no surprise people skip the "sustainable business" part, as you can make even more money in an unsustainable way.
Yet they're somehow looking at a $120B IPO next year.
<snip snip> A network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the positive effect described in economics and business that an additional user of a good or service has on the value of that product to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.[1]
As you well should.
How the fuck have we gotten to the point where chopping up vegetables is a task too onerous for the "I'm too busy in my hustle to bother with this shit" types? These ass backwards Silicon Valley 'products' should be taken behind an alley and burned to the ground.
Coral reefs are dying, mass exctinction is underway, our oceans are deadened and acidic, the little life that remains is full of microplastics and metals, glaciers are receding, entire fucking nations are sinking, fires are blazing larger than ever, antibiotics are no longer effective, heck, even drinkable water is getting scarcer, but fuck it, what we need is yet more asinine packaging to let the fat, overfed, heavily consuming American have yet another morsel of convenience because god forbid he have to get off his electric wheelchair to exercise his muscles and bike to a grocery store to buy some fucking Brocolli.
Fuck it all.
Most meal kits (definitely Blue Apron) still have you chopping up vegetables; they are taking care of portioning and grouping (shopping and household inventory management), not prepping. So your complaint here is a bit of a non-sequitur.
I can't even begin to imagine how hard it would be if I had crippling arthritis in my hands.
It might seem lazy to someone in full health, but sometimes those small things make all the difference.
The example which springs to mind is the pre-peeled fruit a number of years ago which was similarly dismissed for having a harmful environmental impact, but if you've lost motor function in your hands it means you can eat a wider variety of foods.
Just because you don't see the need for something doesn't mean the need isn't there.
I also have a 3-year-old, and keeping on a routine is something I feel that is important, so dinner on the table by 6 is my gold standard that I really really want to have happen as much as I can (allows bedtime routine at 7:30).
I often buy pre-chopped veggies, as long as I trust the chopper (there is a little farm market down the street from me and I see them chopping in the back room). The time it saves is great, easy 5 minutes closer to dinner time than I'd be otherwise, not counting the extra cleanup.
The most prominent one started out more than two decades ago by as a kind of subscription service -- every week you'd get a bag containing the produce of the season, along with weird stuff like Hokkaido pumpkins that most people had no idea what to do with.
These days they ship recipes along with the exact quantities of ingredients that you'll need for cooking. Often ingredients that are hard to come by in grocery stores. It's time saving and usually delicious.
Anyway, my point is, they bootstrapped their business, pivoted a bit here and there, and built it to be profitable. So it's certainly doable.
The article mentioned Blue Apron (and competitors) are trying to increase sales at grocery stores, maybe some of them can survive like that if that works.
From what I've seen it doesn't help, the in store ones cost almost as a restaurant anyway, But at least a restaurant solves the time consuming part (cooking, cleaning), if your in the store then getting everything packaged together only saves a few minutes.
This is in Australia with a higher minimum wage, I imagine it would make an even smaller difference in the US.
But this is the conundrum. If I can pick up a few ingredients, even if there’s some waste, and throw together a meal quickly the meal kits may not add much.
This no longer exists, people probably look on their phones, but the restriction in choice was useful.
Kroger has these in the U.S. Probably some other chains, too.
I was surprised by how little food you get, and how expensive the Kroger kits are. I expected them to be a cheaper alternative to Blue Apron, but they're about the same price. And at least Blue Apron and its competitors deliver to my door. I have to stop at the supermarket for the store-brand knock-offs.
Then again that would be a rather niche market.
This is from 2008:
https://tucson.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking/jacques-pepin...