SoftBank-backed Zume Pizza to lay off up to 80% of its staff

Yikes! I just interviewed at Zume Seattle less than 3 months ago and they had over 100 head count open with plans for an office move that doubled the space. Wasn't the right place for myself at the time and I seemed to have dodged a bullet. Seems they banked a little to hard on their relationship with SoftBank and the promise of future funding.

HN discussed Zume a few years ago when they launched (106 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980694

A more recent article that didn't earn discussion includes this interesting tidbit:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/21/20974979/zume-pizza-so...

> The four-year-old company has largely pivoted to an enterprise model where it works with restaurants that have no storefront and prepare their food in shared centralized kitchens, or “cloud kitchens”; with delivery providers like DoorDash and Postmates; and with existing pizza companies to build a hub-and-spoke model for the entire delivery industry.

Hindsight is 20/20.

On a Pitchdeck it may have appeared disruptive (therefore right up Softbank's alley), and not very far from Travis Kalanick's Cloud Kitchen.

“Pizza was our prototype,” Zume CEO Alex Garden told TC’s Brian Heater back in April. “There’s no reason why this technology wouldn’t work for any restaurant or any food category. Any restaurant who wants to adopt our system can now easily do that. They don’t have to be experts in technology or appliance manufacturing. They can just be restaurateurs, who have a more flexible offering for customers.”

Nov 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/zume-reportedly-snags-375-...

WOW... $300 mil to deliver pizza.

Also wasn't there a company on SV that PP bought that had a similar idea?

Can at this point SoftBank Vision 1 fund chance to be even a modest success?

A lot of failures at late stage. Most of VCs can afford many failures as they invest early and one home run can make the fund, though investing late at high valuation limit the payoff.

Guess I'd better order one soon.

I find it surprising that a service that delivers better pizza than Domino's/Papa John's, at a lower price, in less than half the time, to college campuses would not be popular.

Perhaps the Zume name didn't help or maybe their promotion was poor. Or maybe they needed a better pizza app. ;-)

What's the point if they can't deliver a pizza cheaper (or significantly better) than all of the places with restaurants and hand made pizzas?

Sliceline from Silicon Valley show :)