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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

I just hope Cosmo and Henry land on their feet.

https://www.essential.com/about#team

Oh man, I just saw one of the product exec's LinkedIn and he spent 3 years at Juicero before spending 3 years at Essential.

That's gotta hurt.

If you're a reasonably talented product & engineering person don't work for a hardware startup. Startups are lottos already as is but hardware is so unforgiving. I think Ring's acquisition by Amazon was the last one I can think that was a true success.

I don't see how a "reasonably talented product and engineering person" could have worked at Juicero without realizing it was going to fail miserably (also if they had any scruples they should have felt pretty guilty working for the company trying to wrap DRM around fruit).

This is a shitty comment. It wasn't DRM on fruit. It was an expiration date so that juice bars couldn't sell expired product to end customers. And it's really smart of you to try to judge someone so quickly. I would looove to see your LinkedIn profile and see what great flawless decisions you've made or will make in your lifetime.

If that’s true, expiration dates are hardly exact. A bag could go bad well before or it could be completely fine well after the date. Unless there was some sensor to detect whether something had gone bad I don’t see how preventing use of something you’ve already paid for is a good idea or even legal

Not to mention that I've never been to a juice bar where I couldn't see the fruit they were putting into the juicer beforehand - it's pretty obvious when it's spoiled both visually and from the taste.

Even if this rationalization was true Juicero was only solving a problem they created by enforcing the use of these prepackaged bags in the first place.

It's clear from your comment that you've never even seen the product that you're making a comment on. Talk about an uninformed "expert" espousing their overly-confident opinion on something they know nothing about. And they didn't even use fruit, btw.

I have seen the product and I know how it works. I'm not sure what you mean, elaborate?

> "they didn't even use fruit"

Huh? We are both talking about Juicero, yes?

the bags were filled with fruit and vegetable pulp...

No, it was green juices. There was basically no fruit except as a preservative as a matter of principle. That was the whole point, the original founder already exited his first business selling green juice bars on the East Coast.

Companies in the "slap DRM on commodity goods and market the shit out of it" space always have a bullshit post hoc rationalization of why they're doing it, taking their marketing material at face value is probably not a good representation of the truth though.

It wasn't DRM on fruit.

The QR code was validated against a web service and included a lot more than just the date. It used a unique code for each pack and you couldn't squeeze packs that Juicero didn't like. If all that was needed was expiration date validation that could have happened entirely offline with a much simpler QR code.

It was DRM.

I worked with him at Google. He is exceptionally smart and a great person to work with.

this is a purely empathetic comment...to invest so much blood + sweat + tears in 2 high profile hardware cos to watch your equity value disappear, or incur a huge loss if you exercised options, is a painful experience.

I don't know anyone who seriously thought that Juicero was a good business idea

I mean, I thought (and still think) that Twitch was a terrible business idea - something I'm clearly very very wrong about. Equally, there are dozens of business ideas that I thought were fantastic, but are dead in the water.

Sometimes it's good to acknowledge that your foresight can be wrong. I think engineers in particular can be overly pessimistic.

Why not occasionally take a risk on someone else's gut feeling? You won't always win, but "losing" means enjoying a cushy, well-paid office job for 2-3 years before moving on the next thing. It's hardly the end of the earth.

A lot of startup products start very different than what they end up being. Especially once the VCs get involved and the growth + business model part has to be figured out.

It’s hard to say that the final product was the vision he bought into when joining early on. I’m sure it was very hypey too.

Essential has a good reputation IMO. If it was Theranos, Juicero, and WeWork, then I’d be concerned.

how does it have a good reputation? the ceo/founder is a sex abuser.

Is it right to let the transgressions of the founder color the quality of the product the employees worked to make, or worse, the employees themselves?

Let's not rush to judgement. Sexual harassment is wrong, yes, but that doesn't mean anyone who has associated with the man is irredeemably guilty.

i didn't say the employees were guilty of anything, i just don't know what makes this company have a "good" reputation - clearly it's a failed product that never really worked or made sense. it reeks of a pet project of a wealthy founder who could raise money by his name alone but never really achieved product market fit.

Is it right to let the transgressions of the founder color the quality of the product the employees worked to make, or worse, the employees themselves?

If the employee joins the company after the transgressions have been make public, yes. There are enough companies and jobs in the tech industry we get to choose who we work for. If you choose to work for someone with a reputation for sexual assault then you have to live with that choice, and all the things that go along with it. That includes people writing off your hard work based on the founders bad reputation.

Most people are not willing to overlook someone's previous transgressions so joining them in a company is a stupid idea.

That's an interesting team page. They have, by my count, 20 engineers total, and 45 other employees in categories like administration, business, sales, finance, leadership, marketing, operations, management, and other positions that don't actually build the phone. Plus Cosmo and Henry...if only there were more employees like those two.

They were building a phone, not a web app. Negotiating with suppliers, making sure your contract manufacturer is doing things right, getting people excited about your product, and not running out of money are all really important.

Revenue comes from shipping a product, right? If you have no product, you're guaranteed to run out of money.

It seems that they failed at product, finance and execution.

do you think that it only takes engineers to build a phone. that it only takes engineers to keep a company running

No, I don't think it takes only engineers to run a good phone company. I dispute, however, that it takes mostly administration.

And my concern seems to be validated by the outcome - they failed to build and ship the phone. They have a really shiny website, nice renderings and concepts, good market awareness...but no product.

It seems self-evident to me that it's impossible for a company to function on only administration and no product. You have to have engineers to actually ship a product, if you have none and ship nothing, the company is guaranteed to fail. However, if you have only engineering and no administration, yeah, things will be a mess, marketing will be basic word-of-mouth, and the design will be fragmented, but if the product works, exists, and is able to be purchased the company can hobble along and fix the rest later.

The team was much larger. Engineers have more options when things go poorly.

Not sure if this is accurate - but they seem to have an overly-large number of CXX, VP, Director and "Head of XXX" positions on that page compared to rank-and-file employees.

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