The SoftBank Investment in Zume Pizza

bloomberg.com

3 pointscaseyf73 comments

Eventually, [co-founder Julia] Collins’s team gave up on the dream of baking the pies while driving to customers, according to two people familiar with the matter. The cheese tended to run everywhere as the trucks turned or hit bumps in the road. Instead, the oven trucks began parking in central locations, with runner cars or mopeds transporting the cooked pies.

That jumped out at me as well. It seems to me that what the team actually gave up was the entire business model, because what they did instead was not really much different than what most pizza parlors do.

In southern France (and probably elsewhere), a 'traditional' way to buy pizza used to be from vans parked on the side of the road at well-known locations.

These were essentially 'good trucks' with an actual wood pizza oven inside and a chimney on the roof.

How someone would get close to $400 million in VC investment to reinvent the wheel, especially such a simple thing, is beyond me.

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