Comment by asciimike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asciimike | Hacker News Reader

Matt Levine's comments on this yesterday [1] are comic genius:

Presumably many local pizzeria owners have never heard of Masayoshi Son; presumably many more just would never have thought “oh we’re actually a pizza tech company and we need hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital funding to scale.” But if you have the proper mindset, if you believe in yourself, if you are not a guy opening a pizza place but a founder who previously sold a tech company, if you hire a strategic and retail consultant, if you test out various combinations of “[giant tech company] of [broad category including pizza]” for the pitch, if you call your pizzeria “the Gigaranch” or “the Pizzaplex” rather than “Al’s Pizza & Subs,” and sure sure sure yes fine if you employ some robots to careen around town sloshing cheese around trucks, then maybe you can be the pizza proprietor to rake in Masayoshi Son’s millions.

You craft a pitch calculated to convince Masayoshi Son that your pizza delivery business will change the world. You meet with Masayoshi Son. He convinces you that you will change the world. Now you are all believers, all in it together. He hands you piles of money. You go home and weep to your friends, “I am going to change the world.” The friends are like “wait what with the pizzas?” But it is too late for skepticism, you have the money, the robots are in the trucks, they are fanning out across town, the cheese is everywhere, they cannot turn back.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-14/robot-...

this is one of those moments where i really, really feel like we are all characters living in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

It might be time for the Hiro we need.

Still hands-down my favorite first-chapter of a book.

It's truly too on the nose.

It's been years, but this prompts me to re-read it. Thanks!

Was going to just say this!

Pizza reference and all. That book (along with a lot of his other writing) has really influenced the way I see group social dynamics, and the way technology influences them.

Boston Dynamics’ Spot is even pretty darn close to Rat Things (minus the onboard nuclear reactor). Quite the timeline.

Domino's pizza was one of the fastest growing big companies in the world with a 30 minutes guarantee. It's quite similar to the pizza chain in Snow Crash actually. I would say Snow Crash predicted it before it became so successful.

I think you may have it backwards. Domino's was well known for their 30-minute guarantee when Snow Crash was written in 1992. Indeed, Domino's was in the midst of a lawsuit regarding it while the book was being written; it resulted in a $78 million verdict against Domino's. [0]

I give Stephenson credit for taking that guarantee to its logical extreme. And while I love the book, it's funny how basically none of the predictions in it came true. No computers that project images on eyeballs, no 'poon guns, no losers walking around scanning retinas with backpack-mounted lasers, and book features working payphone booths!

0. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/22/business/domino-s-ends-fa...

> No computers that project images on eyeballs...

Actually, we have something close to that now:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-ta...

It doesn't use lasers though.

The tech is basically working, and they're ramping up to production this year.

And no, you can't just walk around arbitrarily, but you couldn't do that in the book either (you could walk out of range). Also, Stephenson didn't worry about just turning your back to the laser projector...

In hindsight, many failures seem ridiculous. But they're ridiculous in part because they failed.

You could have written basically the same thing about Starbucks if it had failed.

But it didn't.

It went on to become one of the great success stories of the modern era.

I'm always reminded of how the founder of FedEx got a C+ on his project when he presented the idea for the company in his business school class.

He also saved the company by betting the last of the company reserves at a casino when they were near insolvency during the early days.

Someone claiming to be an early employee that wrote the first scheduling software showed up here a few years ago and said that story is BS, FWIW.

/u/graycat, although I’m unable to find any reference that the story is inaccurate from a quick HN and Google search. If you find it, feel free to reply with a link to correct me.

Sidenote: epic thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9281466

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5405903

Thank you! Now I just need to find it somewhere canonical besides HN so Wikipedia can reference it. Appreciate the myth busting!

I never would have got it without the name, so thank you too!

If Alfred Peet had pitched the founders of Starbucks on a bunch of robot baristas in the back of vans who would deliver your coffee, but which spilled half of it before it got to you, it would have been right to pour scorn on them.

I would think the failure and the ridiculousness are not unrelated.

> You could have written basically the same thing about Starbucks if it had failed.

Not really. Starbucks started as a coffee shop, and started expanding when they became successful. There's a limit to how ridiculous that can be.

Yes, the basic business model of a coffee shop worked. What Starbucks did was codify best practices, and worked on efficiency to scale-out.

I guess.

But, in this case, it sure seems, in hindsight, like it should have been predictable. My first thought when I heard about the company was, "How do they keep the toppings from flying all over the place if the truck hits a pothole or has to make as sudden stop or something, and the cheese hasn't softened enough to stick it in place? And how do they keep the cheese from sloshing all over the place after it melts?"

It would seem, based on what I'm reading now, that my error was assuming that they had thought of something clever and wondering what it was. Because the answers turn out to be (1) skimp on the toppings, and (2) you can't, it just plays out like a scene from Astérix chez les Helvètes† back there.

I can infer from this that I, a person who was just sitting on their armchair having a knee-jerk reaction, still managed to think more deeply about this business plan than any of the key figures or investors.

Starbucks, on the other hand, seems to have always had a basic grasp of how coffee behaves vis a vis Newton's First Law of Motion.

†(DDG image search seems to do a better job than Google at turning up the cheesiest panels.)

Google gets it if you add fondue.

> turning up the cheesiest panels

I didn’t expect such a literal interpretation: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/random-raves-xxvii-an...

I don't see the comparison. Starbucks is a successful, 50 year old, company with a good brand and always had a sane strategy. Failure or success aren't random.

What the author is alluding too is the fact that putting a bunch of robots into a pizza store isn't going to turn you into a technology company worth hundreds of millions, that is absurd right from the beginning.

What did Starbucks do that McDonalds hadn't been doing for decades already?

Comfortable seating.

$6 for a cup of mostly water.

Not burn their customers so badly they were put in the hospital.

You still believe that take on the story?

Absolutely

OK that's weird. I was wrong to dispute it, but I think the story has gone around and around on my radar so many times that I was confused as to which was the right story. Kind of an "eggs are bad" "eggs are good" depending on which decade you're talking about. Mea culpa!

Make drinkable coffee?

Starbucks success imho was due to their having a sufficiently well controlled process to make a consistently decent (if not excellent) cup of coffee in _all_ their stores. Their competitors are all over the place in both the time and location axes.

The question remains...

They were the first to bring espresso and espresso drinks to a lot of locations. Plus their coffee, while not the greatest, is pretty standard across locations and is a "predictable" product.

That and the interior of the stores are typically more appealing than McDonalds.

You may want to check out the Starbucks timeline. They did not raise an astronomical amount of money right off the bat. Blue Bottle is a closer comparison. They also grew organically for many years before raising a serious round. There must be an example of a successful food chain that raised a ton of money in their first few years but I can't think of it off the top of my head.

https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/starb...

The quote really understates the sheer insanity of this all... Alex Garden cynically constructed a narrative for Masa Son that he [Garden] would change the world, and at the end of the meeting, _Son_ was the one convincing Garden that he’d change the world??!

That’s pretty much the plot of the movie Inception.

He’s a really unusual blend of journalist and comic, isn’t he.

Masayoshi Son has way too much money to handle.

Fun Fact: He lost EVERY investment in the last bust, save for getting lucky with Alibaba.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com