What ever happened to the "do things that don't scale" saying? Every time I see a food tech startup, flush with automation tech, I cannot help but wonder who has the money to throw away on such obviously flawed plans.
People are willing to question the "obviously flawed" part. Lots of logistics people said that that Amazon was "obviously flawed" because you can't move goods independently to the consumer cheaper than you can move them in a truck to a store.
Turns out, you can.
I don't see how splurging on massive capital investments like machines winds up being cheaper than having a human do the food prep- humans are remarkably efficient at quality control, repetitive but flexible tasks (I.e. dealing with imperfect non-manufactured things like food items) and require little capital to get going (just basic training).
The only thing machines beat humans at in food is volume of high precision, highly controlled tasks- think producing bags of chips rather than prepared meals.
It seems like food startups are trying to jump straight to scale, hoping to prove out that eliminating some human jobs works- saving maybe 1/6 of their costs at best, rather than proving that a market exists for whatever product they are selling.
Cloud services should have come from HP, Oracle, Google, Yahoo, or any number of actual tech companies. It is an absurdity really that Amazon won the space.
I remember playing with S3 and pitching early EC2 after reading a story about how the New York Times digitized their archives, a project my then employer was doing for our records at ridiculous expense. My director loved it, but legal shot it down for 100 reasons that turned out to be nonsense.
Is it at all the same as Amazon? No. But it shows that you can be profitable delivering low value items right to peoples doorstep.
Walmart was the established model for "best practices" in selling general goods for a long time. Now, the Walmart model is showing its weaknesses, which people assumed did not exist.
The part about Amazon that was questionable was the massive capital investments in infrastructure to facilitate 2 day delivery. LL Bean, Sears, HSN, etc all demonstrated that mail order was a thing. Prodigy (aka Sears) demonstrated Amazon like e-commerce in 1990.
Even so, they had to do things like FBA to make money. Walmart is a less sexy but much more efficient business.
Are California startups any different than other places? Besides being more popularized and having easier access to capital I see dumb ideas everywhere I go. I also see amazing ideas.
https://news.europawire.eu/royal-philips-provides-led-lighti...
i.e. a giant warehouse filled with dozens of chefs.
That's the whole point of VC, so while I see what you're saying about a tech bubble I'm not sure that this proves it.
Tech is very lucractive, so it makes sense that a lot of money is being thrown at it regardless if there's a bubble or not.
Isn't that called Y Combinator?
I've enviously pondered that very same topic ever since I stumbled on HN 8 years ago and became enlightened to the existence of a whole new world I never even dreamed existed.
I've never witnessed the funny money leprechauns myself, but stories like this keep my dream alive that I still may some day.