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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

Zoom doesn't have massive manufacturing overhead.

Peloton forgot how easily they can be replaced. You can buy a used exercise bike, and play whatever YouTube videos you need on a mounted iPad.

For a while Peloton started to position itself as a tech company, competing with FAANG when it came to total comp.

I've also seen an explosion in fitness tech companies. Peloton struck gold, and should've remained a much smaller company. Instead they started expanding rapidly, and lost the plot.

My heart goes out to the laid off though.

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Every company in history could have remained smaller and more efficient. Amazon could still be an online bookstore with higher margins than they have now. It is very normal and natural for companies take risks to grow, and sometimes those risks pay off and sometimes they don't. It is very results oriented to see what happened and then say they shouldn't have tried.

Peloton is also far from insolvent. I'm not saying they were mismanaged or not, but the fact that the gamble they made didn't pay off is not on its own evidence they shouldn't have tried.

Wrong comparison. Peloton is manufacturer of fitness gadgets with limited market size. While Amazon is a marketplace gathering fees from sellers with virtually unlimited market size. Everything with hardware is close to death with one leg in the coffin. One mismanagement in supply chain and you are gone. Look at the poor car manufacturers right now. Maybe there is exception - one phone manufacturer that is managing supply chain very well.

> While Amazon is

Not a wrong comparison at all. His point is that Amazon was a place that sold books. They took risks and grew into a marketplace for selling everything. One mismanagement of their AWS development or platformization and things could be very different.

Peloton is a manufacturer of fitness gadgets AND a content provider of fitness classes. What they could grow into if they take risks is an open and interesting discussion.

Starting with books with an intention to go into all e-commerce seems like a good plan to expand into a large domain from a hard problems side, then he could do it again with AWS. By that point size alone was advantage.

Manufacturing a fitness product with streamed classes seemed to be tackling the hardest part of what domain? Sure they could try random things now, but where are they ahead of a media, robotics, car or e-commerce firm? Investors are quoted as thinking he doesn't know what he is doing so probably he shouldn't have built up staff with no new market to enter with an advantage.

I think that's the exact point the parent is making. Most companies can figure out a way to raise and grow. The point was that it was a bad idea in the specific case of Peloton.

> Peloton forgot how easily they can be replaced.

Maybe on the hardware side, but I don't know if the same can be said for their content. Having tried many, I don't know if anyone but Apple has even come close to providing the same kind of consistent value for general fitness instruction.

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