What happened to Pippin / Rent the Backyard

Its exactly the kind of thing I expect from when people in tech go try do something in other sectors without an adult in the room.

Thoughts on the "lessons" (out of order, deliberately).

Lesson 2: Word salad that basically means "we hired people who didn't know what they were doing, and expected the performance of professional tradesmen to just magically happen".

Lesson 1: see lesson 2, but with additional process issues that anyone with any construction experience could have warned you about, and chronic understaffing to keep a lean headcount.

Lesson 3: basically they decided to ignore tried and tested business strategies for growth and wing it instead. This didn't work.

Lesson 4-6 mostly, again, are poor business planning.

See also: recent HN threads of Hackernews readers largely incorrecting each other about work in the trades.

I would have thought a company like this would start out maybe with 1 unit a quarter, then 1 unit a month, then 2 units/month, etc. while seeking product/market fit. Use a general contractor who's good at assembling teams. Keep the core staff minimal.

My oh my. Will they ever learn?

You could power a small town by attaching a generator to the (imaginary) revolving door of my company used by bootcamp grads, overseas devs and relatives of senior management who tinker with computers.

That last one is not made up!

I spent my life in corporate. Lesson 6 (Planning is often the highest leverage work) touched something inside me. In a large corp, I have complained how slow we move, how things are planned to a ridiculous level, how there are people whose job it is to just to this function (or something related like strategy). It is interesting to see a start-up that follows the hacker ethos, but then gets in trouble due to lack of such functions.

This startup could have focused on design sales permitting etc and built a couple as test, but it seems vastly more efficient to contract with an existing player than to try to everything from first principles

Does anyone know where their factory was?

I have worked outside "my domain" multiple times through my life but I was willing to spend a year or years learning about the new domain before raising money. Really needed to make the case that I knew what I was talking about to investors who knew more about the domain than I did.

I’d love to know more about what drove the mismatch of hiring unskilled labour for the unproven production line. Or rather, what went into the belief that the production line concept would cover for a lack of technical skill.

If lesson 2 was, “we should have taken the short-term more painful and expensive path of hiring experienced leaders for each trade or station” then that seems to suggest there were no experts.

So then how was the line designed and tested? Who were the people who built the first few houses before the unskilled workers were brought in? Who was training them? Where did those trainers go? How were the founders so confident in the absence of any expert authority?

I suspect I am misunderstanding the situation, and that there were skilled experts who know how to build houses, but they weren’t appropriate to be actual builders?

But that leads (and I recognize I’m layering a lot of assumptions to get to here) to the issue that you’re not building a house, you’re designing and tuning a production line. That already exists: construction crews. Ever see them build like 20 houses at the same time in a new subdivision? A big part of their value is not just that they know the details of their trade, but that they have honed the production line aspect. (tangent: I once watched, from my workshop, roofers across the street redo an entire roof in an afternoon in what I would describe as a ballet set to the score of nailguns)

I think lesson 2 actually feeds lesson 1: hire a pre-existing team of experts and give them the blueprint. Then watch how they design the production line.

Gosh this is fascinating. So many questions. I wish the post was longer.

Ok, not The Pippin:

The Apple Pippin is a defunct open multimedia technology platform, designed by Apple Computer, and marketed as PiPP!N.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin