Half-Baked Product
weli.dev
weli.dev
You see this in the startup world a lot. Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.
There’s then a big mismatch between what the founder thinks is possible, and what the domain expert thinks is possible.
The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
Another defense is that blindingly naïve optimism is sometimes needed to move the needle, as the concept “that can’t be done” simply doesn’t exist to some people.
I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts.
EDIT: The very latest happened only a couple of weeks ago. A startup had reached out to my employer as they’re developing a platform in our domain. Higher ups liked what they’d seen, enough to arrange a real meeting.
Startup is only 3 months old, and the moment I opened the platform I recognized a vibecoded (likely using clause) platform identical to almost all other launched on a daily basis.
So I probed a bit about data sources, serious questions regarding security, etc. but the guy was pretty fluent in consultant (turns out he had worked as a management consultant before launching), and the CTO was just nodding along.
In the end they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features - but as mentioned, I’m sure the whole product was entirely vibecoded.
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
If you think that Musk did his endeavors in order to become rich, you are likely mistaken.
The thing is, he _had_ this. He had all of Reddit worshipping him. He had the press. He had the tech-internet.
Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
I think the reasons why are pretty clear: a son-who-loves-me became a daughter-who-despises-me and his companies got repeatedly hamstrung by California Democrats.
But if his root motivation was truly just approval, he would have taken it on the chin and accepted slower growth of his other ambitions. So it's a little more complicated than that.
He blew it up years before that with his "pedo guy" false accusation drama.
It's true. Nothing the American left hates more than an ex-Democrat. If only they hadn't made being a centrist a Republican position.
This is speculation, but I am guessing that he didn't do this knowingly. He's probably surrounded with yes-men who didn't challenge his fever dream of swooping in, fixing the government, and being lauded as a hero.
End of the day though, why does it matter his true motivation? If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
It's not like I'm going to get the chance to talk with him personally and get to know him and sus out what it is, either, so it's all just pointless theorizing. What we, the general public "know" is a result of various people with their own agenda pushing their owna viewpoints? Does the man know anything at all, is he a total charlatan, or is he smart and gets it? Hit refresh on a different subreddit and get a different answer.
Are you asking why the motivations of one of the richest (and thus most influential) people on the planet matter? He’s actively influencing domestic and foreign elections to further his own goals. He gutted government aid programs, leading to millions of deaths. He shares propaganda to a massive audience. Of course his motivations matter.
> If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
Yeah, until the world he creates is one where you can’t. The reason the world is in its current fucked-up state is that too many people think like that. Until the leopard eats their face and they’re surprised, but by then it’s too late.
That seems an incredibly minor thing in the grand scheme of Elon Musk's life to judge him on it. I think it was stupid and unnecessary, and betrays a deficiency of character, but it's so tiny compared to dragging the world into car electrification, satellite internet, not just recreating the US rocket industry but making reusable rockets, online payments, and conservative opinions like "trans women aren't women" no longer being a bannable offence on the world's main discussion platform.
Janice Raymond, left-wing radical feminist, wrote a book making that point in the 1970s.
> His character, at the impressive level of 95, reflected not only a significant time investment but also a high degree of expertise.
> Musk’s performance has sparked skepticism about whether he genuinely leveled and equipped his character himself.
> The prevailing sentiment in the gaming community is that Musk doesn’t typically invest much time in video games, but instead leverages gaming achievements to draw media attention.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Elon-Musk-embarrasses-himself-...
That was the most "the emperor wears no clothes"-moment I've ever witnessed in my life. I play more PoE than I care to admit, and it was obvious within mere seconds that he has absolutely no clue what's going on.
It was absolutely surreal to watch.
It is also so bizarre to brag about rankings for games where the grind to end game is a massive time sink. It wasnt like he was some LoL god where there is no grind only skill.
Yea, that’s called narcissism. Their only drive in life is to be admired, and it’s much easier to lie and deceive to reach that goal, than doing something that’s truly praiseworthy
IMO people who are seeking approval tend to not go out of their way to be assholes quite so often ("pedo guy" incident, for example).
He's an action junkie.
In both cases he saw inefficiencies and just wanted to spend the energy he's always been overflowing with to improve things. I don't know about Musk but my friend hates mediocrity and saw everything as something he can improve.
In another case I was in car, for a long trip, with someone else (who was working to become an... Ambassador: hardly the tech type!) and that person would constantly comment on what could be done enhanced.
Something something about personality types, the builders, etc.
Those who only ever want to spend the money of --and benefit from the wealth created by-- others are going to dismiss it all as "people who are after money" but it's more complicated than that and you can't generalize people.
I know several doctors for example: two of them are clearly money-driven (one of them literally told me "I'd never ever teach medicine, I'm in this only for the money") but most of the others I know are just happy to help people be more healthy.
I've got another friend, not rich at all, he's working an additional job as a firefighter: sure it brings some money, but that's not the reason. He's also an action junkie. He was there driving ambulances during Covid: to be helpful, for the action, etc.
It's not all about money. Thinking it's only about money is a mindset that often comes from those who want the money of others (through taxes).
Thanks for sharing, it’s nice to be reminded of potential other motivations of people who outwardly seem to just want to accumulate money.
Thanks for your agenda, was really looking forward to it.
A less charitable response would be the desire for attention and approval to fill some kind of deeply rooted inferiority complext.
The latter view would also illustrate a similarity to Trump.
I know a company that fits this so well that I almost want to check the names. It's older than 3 months though.
You mean the moment when someone says "It's Facebook but for dogs! That should be easy, right? I had the idea, that's the hard bit, you just need to write it!"
Except… they don’t.
You need a different type of camera - one not optimized for “vision” (in the sense of “object discernment”) - one Teslas do not have.
And even if they did, to count photons you need an enclosed space in front of your lens, not the … open road.
Which is annoying: Teslas haven’t had that, and could never have that but he goes on an investor call and openly lies about it, and doesn’t get called out. It’s not even an “aspirational statement” it’s a lie that goes against the laws of physics.
He knows a lot, and he also knows enough to be able to be confidently wrong and pass the bullshit meter of people who don’t know any better. They are not the same thing.
Nope. Musk has been obsessed with rockets and electric cars, specifically, for a very long time
Lets throw in a few more of Elon's failures, this time lets focus on the ones that are outright dangerous or killing people!
- In an accident, the Cybertruck has frequently trapped people inside the vehicle and caused them to burn to death when the batteries catch fire because they hid the manual release on the doors for aesthetic reasons, so people couldn't get out. Also the unbreakable glass means that people spent their final moments desperately trying to smash an unbreakable window while burning to death. People have died from this! It was totally predictable and preventable! https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-woman-killed-cybertruck-cr...
- Fully self driving. Hasn't happened, and a lot of the danger is because he wanted to cheap out on lidar and brashly overpromised on its capabilities.
Lets also focus on some of the funny ones that came from his need for validation, like needing people to think he's a great gamer: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jan/20/elon-musk-stan... (why would any adult not involved in E-Sports even want to convince their peers they're great at gaming? Like, who cares?!)
Even when he has a good idea like Starlink he ruins it by awful about it (shutting it off for entities he disagrees with).
This guy should not be anyone's hero.
The Buran, a soviet spaceplane very similar to the space shuttle, landed autonomously
He made all the money first the silicon valley way (paypal) and then decided to actually make and sell non-software/ip things that physically exist. I think that is actually hard. And if successful very valuable.
Although making software isn't easy, I think there are lots of silicon valley types who create IP, but enter a super-competitive market. IP can be valuable, but it might be quick and easy to spool up a competitor and/or copy it.
Thanks, gave me a chuckle. One to remember.
Or, if they're an engineer, to design cool products while not having the faintest idea of how to run a business and manage people. Ran into far more of those than get-rich-quick types.
Having said that, I was also lucky enough to work for a company where the founder had a science degree but not in the field he was currently working in, was really good at sales, and recognised that others knew a lot more about the field than he did and was willing to listen to them. One of the lead tech guys could literally say to him "this is a stupid idea" and the idea would get changed. They muddled along for some years until he found the right people to run things, and have been doing pretty well ever since. Last I checked it was still a good place to work for.
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
(No, from dry-cleaning)
https://stroodles.co.uk/collections
I bought some edible cups out of curiosity a few years back. Nice for coffee. I did end up eating them all, although some of them were still dry at the time of consumption.
I think edible soap has better behaviour-adjusted shelf-life here.
Sodium bicarbonate residue won't kill our customers, so consider it technically edible. The issue of taste and efficiency will be approached after MVP
(I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)
This allows the pre-wash cycle to get rid of most of the grease and stuff before the main cycle so the main cycle is more effective and the water is cleaner so the final rinse works better too.
I am quite certain these exist already large kitchens and I seem to remember one from a school diner from maybe 35 years ago, but I've always been wondering why they don't exist on smaller scale.
The cycle-to-volume ratio is as bad as it could possibly be. Conventional dishwashers recirculate water as they wash and rinse. I imagine there's an mx + c formula to how much water is needed (c = enough water to prime the pump or whatever). So compared to a normal size load, you'd be wasting that constant amount of water.
The wash is also likely going to follow mx+c (c = time for grease to break down, time to rinse, time to dry etc). You can wait a few hours for a whole set of crockery. Can you wait a few hours for a single plate?
Commercial "passthrough" dishwashers work very differently. Manual mechanical action with a spray, plus a quick wash, sterilise and rinse. At that point why not wash your single plate by hand?
That doesn't help, however, if users are lazy and don't unload the dishwasher after opening it to grab a clean plate or whatever.
It's a nice feature that can be added with existing sensors and one line of logic in the uC. Another one I noticed recently is garage door openers with the photo transmitter/receiver ('beam') to stop the door if someone blocks it can use that same beam to turn on the light if broken when the door is up. Handy if entering a dark garage from outside.
The downside of low tech solutions if many people touch it (i.e. not just the janitor or rostered staff) is that someone can still add their shared mug to the dishwasher just after a cycle's complete, causing the entire batch to be considered unclean. Or in your example, someone deciding to flip the sign but not emptying out the dishwasher.
Then again, these are little things that people have learnt to make do and just live with, and I'm not sure it's worth paying 2x or 3x, or even 20x the price just for fancy feet, like what the article thinks people might do with a fancy oven.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
The hot water is recirculated during the wash, the rinse uses fresh water from the tap with the excess going out an overflow. A little sump water gets replaced every cycle, but enough stays that it's back up to temperature before you've emptied and refilled it. There's also a small peristaltic pump to top up the detergent directly from the bottle.
Not much benefit in a home setting unless you fancy having it hot and ready 24/7 though.
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
the task is prepare food, eat, clean. when you leave the kitchen and come back the next day the task is now different, its unpack, prepare,eat,clean.
you are constantly not finishing today's tasks. it lives to see another day. if you can fix it, bound it to the workflow, you will be a billionaire
You could use your same type of reasoning for food/cooking. When you buy food and put it in the fridge to cook later, you haven't finished the task. I think that's more a way of feeling permanently uncomfortable with things not being finished. There is no end state for most things in the house. Work is never done.
dual dishwashers
One pot, no dishes. Each roommate has to keep track of their private spoon. Greedy "clever" roommate who shows up with a liter ladle triggers a spoon fight in the kitchen. Eating from pot by hand is corrected by rapping their knuckles with your spoons. Eventually, all the glassware ends up broken, and some bozo threw out all the used red solo cups, but luckily, the kitchen faucet has a spray attachment.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
Because they need space, they need even more nasty chemicals than domestic dishwashers, they need a stack of trays to load the dishes on and a crew to load and unload them.
If you want a dishwasher which doesn't require unloading after use you can get 2 of them, one of which is "clean", the other "dirty" or washing. When the "dirty" one is full you turn it on and let it wash while you take whatever you need from the "clean" one. Once the formerly-dirty one has finished it's cycle the roles are reversed and it becomes the "clean" one.
(They also have a fridge and then two pull out drawer units, one is for keeping extra snacks frozen things (like ice, ice cream, juice etc.) and the other is for veggie / meat.)
With 2 dishwashers one would use some clean plates and maybe leave some pots behind that would not be used for a while. In practice, these would need to be emptied. It is a great idea if one uses only one dishwasher worth of utensils though.
I think of those toilet modules in japan where you can clean the whole bathroom with a hose. Maybe what we need are self cleaning cupboards.
I've used these while working as a volunteer in a camp kitchen during work weekends, where we had maybe 20-40 guests eating a meal. You put dishes/silverware/pots/pans/whatever in a square tray, push it into one side of the Hobart, and pull down a lever to close the doors and start the cycle. They take a number of minutes that you can count on one hand... I seem to remember 90-120 seconds but I'm not sure. Stuff comes out clean and hot on the other side, and you want to pipeline this so it's one person with dirty hands feeding stuff in, and one person with clean hands (and thick gloves) pulling the square trays out, letting them cool, and putting the clean dishes/etc. away.
They release a huge amount of steam and they're wonderful for this kind of volume (20-40 people at a meal + all the cooking implements to support this). Larger than home use, though --- unless of course you had a mansion with servants. And I get the sense that maintenance and operating costs would be a lot higher than a regular plain dishwasher.
On one shift I was paired with a ex-convict. With the exception of the cooks themselves, most of the kitchen was staffed with high school students and ex-cons. The ex-con I was paired with was a dead ringer for Roger Daltry. I was on the "dirty" side and he was on the "hot" side (because there is a pecking order in even the worst jobs), and for some reason, he wanted _me_ to control the opening of the door. I think the reason is that this guy was high all the time and would space out unless something grabbed his attention. Anyway, I made the mistake of opening the door a bit too soon, when the machine was running, and it blasted this guy with steam. I remember him yelping in pain and then glaring at me angrily. One of the line cooks said something along the lines of "we try not to kill our dishwashers" which probably stopped the guy from punching me.
It's a beast of a machine. A little out of place in an ordinary household kitchen...
Fix it by separating the tools (different non-interconnected VMs, etc for dev/qa/preprod/prod environments) and the permissions (different accounts, sessions, tokens, etc for the run/debug/test/deploy loops).
I achieve the first two goals by simply scrubbing+rinsing dishes after most uses and letting them dry. No glued-on food to go gnarly. They go thru the dishwasher once in a while. It's my personal strategy for being eco without getting food poisoning, but I've never seen a paper that evaluates this method in comparison to more-typical workflows (i.e. in-sink wash-using-soap or in-dishwasher wash-using-soap).
I’d like to speak with you, if so.
I’ve seen laundry setups where the water is ozonated, and no detergent (or hot water!) is required to remove debris and oxidize oils and other gunk out of clothes.
I absolutely hate bending over to unload the dishwasher. When I open a dishwasher, it should slide out and lift itself to cabinet height. And it should just hold an entire bottle of detergent so I don't have to put it in each time.
The two dishwashers idea is neat, but the cupboard capacity is greater than that of a second dishwasher; and we haven’t got the space!
I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.
The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.
I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.
This is assuming there IS a way to keep the business afloat. It's this framing of thinking that has caused more suffering, frustration, and bad will in all the places I've worked at which are just reskins of this article.
A business is entitled to it's model but it is not entitled to success. This story which is more than just a strawman or anecdote gets it right: The engineers are doing their job the best they can with unreasonable expectations set by people who do not feel they need to be constrained by reality and just have dollar signs in their eyes. The engineers do not share the same type of blame as everyone else at the company. Their failure was enabling nonsense and greed.
In a couple of these cases, the company was ultimately sold in a fire sale. The early investors, founders, and employees got nothing. The acquisition is still celebrated as a "success", of course.
Most people can’t just stop working and start working for no cash.
I might be missing some obvious sarcasm, though!
Software in general is a field quite compatible with initial self-funding, in ways you can't say for other industries.
But even still, investors threw away gobs of money on clearly unsustainable businesses like NFTs, and capitalism in general is happy to sell people the rope they will use to hang capitalists, so it's not even impossible to find investors if you absolutely need them.
Pair the lack of ongoing payments to investors or lenders with the superior execution of worker-led organizations, and companies such as these should pretty clearly mop up their competitors saddled with non-value-added executive management and non-value-added investors.
That is, assuming these roles don't provide any value to companies.
That’s only close to possible if we start with the assumption that all businesses are billion dollar businesses.
This is also unrelated with the possibility to bootstrap a business without money.
With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to only sell to people who are purely excited about the tech.” I don’t know when he learned this (I actually wonder if it was a lesson he learned from Eberhard/Tarpenning at Tesla, who were only selling the roadster to sports car enthusiasts who cared more about 0-60 than fit & finish, or range, or cost, or anything else).
Anyway, my current interpretation is that the pizza guys shouldn’t have sold to pepepizza (or friends and family, probably). I know startups do this all the time, but whenever I’ve seen it, it always seems to turn into a distraction from the Big Idea that is the company’s thesis. Then Big Customer gets hung up on ancillary requirements and Cool Startup doesn’t really get to test their thesis at all. Maybe the key is to stay small, focus on finding people who really care about the new oven tech, and size the company to that market until you’ve solved enough problems to expand to people for whom the cool tech is concern #2 or #3.
This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.
The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.
I agree that being a "custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer" might not have been the ideal outcome, but at least the entire company would have gotten some expertise, and probably be able to pivot and finally build their own thing given more resources (*cough*moreVCfunding*cough*).
"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them."
Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
Occasionally the business types come along and make it worse by turning it into a product or a service. Other times they make bad products and bad services from scratch.
The people in this story are focusing at the wrong layer (as are many of us). They need to stop trying to sell ovens and start trying to sell baked goods. Maybe once they're good at that, they can also sell whatever oven they came up with along the way.
If most founders are wealthy, or even reasonably comfortable, it's possible they're too out of touch to identify a problem shared by enough people.
The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.
"their kitchens are custom-built, so they need ovens with specific dimensions. Oh, and a rotating base like the one they already have."
“My oven at home connects to the fireplace. Does yours?”
“I make a lot of wedding cakes, what have you got for me?”
“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”
Those are all problems.
But are they problems worth spending time? I dunno.
The "secret" is just to talk to people in the field they're trying to "revolutionize," and ideally observe them work. Often, people become blind to workflow problems and workarounds become normal process. They never even consider to look for a better way to do something. Those are the opportunities for founders to solve.
But what I've seen a lot is founders just arbitrarily coming up with an idea that sounds cool on paper, raising money, and only realizing too late that there is zero actual market fit.
They're not problems people need solved. They're problems people think they want solved. need != want.
the high street bakers needed reliability with improved efficiency at an affordable price (cost of risk). they didn't need improved efficiency, less reliability and still really expensive.
It seems like most customers are returning the oven, which would normally be an extremely strong signal that there is a quality problem. In the SaaS world, the equivalent would be churn, but it's not always as straightforward since if users quit before they sign up (e.g. by reading a review or using a free trial), then they don't show up in that metric.
How do people actually buy ovens? What actually matters for customers, not what do they say matters? Who are the competitors and why do you think you can actually do better than them in at least some niche? What culture actually works for an oven producing company?
No, and neither does anyone else in these scenarios. Almost all startups are trying to build something new that they want people to want. But customers almost universally do not want your product. They don't give a crap about you or your product. What they care about is delivering their own product and/or achieving their own goals. Your product is a tool. If it is a tool that helps them for a reasonable price, they will buy it. But never be fooled into thinking "They want my product". They don't. They want an effective tool to to meeting their own needs. Your product wins when it is that tool.
the trick to sales is to feed into that selfishness.
I mostly see the leaders or the product people telling the engineers or designers that they don't understand business—implying that the latter aren't reasonable people who can advocate for things that balance the various dynamics that have been brought up in a meeting, that their view results from only considering the thing technically or aesthetically. It's a hand-wavey maneuver that's always there, said without specifics. This is particularly so given you've provided specs and designs and they rarely show business or market analysis. I've worked with many PMs to propose our work to stakeholders—they swear to the audience they've done the business work, but in preparing the presentation, they just googled a couple very broad things (one example, "the collaboration market is a $70B market"). I've worked with others, who I've tried to learn from, to show or point me to some basics of that analysis and they didn't know.
Product managers and product people in general have very little background in product management. It's not a degree or anything. Sometimes they come from backgrounds that are helpful, but we oddly have junior and entry level ones. This doesn't make that much sense, given they are formal or informal leaders of teams. What could they be bringing to the table? A (sad) exception is when access to meetings or information is gatekept, so then they're bringing that. Sometimes it's argued that PMs are good at seeing across things, but that has not been my experience. The problem with the each person is an expert in their own field is that in a lot of teams, the expert is frequently not better at their thing. The decision maker is not actually better at business or seeing across things or making decisions.
> ... if he sells a new oven to the country’s pizza makers, pastry chefs, and bakers, he only needs to capture 10% of the market to become a billionaire.
i.e. the founder assumes that "ovens" is a single $10b-sized market, and it isn't, because reality has a surprising amount of detail (as sibling comment also notes).
You could interpret this whole story as a saga of very inefficient oven market(s) research, the end result of which is the forum post at the end:
> On the forum an old user warns “Make sure that you support rotating bases day 1”.
its because the story just makes that assumption.
What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.)
Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?")
Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?")
More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?
My bosses don't buy the ovens that are the most dependable, the most efficient, nor ones that are even compatible with the other steps in the cooking process.
They're impressed by the AI oven that cooks the pizza mostly right 30-40% of the time. "It'll be more consistent if you let the oven decide how long to cook." But we ignore that because of how stupid it is.
They buy ovens that suck because sales people impress them with baking jargon they don't understand. At least, that's how it comes off when they talk about it. I'm sure getting a good deal is a much bigger factor than they say.
They don't eat pizza. They can't even tell whether it's burnt. They tell me "soon the oven will do everything for us and you won't be needed."
They don't seem to comprehend that an oven can't knead dough or mix ingrdients. And that's even ignoring the fact that the auto-cook features are wrong except in the best of conditions.
The ovens break constantly because of the humidity levels needed to keep the dough nice. They spend more on repairs than they ever did on the ovens. We keep telling them to get the moisture-resistant ovens. They say it's too expensive.
I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.
In this story specifically they needed to bring technical stakeholders to Mallorca.
Not if they're building inverting ovens for another big corporation. If you do one truly worthwhile thing better than everyone else, do you still need to chase after marginal opportunities to stay afloat? I'm sure there are many, many small companies (not "startups") who are just quietly filling a niche.
- previous customer yells at you for not delivering required features. You ask the engineer about the status of that feature
- engineers write a manifesto on #general complaining about you for asking them about the status of the new feature
- PM calls you in to yell at you for trying to jump the roadmap
- you start prepping for weekly call with the CEO. at least doubled your numbers this quarter!
- while you're prepping you get a response to one of your cold emails from the day prior, someone calling you "gauche" and "annoying"
- go into CEO meeting. CEO yells at you for being 80% under the quota, because the psychotic quota was set to 10x last year's numbers.
- long day! go home. husband yells at you for working late
etc.
That being said, engineers usually don't complain about being asked for the status of the feature.
What we complain about is being asked why the feature we never committed to deliver is still not there yet.
Even worse if we get cornered into uttering words that are then ret-conned into a commitment.
(A very "efficient" techniques I've heard of if for salesperson to "ask the same question over and over again with enough variations until the engineer and PMs cave." May be helpful if you have already decided to answer "yes" to the feature request / RFP checkbox anyway. Doesn't end well for most people, but sometime a quota gotta be quota-ed....)
> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.
That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.
Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.
(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)
Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.
I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.
However, I think Anova would be a better direct counterpoint. They started in sous vide, replacing existing products that did the same thing but better. But now they are literally trying to replace ovens. That effort started after the Electrolux acquisition in 2017, but they do seem to be pretty successful. A friend of mine really likes their steam oven, and if I had more space in the kitchen, I would be tempted.
Yahoo had two failed attempts to acquire Google; in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.[37][38]
In 2002, when Terry Semel entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal.
Doesn't this still line up with the original point though?
The incumbents had the exact same opportunity to capitalize. Blockbuster could've leaned into streaming hard before Netflix.
I do think that's become a bit harder recently, though, so the original point is slightly less relevant (though obviously still exists, see for example OpenAI vis-a-vis DeepMind). Big companies are much faster on chasing trends, even if they end up amounting to not much. See crypto, for example. I do think part of that reason is because the current wave of companies capitalized where incumbents faltered, so they're desperate not to make the same mistake.
Philips is in no way strapped of engineering talent, but they can still design the occasional bad product, when there are many alternatives at similar price points that are better, like the Sage Barista Express.
Even though our ovens actually work fine, the problem is a new competitor: OpenOven. Their oven is completely free, and on the Italian forum everyone talks about them. It has even way more buttons than ours (most don't work very well, but the community loves it).
We almost sold to MrBaguette, one of the biggest bakery chains in the world, as they wanted new oven supplier for their next generation of kitchen. Their chef tried our oven and loved it. But in the end they went with the pricier one from Corporate Oven, because some VP thought we were too small and worried we wouldn't supply them in 20 years.
If I may ask how do you actually plan to make money? Because as far as I can tell, you're still losing a lot of money on every oven you give away.
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
(I'm not a mod or anything; I just noticed that most of your comments have been flagged/killed, and I suspect this might be why.)
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
If there are specific tells that the text has been AI generated, point them out! A lazy drive by of "that's AI!" doesn't teach anything.
FWIW I do find it somewhat useful to have someone point out "this is an LLM" - I don't always have my AI detector on and I appreciate it when other people do. And when someone says particular text was LLM generated I need to go back and think about whether I believe it a bit harder.
There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.
I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.
Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)
- Mario
It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.
Good fiction teaches you something you hadn't seen before, or challenges your perspective, or articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered. If it's just "some guy went to work and it sucked and he was right and everyone else was wrong and the Green People did classic Green People bullshit", and there's nothing else complicated or humanizing it, and no real-world lesson or stranger-than-fiction details to it, then what value does it have?
Like, what would happen if you asked a redditor with 10 years of experience reading about startups, but no real exposure to that culture/experience beyond the comment section, to write a story summarizing the consensus opinion on reddit of how startups typically work? Of course, because it's made up it's not wrong, but it exists entirely within the socially-contingent reality of the Internet Consensus.
In the real world there's politics, inter-personal relationships, personalities and personality flaws, and too much detail for "startup flails around" to be something you can reduce to "the startup flailed around". Of course it did, but why and how? A story that says "you know how it goes in all the other stories? yeah, that" or "there was a guy like you and he was good, and all the other guys were idiots and they were bad" has no point
You are 100% correct on good fiction.
I have the feeling that you will not like Franz Kafka.
Without elevating this piece to that level I think we can still agree to disagree on what good fiction is.
Or maybe your humor is better aligned with the socially-contingent reality of Franz.
But your perspective is valued. I need to shake of my bias and remember that there are no easy wins. For each point there is a counter. And I find it hard to argue against yours as my bias makes your stance feel very dismissive. Everything then turns into wedge issues.
I would have preferred an argument based on why the piece was flawed not how. Then I could counter with my experience and we could have had a conversation.
Enough Internet for me today! ;-)
You should never take a risk, business people are all evil and stupid, you should treat every employment or business opportunity as purely transactional because they'll do the same to you, there's nothing you can do about your job or employment, the only way to win is to cheat because everyone else is doing it, the key to happiness is educating other there's not really any cause and effect involved in the way things work unless you, personally, already know it. Just, you shouldn't do anything unless you understand everything about it, and if you don't it's not your fault.
> not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely
This is literally the defining trait of startups. What makes it stupid is that it's always more complicated than "engineer guy did everything he could but got screwed in the end" and that in real life, sometimes people do actually make money or establish businesses because of decisions they made, and conversely that there are real causes and effects behind things that don't go the way you want them to. Telling a story that doesn't contradict in anyway with consensus (so, directionally correct but always wrong) opinion has no point in the same way that there is no point telling a story where a knight rescues a princess by journeying through the kingdom making friends and overcoming challenges, then confronts the evil guy and kills him, the end. This is just that, but "the shady business guy and the screwed engineers"
I found this piece to contain more layers of detail than the usual feel-good dunk-on-bean-counters rants.
I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.
If you don’t see the value of your own word, I can’t give it back to you.
I think there’s a balance to it. You have to meet the customer, and also understand your boundaries. I’ve sold non-existent features that I was unsure if I could deliver, but always solved it since I’m good at smooth talking. I’ll make sure what I deliver brings value, and keep a dialogue with the client. Sales relations are rarely static from my experience.
The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”
It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.
I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?
I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.
But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.
Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?
The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk.
Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk.
If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million.
If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.
If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal.
More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.
> The founder has it all figured out: the problem was never the plan. The problem was the execution
"Execution" being one of those magic business words, I've said this exact thing but only once lampooned thusly did it dawn on me how psychotic it is. If VC-funded startups are almost by definition about "a big vision", then the vision is never wrong -- a self-consuming logic answered by the magic of Execution.
Interestingly, what is ignored there is the founder is also the CEO here, so if the execution was bad ... shouldn't he be fired?
This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
The most resonant line for me. This line for me is about how good project management meets team culture. You want a high performant team: one that remains focused and motivated - but the goals are carrots, not sticks.
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
Restaurants wouldn't even need dish washers if they switched to paper plates. The pots and pans have to be washed by hand anyway. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant when I was only 14. I'd work a 12-hour shift on Saturdays because none of the 'real' dishwashers were available. The only perk I got was that I could have an occasional pipsi on-th-house. I also worked as a young adault in my father's restaurant. I'd come home from 'my' job every day, working on an electronics production line only to be shown the huge pile of dishes that had accumulated during the day. The production line paid me $2.50 per hour. My dad didn't pay me anything. But he let me park my 20-foot trailer in his back yard, which was adjacent to the restaurant property, and in the winter I had to refill my propane every 3 days.
> First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort or in other words building the most minimum version of their product that will still allow them to learn. [1]
There is no hypothesis to be validated or learning connected to those prototypes in the story, and I think using the definition by Eric Ries would change the story quite a bit.
[1]: https://leanstartup.co/resources/articles/what-is-an-mvp/
What I think is a bit of a missed opportunity is for the product to fail with "the pizza|cake|pastry is half-baked" and so customers still have to do the rest of the job anyway.
A wiser version of myself would have cut my losses after at most one year, or much sooner, especially after noticing the red flags. This is something I'm keeping in mind for my next gig.
i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
your article needs to be passed to engineers & I guess everyone before graduating college.
in all the satire - what our industry forgot is - how did people build/fund companies before Venture Capital ?
I’ve found that most people hate making tradeoffs. They don’t recognize that the things they do like don’t do everything.
So If you focus too much on a customer or worse an internal stakeholder who hasn’t designed or built things, it can became a Homer Simpson designing a car situation.
The story could be change with just a few sentences in the middle that would turn it into the founding myth of how Globoven took 100% of the market for energy efficient portable emergency ovens for NATO military use.
If the founder had started by talking with people in the problem space, he could have discovered what problems were actually worth solving before investing any money and effort into a product.
Everything after that happened were downstream effects of creating something without a defensible reason why and for whom.
So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
The baker is happy and proud with what she could contribute to the worldwide bakers community and has made enough money that she and her family never need to worry again. There is just one problem: By now, she is getting old and none of her kids are interested in bakery or oven tech. She's also getting a steadily growing amount of offers to sell the rights to the brand.
Eventually, she caves and sells the brand and designs to BigOven. They promote her brand front and center and initially also use her design. But over time, BigOven replaces more and more parts with cheaper equivalents while keeping the overall look the same - until eventually, they replace the entire product with a stock design.
The bakers take a while to catch on (during which time BigOven makes a ton of additional money from the brand value) but eventually, the quality decline becomes impossible to ignore. Frustrated posts about corporate greed and enshittification make the rounds on the Italian forums.
"They don't make em like they used to" someone writes...
There's no way a contemporary tech founder would offer 5% of the company to an engineer that late in the game. It would be 0.5%, and it would be ISOs at worthless pricing.
Also, for all the founder's Leadership contribution that warranted owning more than half the company, apparently they didn't know that those VCs could pressure/pay all their other companies to buy ovens. And then you simply ride that growth signal to a successful exit. Building and sustaining a viable business is a problem for seasoned professional managers, not brilliant innovators.
Why did the engineer "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens" not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but the engineer's salary wasn't great anyway; the real goal was to build "the oven of his dreams". To do that, he very much needed to understand the algorithmic complexity involved.
What I assume happened is the engineer wasn't sure whether the idea could work, and the only way to find out was to try. Well, he tried, and he found out. Oh well.
Isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes. There was nothing wrong with the nine founders who failed. They were just unlucky, and they can try again.
I think what went wrong in the story is very simple. The company didn't "fail fast".
I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
Oh, that was another problem! The story says:
>> In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP.
No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP! If your product's core functionality—baking stuff, in this case—only works one third of the time, then your product is not viable! It is maybe a proof of concept, but certainly not a product.†
So the company never should have released an MVP, they should have kept working on their reliability problems. Which is when the engineer should have realized "alright, this isn't going to work," and the whole company needs to pivot or close up shop.
Alternately, if they ship a real MVP that can produce perfect cakes with reasonable reliability, and the customers don't like it, that would also be time to change plans.
What happened in the story is they shipped a product that obviously doesn't work, customers dislike the fact that it doesn't work, and the obvious conclusion is "well, they didn't like it because it doesn't work yet," which is true but also obvious. You didn't learn anything.
This doesn't really answer your question and I don't think a definitive answer exists (and I've never worked in this space). But, obviously, this company should have stopped sooner than they did.
---
† The only exception I can see is if you can come up with a potential customer for which "an oven that bakes correctly one third of the time" would still meet their needs. Under the scenario in the story, I don't think this exists. For, say, an AI coding agent that can run automated tests and throw away bad results, a one third success rate may still be useful in some scenarios.
I think this speaks to the other major weakness of most founders: that they are optimists to a fault. The "MVP" in the story was a colossal failure. It wasn't "good enough." It was a disaster, and they should have just stopped there. But founders wouldn't be founders if they were able to know failure when they see it.
Different tastes
It resonates with my personal experience, and your writing style is fresh and dynamic.
Thanks for sharing it, and it deserves to be on the front page and #1.
You can't please everyone
Some folks want to gripe about everything. Life's too short to worry about them. They need to live in the world they make; not me.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
In keeping with the metaphor, how could Engineer, Mario, or Luigi have negotiated better trade offs? I mean, working for a baker as the founder or at least on the board is huge. But what else?
Someone who’s had success critique my draft here:: I want to respect expertise without “caving”.
“I understand the goal of the organization is 10% of the oven market, and I believe in that goal, but if we focus only on pizza for a while, we hit 6%, and gain at least 25% NPS. The garlic bread, calzone, and sweet pastry markets would be easy to tackle, getting us closer to cake. Alternatively, we start with cake. If we deliver Pepepizza a cake solution that absolutely thrills them, would that buy us credibility and time?”
If it didn't make more changes than you're aware of, then you should be aware that some features of your style are common amongst LLMs, and over-use of them will alienate some percentage of your audience (even if unfairly).
Key ones to look out for:
- Staccato prose: repeated runs of short sentences (e.g. "The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.") - Negative pivots: anything with the structure of '!X; Y' (e.g. 'it’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it')
These are valid linguistic features, but if you use them a lot, it sounds like AI writing, and people are wary of AI writing (because of the tidal wave of malicious, spamming & extractive actors using it). It will impact your audience.
I thought it might be intentional though? The first half reads very non-slop, and it just kind of inches its way in as the situation falls apart
Which is a shame, because it makes those constructs less pleasant to read than they used to be. If you squint, and pretend AI doesn't exist (imagine!), then maybe you might be able to enjoy them again.
It is a little bit too long though.
Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there
When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had
For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters
Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those
Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work
Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind
There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet
ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features
These kinds of companies make hundreds of thousands or even millions a year. But it’s too small to hear about them.
why does this happen though? i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time.
also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).
If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.
I've seen this Luigi in my standups (are people still doing these? whole other topic). Hell, I've been Luigi.
Is this unavoidable? - feels like it requires increasing amounts of deliberate concerted effort to avoid this kind of season.
When the glitter of "total freedom to build the perfect oven" patinas into the ground-hog's-day of endless tickets and breathless status updates, how do engineer-folk keep hopping back on the hamster wheel of birthday-cake features?
Asking for a friend .
Quite the interesting part here is that if someone adheres to taste, the oven story would never happen. The question though is does taste matter more, or the oven :)
The catch: domain experts don't know what they don't know about shipping. The fix — vibecoders build it, dev team hardens it for production.
Ever try make a product using Google Glass?
You don’t have to be beaten and starving to have a perspective and story to tell.
Anecdotally I remember 1 hour to 90 minute lunches being the norm 10 years ago. Now, taking more than 30 minutes feels like I need to play 'catch up', primarily because the workload and expectations of SWEs has increased dramatically since then. The pay? Not commensurate. And that's even if you include the short lived post-Covid spike in salaries.
"Be grateful for what you have" gets old quick, especially when leaders (and I use that term loosely) use any opportunity to take more and more.
I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.
The leader never made the hard choice about who the product was for and what problem actually needed to be solved. A smaller product that works well for a market is usually better than one that is trying to solve for everything.
To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place.
It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.
The problem is that those people are really bad at making money, and have a hard time competing with the people whose motivation is money.
It’s not evil, it’s just how money-oriented society works.
This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.
the teleport mechanism is built in into the base of the booth, so it does not affect overall design.
So what's the solution? Is there a playbook that avoids these pitfalls, or is it just the cost of the spin. Ideally, something early engineers can point to when we see non-technical founders falling into familiar traps.
For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.
Take it as a mental exercise.
for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them.
i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessmen, big brain dev, co-founder etc. etc.
thank you for writing this. i'm still trying to come back from crashing and burning at that place. i might read this a few more times as it felt like my story too. the another Engineer part touched me. that's who i was in my story. it hurt.
edit -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774444 hits the nail on the head with their last bullet point. bad leadership innit.
More often I see the opposite. 100 page pdfs that fall apart in first contact with reality.
I think it’s not about research, but it’s very hard to contribute in a field you haven’t actually had a career in.
"FOSS is universally unreliable" was one of such assumptions i had to push back against 5 years later. they meant academica produced software. but they assumed all foss is the same as all academica produced software.
When they didn't iterate on PMF with a niche client.
- not understanding sales and properly incentivizing them
- attacking only urgent problems (urgent vs important matrix)
- not taking constraints expressed by domain experts as real. (Big companies are actually good at this.)
- you need aligned incentives across the board. Sales and accounts mustn’t promise what the company can’t deliver
- people need to defend their area of expertise whilst listening to what others are saying about theirs. For me this boils down to a division between technical and business focussed. Techies need to push for non-client facing technical improvements without making everyone ignore them every time they say “technical debt”, and they need to accept that sometimes you just build shit to get business through the books. Sales/accounts need to accept that sometimes the build budget is taken up with mysterious technical drives that will be worth it. When I say “must accept” I mean accept that it must happen some percentage of the time - each case still needs to be backed up by a business case.
- ultimately this needs to come from the top - founder(s) must balance these facts and drive it through the whole organisation, and in the article they didn’t
And I have to say that no one tries to build a failed business. Founders can be really earnest about their intentions, work harder when they see the cracks, but often it just doesn't work, they don't find the right way before it's too late.
Maybe just before the end someone tries to siphon the funds into private account or assets into their next venture, but you tend to get caught doing so.
Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).
The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.
But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
Oh cool it's still around!
Are you kidding me? Here's my business plan: manufacture faster computer chips than anyone else ever has before using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want faster computers? Buy our chips. End of pitch.
Here's my execution strategy: I'm going to hire the person who comments the most on Hackers News discussions about new chips and let him loose, then come back with a million new requirements because I never bothered to understand anything about how people want to use computer chips or how they're sold today.
My company eventually loses its only customer when it turns out that we don't know how to build faster computer chips at all.
The founder is not "very good", he's a moron who doesn't make a single good decision in the entire story. His failure is absolutely predictable because he doesn't add any value for anyone else at any point in the story, he doesn't understand his customers, he doesn't understand the market, and he doesn't understand his employees and their motivations. The only thing he ever does is raise money, and he's able to do that because his investors also know nothing about the customers, the market, or the potential employees.
Great business parable! This matches how reality works 100%, including the delusion that guys like this are "really smart".
Also my context is totally different. And MY oven concept has none of the drawbacks of their oven and Claude tells me I'm definitely on to something.
I'm off to the notary to sign the docs for Oven.ai (got the domain for only 300k!!) See ya on my yacht!
Premise is laughable right out of the gate.
> The founder offers him 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven
the slow dilution of the core vision and the engineer's freedom is the saddest thing in this
i'm gonna read it 2 more times at least.
If founder keep iterating and hyping his ovens with enough capital he could become big player in oven maker space and disrupting industry. Learning from this article was that he lacked capital and vision.
I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder.
Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver.
Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research?
"If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.
Tesla was overhyped in the first decade after acquisition by Musk; it was bleeding money for 15 years. Arguably, the first Tesla cars were worse and pricier than traditional cars.
My point is that compared to the US, in Europe you have very few stories of successful stealth startups or startups that have needed lots of money for many years. That is a main reason why we cannot create a frontier LLM lab.
just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it