The Biggest Pivot in YC History
blog.soylent.me
blog.soylent.me
Liquid feeding is not new. Many companies do it already.
Liquid feeding for developing world also isn't new. There are a number of foods developed especially for that market.
Here are some of the competitor products:
(http://ensure.com/) Ensure
(https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//) Fortisip
(http://www.complan.com/) Complan
(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands) Abbott Nutrition Brands
These are big companies. They have dieticians and nutritionists working for them. They have established manufacturing channels sorted out. They supply a known, quality product to a variety of sources. They have existing contracts with big customers. They have expertise in selling to healthcare markets.
Note also the caution they use when describing their products - they don't claim that these are suitable for anyone. They certainly don't suggest that you stay on a liquid diet if you don't need it. They strongly suggest doctor's supervision.
Soylent claim to be interested in the developing world markets. About 20% of the world live on less than $1.25 per day. (http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home)) And the main ingredient of Soylent is water, supplied by the user. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. (http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.htm...)
The World Food Program and UNICEF have some information. (https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products) -- see how cheap they're aiming for?
It's your body, and what you do with it is up to you. But Soylent are being irresponsible by selling this product as "safe", for everyone, as "tested", when it hasn't had any testing, and we don't know that it is safe, and we do know that it is not safe for everyone.
And this is the company selling most of the ingredients for these various nutri-stuffs (http://www.dsm.com/en_US/foodandbeverages/public/home/pages/...)
Good Luck and everything, but I don't think they have any clue what they're doing, or who the established competitors are.
(Using secondary account because I'd set noprocast a bit too long)
If you make a new A/B testing tool or a spiffy way to choose colours for a website nobody is going to wonder what the long term health consequences might be.
Your logic can be applied in regard to the consequences of a whole host of technology ideas which involve personalizing user experience, providing relevant advertizing content or analyzing user behavior.
As a parent, I certainly wonder about the long-term consequences of online behavior, and expect they are of a far more irreversible nature.
So far I haven't seen any sign that they have any idea about what going on in that domain.
There's a bunch of stuff about "Hey! What if food was a simple easy liquid?" - well, fine, except that's been in existence for many years. There's some stuff about "optimal health" - which is a bit scary when you have a bunch of people with (as far as we can see) zero medical knowledge, zero dietary knowledge, and zero nutritional knowledge. Apart from what they've got from Wikipedia. And then there's the "Soylent will feed the world" - except we've been trying to feed the world with similar products for years and there's still a problem.
For the world hunger stuff: Who are they selling to? Charities and NGOs? The WFP and UNICEF? Will they just sell the raw product, or will they sell distribution too? What makes them better than whoever the WFP / UNICFEC are buying from?
This is why it doesn't feel disruptive. Most disruptive companies see what other people are doing, and target the inefficiencies or target what people want done differently.
Soylent claims to be different, but is the same as existing products (but with much bolder claims and much less quality control).
Everything I've seen with Soylent so far feels very rushed, and not thought-through. MVPs are fine for most things, but I'm pretty cautious about what I live on.
Most YC startups are not going to cause you direct physical harm. Soylent might. And I'd be fine with that if they had stuck to the original self-experimental approach. But they're not. They saying, clearly, unambiguously, that the product is tested and is safe and is safe for everyone.
"Soylent is a simple and affordable nutritional drink that has everything the healthy body needs"
"Everything the healthy body needs"?
If I use it exclusively for a decade, will Soylent be liable for health issues arising from any potential nutritional issues?
I find the experiment interesting and don't wish to rain on the parade as I'd love to see some solution to nutrition in general (understand and communicating, figuring out a plan given height, age, sex, activity levels, dietary preferences, etc).
But I really hope the experiment stays out of the third/developing world until it's proven... if you're going to risk someone's health then at least let that be someone who has access to health care, clean water, other food, etc.
The worst thing they could do is to use the potential third world market as a sales pitch, experiment there, and then screw it up and leave people with a whole new set of problems and no recourse. Though, I guess that other industries do exactly that and treat it as an externalisation of the cost (oil industry practices, etc).
1. Chewing is important. It helps trigger the brain to stimulate the digestive process. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7568724.stm
2. "Meal time" appears to be an important social construct. For example, the single strongest predictor of school achievement scores was the frequency and duration of family meals.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/73393...
3. Scientists are just now discovering the importance of bacteria in food consumption. Bacteria can be difficult due to the need for some of them to be refrigerated. NYT ran a great article recently on the problems with baby formula (arguably an infant-stage competitor :)).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-...
4. Finally, getting the right mix of nutrients can be fairly difficult. I was surprised to find the "dark side of antioxidants". Thus far, in the studies I've read, it has been extremely difficult to "beat" a "whole" foods diet.
http://bigthink.com/devil-in-the-data/the-dark-side-of-antio...
No kickbacks, but the best "drink" I've found in this arena so far has been Xymogen's i5: https://www.xymogen.com/products/product-detail.aspx?pid=78. I use it for reasons alluded to below in background.
Background: wife is a food and travel writer. Some major life hurdles have required us to study and be extremely cognizant of what we eat.
2. Don't replace your family dinners with Soylent then. Just replace the meals you typically eat alone. Problem solved.
3. Don't replace every meal with Soylent. Only the ones for which the preparation is inconvenient for you. Again, problem solved.
4. Getting the right mix of nutrients is difficult whether or not you're drinking Soylent. I would argue most, if not all people are deficient in one nutrient or another. Adding Soylent to your diet would probably ensure (no pun intended) that you'd get more nutrients than you do now, not less.
Then the article begins on Soylent and, aside from a few appearances from Paul Graham, YC isn't mentioned again (literally, I even used the find function to check I hadn't read too quickly and missed a crucial paragraph).
From when "YC accepted our original idea" has everything these guys have done been under a kind of YC umbrella? Did they break away then re-establish with YC when Soylent started taking off? I have no idea how any of this works. Could someone fill in what is between the lines here please?
On another note, I've enjoyed the passion and controversy of the Soylent topics on here and avoided commenting because someone has always said what I was going to - except they've said it hours ago and four people have made good rebuttals, and four more have made rebuttals to each those, and so on, to the point where I just want to drink it all in rather than join the noise. However, this part seems a new one on me:
"Rob would simply go to the pitcher, shake it once, and pour a delicious meal for himself"
Delicious? I was under the impression Soylent was either fairly tasteless or mildly unpleasant-tasting. Is it really delicious? In what way? Why? How?
It has quite a bit of sugar. Just go back and read the many articles that have been written by both the founders and the press.
I've just done a google and the only person I can find describing Soylent as 'delicious' in the first few hits is Rob himself, who even says "I'm not trying to make something delicious; there are already a lot of delicious things" - that's defending Soylent's taste in this Gawker article http://gawker.com/we-drank-soylent-the-weird-food-of-the-fut.... The piece contains the following:
"Soylent tastes like the homemade nontoxic Play-Doh you made, and sometimes ate, as a kid. Slightly sweet and earthy with a strong yeasty aftertaste."
"It tasted like when you're baking and you taste the ingredients even if there's not sugar or vanilla in there, you just have a compulsion to taste wet food."
"My mouth tastes hot and like old cheese."
"It tasted like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass."
As a health food Soylent had my curiosity. As a 'delicious' food it has my attention. However, that attention appears to have been misallocated.
"It was delicious! I felt like I'd just had the best breakfast of my life. It tasted like a sweet, succulent, hearty meal in a glass, which is what it is, I suppose." --http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
Gawker staff tried Soylent. Feedback was mixed. Including:
"[It] made me feel like joining a cult, after just one sip." "It tasted like when you're baking and you taste the ingredients even if there's not sugar or vanilla in there, you just have a compulsion to taste wet food." "My mouth tastes hot and like old cheese." "It tasted like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass." "It was great and I love it. I don't want to eat anymore." --http://gawker.com/we-drank-soylent-the-weird-food-of-the-fut...
Eating is not about 'efficiency' unless you're an astronaut or a person doing a round-the-world flight in some exotic aircraft.
I'm sure that in a world where people are all about getting the most out of their day and shaving off a few minutes by reading on their mobiles whilst in the toilet a thing like this might be popular. But I'd rather sit down with my family and/or a bunch of people and share a meal rather than to fuel up.
Beautiful artwork is important, but sometimes you just want to paint a wall white so you can get on with doing other important things.
It seems, that soylent is for time, when you eat in solitude, and for me it's the majority of my dinners.
Friends are always welcome to eat at our house, and to stay if they want to. Plenty of HN'ers have already found out that that is not idle talk.
"Soylent - Free Your Body"
"Share it with your friends and family -- they like getting good nutrients too, we promise!"
"Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health"
A bunch of unsourced (anonymous) 'early adopters' raving about the product.
This is wrong at so many levels that a bit of skepticism to counter it is a good thing.
Disrupting eating, what could possibly go wrong?
Soylent is definitely arguing that people should switch wholesale to their diet, and that's a move that would require a lot of hoops to be jumped through before any kind of claims hinting in that direction could be made.
It's nothing to do with BMW vs KIA, it's everything to do with taking significant risks with other peoples' health.
But I am really happy to hear they are getting YC support and funding, now they will be able to develop it further with good input from specialists. This could become something really big.
With any diet there's risks, assuming it's not missing any major dietary component it's unlikely to be any unhealthier than your average fast-food diet.
Soylent is a single product, from a single supplier, with a single ingredient list, for every meal, everyday.
Also, it doesn't have a single ingredient list. It's been stated several times that the measurements would be modified according to each individual that would use Soylent.
Because they're selling it as that. Perhaps Soylent could consider reading these threads and improving their website information?
>Also, it doesn't have a single ingredient list. It's been stated several times that the measurements would be modified according to each individual that would use Soylent.
This version of the product comes, I think, in just two forms, Male and Female. Ingredients are crucial. (Perhaps a legal requirement? I don't know about the US market.) Certainly a list of ingredients for the base product is possible.
It'll be interesting to see how Soylent do the tailoring to each individual. It'll be interesting to see what information they use to do that modification.
It has some fibre, but it's missing solids. Who knows if that's important or not?
They claim it has a long shelf life. I'm not sure what they're doing to maintain shelf life. Vitamin C, for example, has a short shelf life. Soylent aren't saying how long the shelf life is, or which nutrients might degrade sooner.
That's the kind of thing they'll need help with. Sealed containers, maybe with weekly supplies per container, dark light-proof containers will help.
(While I'm strongly anti-Soylent, I'm trying to be more constructive.)
I am happy to spend a considerable part of my budget to procure groceries that have been grown in a sustainable way and meat from animals that were not industrially produced.
I am also happy to spend considerable time preparing these ingredients into Dishes that are not only nutritious but also a good enjoyment for all senses.
For people that otherwise get their food from budget Walmart microwave dishes or McDonalds and the likes, Soylent might be a good alternative. It is probably easy to add all kinds of spices to create the illusion of variation that is very important for most human taste buds.
Lots of people on the planet are still going hungry or even starving and for those people Soylent - provided it's actually cheaper and proven to be safe - could mean having access to regular nutritious meals for the first time in their lives.
Although he's much misunderstood upon the layman as meaning luxurious foods and pleasures, it's understood he really meant to enjoy basic foods (usually grown in the communal garden) amongst friends.
Soylent would be great for many reasons; third world, developing world, a trip to Mars. But I also share the thought that food is a pleasure and I won't want to give that up.
Epicurus, if he were alive today, might be an early adopter of Soylent.
If Soylent plays a part in reducing the hunger in the world, then I am a big fan. I reserve the hypocrisy for me to not be a fan of it in my own diet.
I don't need to have fancy gastronomical adventures three times a day; I imagine that really, without a need for it, it would be an indulgence to be pursued with about the same frequency as sex.
I love cooking, I love food, but it does take a lot of my time, of which after sleeping and working I only have 7 hours of the day. Other people can't or don't like cooking - what joy is cooking your own food to someone who burns a bowl of cereal?
And for anyone who simply doesn't care about cooking or food, this could be a huge improvement over eating McDonald's or Lean Cuisine every day. Right now, 'not caring' about what you eat has a huge, negative impact on your health. They're trying to eliminate that.
It's a shame that they (and many of their prospective customers) appear to be unaware of the existing liquid feed products.
Eventually they claim they'll tailor the product for each individual. That'll be interesting. Maybe combine it with life planning for exercise and healthier eating? People could wean their selves off junk foods (subbing Soylent for those) and tapering in better food.
Who gives a fuck if I am in the target market segment? The important lessons of Soylent are applicable beyond the specifics. They scratched their own itch, they're shipping, they're gaining the traction needed to build a clear brand, and above all the founders were not so in love with the contents of their own heads that they failed to recognize failure nor seize opportunity.
Sure it's not a product that contains interesting ideas expressed as computer code. Ain't the point. What matters is not the operands but the implementation of the operands.
Good luck to the Soylent team. Maybe you will convince me to be a customer, but no hard feelings if you forego wooing me.
I don't know about the biggest pivot, but I'd say it could be the biggest disruptive business, possibly ever.
I've always envisioned a future where you'd eat a meal as a special social occasion, otherwise, get your nutrition from something like soylent (though I imagined a pill).
EDIT: I have to concede that while the Soylent team's lack of health/nutrition expertise is worrying, the promise of their business is so important on a global scale that they deserve to get funded and further research their ideas. Very rarely do you see a startup operate in this space, even more rare one that could end up fighting world hunger.
I was thinking earlier today that if they are just capable of getting people to use soylent twice a day for a hurried breakfast before work, and for many (like me) who work through their lunchtime, that would have not only a massive market.
The thing is, how much of this is just the right marketing. Meal replacement drinks have been around forever, and though the name says it all, we don't believe that the product is actually a replacement for our meals, rather it's an occasional helper to get us to the next meal.
Poor developing countries. I hope they get their ubiquitous wireless soon. (Alternately, I wonder what this project will pivot into: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1776324009/brck-your-bac... ).
If you enjoy preparing every meal you eat, or eating social for every meal, Soylent isn't for you so save the specious criticisms. If you do, however, get annoyed by having to prepare certain meals and wish you could just get the food into your belly immediately without the work on occasion, then Soylent or some other meal replacement drink is a great solution.
It's not going to kill you, or mess up your health, or do any of the many terrible things people have been warning about in every thread having to do with Soylent. It's going to perhaps save you some time and give you a few essential nutrients you may not have been getting otherwise. That's it.
How do you know?
Soylent is being sold as something that you can eat for every meal. You can argue that most people aren't going to do that, but that's how Soylent are selling it.
Soylent claim, unambiguously, that it is safe for everyone. People with Crohn's disease sometimes need to eat a liquid feed. Is Soylent safe for them? Because Soylent claim that it is safe for them, and that it'll provide them with optimum nutrition and bring them to good health.
I agree with you that they should not be selling it in that way.
But I'm trying to be more a "critical friend" rather than just "negative". I realise that I don't yet have the right balance.
The first two sentences made me think of Atkins, who I've heard (yes hearsay again) was hastened to his death by the high fat content of his low-/no-carb regime?
FWIW I'm not saying Soylent is worse than any other diet, I don't know. Just that your opposition to the parents scepticism seems a little too strong.
Only one aspect of our eating habits should be the nutritional value. Enjoyment of your food and the people you eat with are also very important.
Very interesting post - I know many people will eat this product right up.
At $70 BOM cost, it failed, but at $15 BOM cost it might succeed. Why not put the work into the public domain and let someone else do good with it?
I've always read differing and greatly conflicting views on what a person should have as intake, obviously because it's very subjective and so many factors are being balanced (who's saying it, why, motives, height, age, activity levels, etc).
The greatest part of this experiment that interests me is less about providing the product and more to do with determining the exact mix for someone.
I can't seem to find them on the YC summer 2012 list and their new nutrition thing is all that comes up in my web searches.
Their big "campaign" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5745707
Come on, HN.