But this made me a bit sad.
I think Soylent is great, it is disruptive, it is more palatable than nutraloaf it could be a great alternative for folks who just need food to live, and it could provide a fascinating 'control' group for various Microbiome projects. But clearly these folks aren't exactly "experienced" as Jimi Hendrix might say.
Here is the challenge, there is a crap ton of knowledge about how to do things that isn't taught in school or on the web or in books. You learn that by 'apprenticing' at a company or organization which is already doing something like what you want to do, and getting the history of all the things they had to overcome and avoid "in the old days." It isn't nostalgia, it is education through experience. That is what experience is. And the only way to get it, is to experience it. It was sad for me when I realized this, I could be smarter than my manager at the time and yet he could be a better manager because he had experienced more issues and overcome them (or at least seen the solution to them) to have a much better sense of what would be an important problem and what would be a minor problem. I could put any situation I wanted in front of him and he had an answer to the "big problem" / "small problem" classification, but he could not express that as an algorithm I could learn from.
So when people come out of college and start companies the next day I tend to cringe a bit as there is a lot of stuff they are going to learn the hard way. That is doubly true when you're doing multiple disciplines (food prep + nutrition + distribution + marketing + regulation + Etc.) and having run a business of type A won't prime you to run one of type B, other than to help you recognize where you need subject matter experts.
One wonders why the first hire at Soylent wasn't someone who had 5 years or more setting up and running a food production line. I don't know but I have heard folks in similar situations say "How hard could it be?"