One important part of the story is in the very beginning: The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy.
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.
> 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.
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
> 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.
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.
I'm convinced this is a schtick. Not that he doesn't genuinely want that, but it's not the root motivation. I suspect it's something more like wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark. The cave rescue capsule episode is illustrative. The guy likes attention.
> wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark
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.
> Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.
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!"
Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.
Oh, I’m glad I don’t work in the oven or dishwasher business. We’re just starting a stealth startup that’s revolutionizing coding assistants, and the prototypes are amazing. They write code faster, explain it better, and this weekend we’re hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they deploy to production.
This issue does not come from the coding assistant. In fact, humans will occasionally do the exact same thing as long as their tools have enough permissions to deploy to both local and prod from the same environment.
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).
It sounds like you're joking, but I've long dreamed of a different type of dishwasher. One that washes instantly. I don't need it to fit more than a single plate at one time. Just put something in from one end, and out comes clean and dry plate on the other end. Like a car wash.
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.
Restaurant dishwashers use an enormous amount of water. They require a hot water supply that’s much hotter than residential heaters typically supply. They require a more complete manual pre-rinse and scrub. They only accept kitchenware that’s made for them and destroy the rest.
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.
Those I've used in the UK aren't so bad, they're cold fill only with a heating element in the sump. It takes maybe 15 minutes to fill and get up to temperature at the start of a shift, after that each cycle is ~2 minutes.
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.
They also have the clever system of standardised, removable baskets. Need to increase dishwashing throughput? yank the clean basket, line them up on the counter to dry, and run a new basket through
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
The problem in basically any consumer kitchen is storage - having racks and racks of stuff under your big stainless steel commercial countertops is no problem.
Dishwashers? How dare you. We preferred to be called “Sanitation Engineers - Dishwashing Division” Even had bossman put it on our paystub (he was so tolerant of us kids. I think he was just happy that we were into buffoonery and not meth).
It was definitely one of the more tame activities at work. We would golf rotten potatoes into the field behind the restaurant. Play Celery Generals with traffic, make Concoctions and get the waitresses to test and rate them, and we had an entire WWF wrestling league (that was exclusively judged by the entrance strut and banter; there was never any actual wrestling). Sometimes we’d make new pizza recipes and present them to the kitchen staff of the pizza shop next door. Their contribution to the bit was to act incredibly Italian in their wholesale rejection of our pie. Sometimes we’d even do work.
> I've always been wondering why they don't exist on smaller scale.
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.
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.
When I was a teenager, my very first real job (after being a paperboy) was being a dishwasher in a popular local seafood restaurant. Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr but they offered me $5.50/hr. Boy howdy!
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...
I've dreamed of a dishwasher for people who prioritize clean dishes quickly and quietly over the incremental savings from using asymptotically less water or energy. See also low flush toilets and clothes washing machines.
I've long dreamed of a dishwasher that can detect when you remove the (cleaned) dishes from it, and presents a display saying 'load dishes' or something like that. And after finishing a cycle, says 'unload dishes'. Should be pretty easy to achieve with some load cells in the feet, but haven't seen any like that.
We had this at my old work, except it wasn't a display, it was a circular piece of paper with "clean" on one side and "dirty" on the other. When it was done, you rotate the paper so it was clean side up. Should we have gone for series A? It was a pretty great MVP after all, albeit manual, but automation of the paper flipping would of course come on the second iteration
I would for sure be that rookie who is paralysed with indecision over whether to read "clean" as an adjective or an imperative. Is it telling me that it's clean or that it needs cleaning?
There's also the upgrade path of 2 dishwashers with a single 'clean' token moved between the two. Cupboards are an legacy product holding back progress.
Many modern ones have a door open sensor that allows for the dishwasher to display that dishes are clean after a cycle until the door is opened and fully closed again.
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.
Some dishwashers add a simple timer-based heuristic so if you open it for just a few seconds while you lazily grab something the "clean" indicator stays lit.
I don't know the first thing about dishwashers, but it seems obvious to me.
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?
What you really want is 2 dishwashers! That way you never have to unload the dishwasher because you alternate your dishes between the two. The one that has just completed the cleaning cycle has now become a cupboard with the clean dishes and the other one becomes the dirty dish storage and vice versa.
Then someone has to remember to buy them and take out the trash. The canonical solution is for you and your lazy roommates to eat straight from the pot over the sink. When done, fill the pot with water, to discourage the ants and roaches. Occasionally, you end up with a drowned ratling, but hey, wachagonna do?
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.”
In bars that cycle a lot of glassware they actually do seem to use high heat and break a lot of glasses. But it's fine, the restaurant just buys cheap (easily broken) glasses so it all works out.
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.
I hope it's not the approach of using less water by not rinsing properly in the end, so people have to either eat soap or rinse everything manually afterwards, wasting far more water. I swear Bosch is so terrible at this.
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
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.
I recently learned that you should add detergent for the pre-wash rinse as well. May dishwashers have a separate pocket next to the detergent pocket, often there isn't even a lid on it or the lid has openings so the detergent falls out as soon as you close the door. If they don't have the symbolic pocket you can just pour some extra detergent anywhere, like just spill some outside the main pocket or pour it into the bottom.
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 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).
We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be?
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.
"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.
A lot pf good products are a combination of features that customers need and use and features they think they need and ask for, but never use. But the sales wouldn't be as good without them. It's a bit comical once it becomes apparent, but it is a widespread pattern.
Pre-purchase, the customers are just looking at lists of features. Post-purchase, they realize the ovens burn bread and cake 10% of the time and pizza 100% of the time, and they just want a good working oven that doesn't burn food.
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.
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.
The key difference is the founder built a product in search of a problem to solve, rather than the other way around.
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.
...which is why none of the best software is a product or a service. The best software is always a tool, made by people who have a problem for people who have that problem.
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.
> The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat.
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.
Yep. I've worked at a couple startups where engineering built a thing, sales was able to sell it but had to give a huge discount. The resulting economics just didn't work. But, each sale was seen on its own as a success even though the generally lost money. Often there was a discount plus some promised bespoke feature that required additional development to close the sale. There was never enough volume and often that additional engineering work never applied to another customer. Nobody wants to say "maybe this deal just isn't worth making" and move on.
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.
I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
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.
Every startup/SmallCo I worked for seemed to fall into this trap. Sales finally finds a BigCustomer, and the company instantly transforms from a product company into a custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer. We're no longer building our own product vision: We're cramming everything BigCustomer is asking for while they hold a carrot tied to a stick in front of us. We no longer have a general product that can be sold to anyone. We have BigCustomer's wish list and they still haven't bought more than a handful of units.
> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
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.
It seems to start with the fact that the founder doesn’t understand the business domain at all:
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?
The problem is that people are not listening to each other. Part of this is just working together is hard, but a bigger part is that there is status associated with being "in charge" of things as founder. The desire to feel like you are controlling the outcome and people need to take instruction and direction from you rather than working together to find a path through the forest.
The fundamental problem is that reality has a surprising level of detail (as described in an article by the same name). The founder is the same kind of guy that believes the government should just get rid of inefficiencies.
Isn’t a large part of fundamental problem the lack of clarity and mental discipline to stay focused on MVP and if it’s clear it’s necessary then pivot but still stay focused? It seems clear to me that real problem is lack of focus and discipline.
Yes, but the subtle issue I've seen in companies is "MVP" easily ends up interpreted as: "add this one small thing since it's quick and easy to implement". Then before they know it you've got this mousetrap-like product that goes in all sorts of directions.
There are two fundamental problems: one is the inability to admit mistakes and shed the false aura of omniscience in front of customers, investors or employees. The second (almost a corollary of the first) is overpromising and, as a result, underdelivering because those who face the customers/investors want to appear infallible.
This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.)
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 ?
I'm a healthcare worker, so I'm not immersed in this world at all. I can only speak as person who has to use the oven, but doesn't get to pick which oven is purchased.
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.
It's amazing how much of the world runs on confident CEOs convincing gullible investors to give them money and confident salespeople convincing gullible customers to buy their junk. I wish I re-did my character creation and put all my skill points into charisma.
"Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?"
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.
For me the worst scenario is when a kitchen sink of non-existent functionality the customer never asked for was sold. And in all likelihood it will never be used. But some project manager is hellbent on getting it through the pipeline and checked off!
I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.
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.
I started OpenOven in my free time of which I had a lot when I was still studying law. Ovens were always something I was interested in and I created FunkyPizzaHeater, as it was named when I started it, only to play around with the tech. I published it on the Italian Oven forums and it really hit a nerve, there were immediately 2 people who took the design a bit further. People tried building them and posted photos, there was a lot of discussion and eventually we agreed on a new name and moved the OpenOven project to github. It was still a project for oven enthusiasts who liked lots of buttons, until it was miraculously featured by a slightly weird but lovable YouTuber with 2 million subscribers who suggested OpenOven to anyone to finally get rid of corporate big oven.
I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:
> 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.)
It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better
How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb).
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.
> Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product
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.
Google was definitely "exact same product, but better". It was a search box.
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.
Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
> 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.
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?
This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.
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!)
I had the opposite reaction, this felt like a story that was literally purpose-built for pandering the hn audience without saying anything interesting.
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
I grant you that it might pander to a certain audience.
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.
One of the points is that, for a startup, not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely: these patterns of failure and "classic bullshit" are the universal norm. This piece "articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered": that you and your startup are no better than the characters in the tale, and equally doomed.
Yes, that's the Internet Consensus and the reddit comment section every time a startup doing anything is mentioned.
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"
Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.
same. substitute VC with upper management and I (corporate dev through and through) became more queasy as I read. product and strategic mismanagement is the real deal regardless of the source of capital
I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion.
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.
I work in consulting and have been in many projects where the client was sold promises and features that don’t exist in reality. If I had a firm I would have a rule that whoever sells a project worth > $5M would also be responsible for delivering it.
I was doing contract work last year for a young solo founder, and he promised a feature to a big customer who only signed up because of this one feature. It was a feature he vibecoded and was able to demo in ways that made it look like it was working, when in reality it was a buggy POS. The customer was going to go live on the platform in a few weeks, and this kid expected me to work over my pre-planned holiday to actually get this (frankly rather complex) feature built properly. I told him good luck, ended the contract, and enjoyed my holiday. No time for that BS.
Too close to the home, ouch. It’s such a microcosm of things. I can imagine people reading this going “ah, the founder was right, it’s those damn nerds” or “at least WE generated sales” and so on. The more you do startups the more it seems that the time is indeed a flat circle.
> When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth.
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.
I’ve felt like this before but I think the responsibility of the founding engineer is underestimated. 20% of the company is a cofounder and a partnership. The failure was compromising on the buttons. An engineer who can say “no” is far more valuable than the one who will grind out features for a sales call.
> The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers.
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".
In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it. This clearly is first point where they could "fail fast", but they believe they can improve and they do.
I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
> In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it.
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.
> No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP!
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.
This is so well written. What would really be icing on the cake would be for Mario to join another oven company that had the same premise (or similar vein) where he got to experience that all over again. Either way, there’s always a starry eyed graduate that thinks this is my ticket.
Slow clap… matches my experience in startups. And honestly, big tech as well. I think you can consider an enterprise to simply be a collection of many startups with shared revenue as funding.
Here is another story: A baker who bakes for her kids every day makes an oven. She spends years perfecting it by herself with details only someone who uses this product would notice. The nuance of gold baked details in just the right places on the bread, the infusion of essences for the cakes. The precise charring on the pizzas. She goes to young founder events to meet likeminded makers and they talk about space ovens and OvenCrunch incubators fund them just on school name and ideas. But the oven maker with the kids doesn’t even get an interview. She applies with a working product and increasing sales year over year for 10 years and no interview. Her over becomes an organically growing best seller and she doesn’t need the seed money anymore. Incubator founders have spend their seed funding on fancy trips and conferences and flying over the Egyptian pyramids on instagram. The Incubator partners say they don’t fund oven makers anymore because the business is too slow to grow and consumer stuff is a tarpit.
But slow organic growth is not a hyperscaling unicorn. Who wants to invest money for a mere 50% return? We need to x100 or x1000 it for it to even be worth to invest.
Without a large funded team the founder who knows what they are building will not build an expansion line into other areas because they can’t support the growth solo. Somebody once said funding is kerosene. You want to pour it into working fire pits, not sparklers hoping one of them will be a dynamite stick.
The sad part isn't that the mom with the kids didn't get VC funding because her startup idea isn't hypergrowth enough. It's that she ever thought she needed it in the first place.
Slow organic growth doesn't need investments. It pays for itself from revenue. If you need investments, it means the business is gearing up to become bigger, and will have jumps in both expenses and income.
So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
Ten years later: The woman's oven is still a niche product, but awareness of it is growing, because the quality is just so good. Professionals swear by it and the name is written only with the utmost reverence in the Italian (and other) forums.
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...
Brilliant. What I liked are the characters - it's hard to make every character motivation reasonable and so well communicated.
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.
Considerable arrogance is required to think you can improve on mature products enough to conquer a large market share. Such arrogance should be supported by having, if not a demonstrably fantastic prototype, at least an obviously good idea; otherwise you are following the example of Juicero or Theranos.
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).
Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol.
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.
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.
> Engineering stops trying to build a good oven and starts adding buttons and features. Nobody made that decision. It just happened
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 technology is amazing. The marketing around it is a decade ahead of its capability, and the pushiness to make LLMs do what they still can't is just irritating. The question to me is "who is seeing the goal posts?" And the answer is "the marketing department of whoever sells it".
Wow I was laughing internally. I couldn’t dare to laugh out loud because this story is too real to me. The moment I noticed that I just had to look back my life. Good read
Is this how they view us? Like yeah. I'm going to spend all night arguing with the Haskell lovers (that's a slur in my books) on Reddit, but it's not my hobby. Rather, responsibility demands I direct these functional programmers away from the devil.
This one hits a little too close to home. I left my company around 9 months ago due to being "Mario" at my old company. It was a good decision because it ended up being a sinking ship. I wish I left much sooner, but I didn't know the red flags at the time. An expensive lesson for me
I think the opportunity cost for not moving to a different gig really hurt me, since AI/LLMs were just about to explode at the time I noticed the red flags. I chose to stay because I strongly believed in the mission of my last company (aka really wanted to make that perfect oven), and had some misguided sense of loyalty. I ended up staying a few years.
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.
learned a similar lesson at last company. should have left after six months as "lead" engineer (of two people, not really much to lead there... which is related to why i crashed and burned out, funnily enough)
i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
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
This was such a great read! Thank you! Too bad Oven Inc never got more headcount. Otherwise the engineers could've had a day hackathon week while the managers and founder went to a retreat for a strategy offsite.
I have started a number of (failed) companies and this, this article summarizes the last 15 years of my life.
A software dev trying to play startup founder.
To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
Being able to say no, across the company!
Having an engineering team which is allowed to say No the founder.
Having a sales team which is allowed to say No to the customer.
Having founders who are allowed to say No to themselves, sit patiently and figure the root-causes.
It sounds very slightly AI in some places, but I think this is an example of AI tropes turning up in human writing.
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's worth checking that your LLM actually did just do a quick grammar check, because you've got really quit a lot of LLM tells in the prose.
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.
for me, the moral of the story is that it's easier to promise things than to deliver them. or, engineering was the bottleneck.
in my experience, this is not particular to start-ups, or even software engineering.
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...
Because engineering is where ideas get materialized in reality. And reality has a surprising amount of constraints, unlike imagination. It’s “draw the rest of the horse” turned to eleven.
I've been experimenting with writing longer-form content. I do agree the main point could be condensed a lot and I'm not the a great writer by far. This is kind of a rant and really cathartic for me to write after working more than 5 years on startups. Just wanted to share it.
Really liked it, and somewhat envious that you were able to create such a well-written, cohesive piece of just about the right length. (I blog on different topics and it's so hard to keep things short and not wandering.)
Glad you did share, really enjoyed this... and I've never worked at a startup. Rings true to my hollowed corporate soul. The main difference: your peers might think they're founders; tend to forget they were acqui-hired.
On another post from today, titled "Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test", aparently the TLDR is the name of the dead man. The rest of the article explaining how, when, why, with whom the man was there, for some people, is cruft, a total waste of reading time.
You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.
Only functional startups I've seen solve actual customer problem and don't try to solve all problems. Usually they have tried several things before they found one that actually is worth solving.
But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
The founder should have visited China's oven manufacturing market/industry after raising 5 million. This could have solved their first major client Pepepizza feature problem.
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.
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.
Interesting story. This seems a true story of the author? The author understands the characters of the people in the process of business. Understanding reality is not easy.
Not a situation that happened to me per se. More of a mix of situations that have happened to me and I've seen happen to people close to me aggregated into a single metaphor.
I've been working in startups since 2012 and this was a superbly crafted narrative that articulates so many of the odd circumstances that lead to inscrutable decisions in early stage companies...really well done!
While the majority of comments are absolutely right in recognizing and lamenting such situations plaguing our industry, let's not forget this is an ultimate first world problem. It can be stressful and frustrating but we are a privileged bunch to be able to call this 'pain'.
Startups and this kind of business trap are not unique to the first world. As well, your comment is sort of generic isn't it? I could imagine it on virtually every post here
Great story. Reminded me what my professional nightmare would look like. But, I think at the end it started to thin out its allegorical premise when it started including SWE terms like Kanban and retros.
MCP for browser automation is interesting because Safari's WebKit engine is the one most AI agents can't easily drive (Playwright and Puppeteer are Chromium-first). Having an MCP server for it could fill a real gap in cross-browser testing for agent workflows.
This is inkblot test. Some will read it and see fundamental irrationality. Others will read it and say “it could have worked out if a couple of things had gone their way.”
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.
Ouch, that hits close to home, and it seems like it does for a lot of others out there as well.
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.
- 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
If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
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.
> Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
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.
yeah i'd agree with you there with lack of experience. and that was definitely a thing at my place. i think it plays a part in the research stuff too. cos if without relevant experience a lot of bad assumptions get made.
"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.
> The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight: manufacture a more efficient oven using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want to work more efficiently? Buy our oven. End of pitch.
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".
Every feature you add to you product really explodes the amount of new states you have to take care of, in addition to the risk of diverting the core product vision
this is the best thing i've read in a while. it's both triggering and prophetic at the same time. really captures the essence of what happens in startups. well done.
This is such European take on startups. Tesla was making shitty overpriced status symbols/value signalling cars and selling FSD for 10k knowing very well that it will not work with car hardware. It took them 10 years to "fake it until you make it stage".
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'd argue the spirit of entrepreneurialism and salesmanship in the story is more American!
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.
weak minds can't comprehend this but indeed, this is the ultimate goal to reach in life: hyping shit up to out-con the conmen into giving you money so you can disrupt things.
just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it
Yeah bro like why would you just build what you want to your vision? Other people don't want that! Other people know what they want, just build what they want!
One important part of the story is in the very beginning: The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy.
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.
> they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features
I know a company that fits this so well that I almost want to check the names. It's older than 3 months though.
> 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.
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
Not OP, but overconfidence is not a quality I would invest in.
> The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
If you think that Musk did his endeavors in order to become rich, you are likely mistaken.
What drives him then? Power?
Seeking approval. It's apparent from everything he posts on X + the memeing + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga.
Interesting, I didn't know; context:
> 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-...
> + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga
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.
Spreading his seed.
Going to Mars.
I'm convinced this is a schtick. Not that he doesn't genuinely want that, but it's not the root motivation. I suspect it's something more like wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark. The cave rescue capsule episode is illustrative. The guy likes attention.
> wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark
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.
> Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.
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!"
Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.
Oh, I’m glad I don’t work in the oven or dishwasher business. We’re just starting a stealth startup that’s revolutionizing coding assistants, and the prototypes are amazing. They write code faster, explain it better, and this weekend we’re hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they deploy to production.
This issue does not come from the coding assistant. In fact, humans will occasionally do the exact same thing as long as their tools have enough permissions to deploy to both local and prod from the same environment.
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).
It sounds like you're joking, but I've long dreamed of a different type of dishwasher. One that washes instantly. I don't need it to fit more than a single plate at one time. Just put something in from one end, and out comes clean and dry plate on the other end. Like a car wash.
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.
Restaurant dishwashers use an enormous amount of water. They require a hot water supply that’s much hotter than residential heaters typically supply. They require a more complete manual pre-rinse and scrub. They only accept kitchenware that’s made for them and destroy the rest.
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.
Those I've used in the UK aren't so bad, they're cold fill only with a heating element in the sump. It takes maybe 15 minutes to fill and get up to temperature at the start of a shift, after that each cycle is ~2 minutes.
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.
They also have the clever system of standardised, removable baskets. Need to increase dishwashing throughput? yank the clean basket, line them up on the counter to dry, and run a new basket through
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
The problem in basically any consumer kitchen is storage - having racks and racks of stuff under your big stainless steel commercial countertops is no problem.
So sell small scale scullery, sink, storage and sorting systems to save and subvert storage solutions.
Those Restaurant “dishwashers” are sanatizers. A dishwasher is a person in a restaurant. They are the ones removing and getting the dish clean.
Dishwashers? How dare you. We preferred to be called “Sanitation Engineers - Dishwashing Division” Even had bossman put it on our paystub (he was so tolerant of us kids. I think he was just happy that we were into buffoonery and not meth).
Engineer? Wow, that’s high falutin. Sanitation Technician is as high as I got.
Dishwasher? I hardly know her!
Did this actually happen? That's pretty wholesome lmao.
It was definitely one of the more tame activities at work. We would golf rotten potatoes into the field behind the restaurant. Play Celery Generals with traffic, make Concoctions and get the waitresses to test and rate them, and we had an entire WWF wrestling league (that was exclusively judged by the entrance strut and banter; there was never any actual wrestling). Sometimes we’d make new pizza recipes and present them to the kitchen staff of the pizza shop next door. Their contribution to the bit was to act incredibly Italian in their wholesale rejection of our pie. Sometimes we’d even do work.
the real problem with home dishwasher is that it extend the duration of the task.
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
Easy. Just keep your dishes in the dishwasher instead of the shelf.
oh yes, the two dishwashers solution
> I've always been wondering why they don't exist on smaller scale.
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.
That's called a Hobart. https://www.hobartcorp.com/products/commercial-dishwashers
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.
When I was a teenager, my very first real job (after being a paperboy) was being a dishwasher in a popular local seafood restaurant. Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr but they offered me $5.50/hr. Boy howdy!
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...
I've dreamed of a dishwasher for people who prioritize clean dishes quickly and quietly over the incremental savings from using asymptotically less water or energy. See also low flush toilets and clothes washing machines.
Too bad the government demands you prioritize the latter
I've long dreamed of a dishwasher that can detect when you remove the (cleaned) dishes from it, and presents a display saying 'load dishes' or something like that. And after finishing a cycle, says 'unload dishes'. Should be pretty easy to achieve with some load cells in the feet, but haven't seen any like that.
We had this at my old work, except it wasn't a display, it was a circular piece of paper with "clean" on one side and "dirty" on the other. When it was done, you rotate the paper so it was clean side up. Should we have gone for series A? It was a pretty great MVP after all, albeit manual, but automation of the paper flipping would of course come on the second iteration
I would for sure be that rookie who is paralysed with indecision over whether to read "clean" as an adjective or an imperative. Is it telling me that it's clean or that it needs cleaning?
Given "dirty" would make a strange (although valid) imperative, it would likely be referring to the state of the dishes
There's also the upgrade path of 2 dishwashers with a single 'clean' token moved between the two. Cupboards are an legacy product holding back progress.
Bezos has magnet versions.
Many modern ones have a door open sensor that allows for the dishwasher to display that dishes are clean after a cycle until the door is opened and fully closed again.
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.
Some dishwashers add a simple timer-based heuristic so if you open it for just a few seconds while you lazily grab something the "clean" indicator stays lit.
I used to have two dishwashers. One for clean. One for dirty.
I don't know the first thing about dishwashers, but it seems obvious to me.
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?
What you really want is 2 dishwashers! That way you never have to unload the dishwasher because you alternate your dishes between the two. The one that has just completed the cleaning cycle has now become a cupboard with the clean dishes and the other one becomes the dirty dish storage and vice versa.
It can be accurately simulated with appropriate brushes and rags, water and soap, and a sufficient number of hands.
The answer is obviously paper plates and plastic silverware /s
Then someone has to remember to buy them and take out the trash. The canonical solution is for you and your lazy roommates to eat straight from the pot over the sink. When done, fill the pot with water, to discourage the ants and roaches. Occasionally, you end up with a drowned ratling, but hey, wachagonna do?
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
In bars that cycle a lot of glassware they actually do seem to use high heat and break a lot of glasses. But it's fine, the restaurant just buys cheap (easily broken) glasses so it all works out.
That's handwashing right?
I hope you are planning for a rotating base as a core feature.
I'm 6'7".
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.
Are you really doing this?
I’d like to speak with you, if so.
I hope it's not the approach of using less water by not rinsing properly in the end, so people have to either eat soap or rinse everything manually afterwards, wasting far more water. I swear Bosch is so terrible at this.
The innovation here is clearly edible soap.
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
>edible soap
Sodium bicarbonate residue won't kill our customers, so consider it technically edible. The issue of taste and efficiency will be approached after MVP
Luckily our investors helped us out with the regulatory capture, so we don’t need to worry about the safety, just the palatability.
from L'Affaire Siloxane? ( https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane ) (subtitle: "How antiperspirant fumes nearly got NASA to evacuate the space station")
Wow!
(No, from dry-cleaning)
Edible soap?! The solution is clearly edible dishes!
Too late, already been done!
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.
Perhaps a match for the UK market? From what I've read they often don't rinse the soap off of dishes there (I wish I were making this up).
Maybe it's the cause of our "bad teeth".
(I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)
Sadly it's true. I've seen people just put the dishes in the dish rack and let the soap bubbles slide off them.
If there was enough soap residue to matter you'd notice the taste.
Do you use rinse aid?
I recently learned that you should add detergent for the pre-wash rinse as well. May dishwashers have a separate pocket next to the detergent pocket, often there isn't even a lid on it or the lid has openings so the detergent falls out as soon as you close the door. If they don't have the symbolic pocket you can just pour some extra detergent anywhere, like just spill some outside the main pocket or pour it into the bottom.
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.
> less water, less detergent,
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).
We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be?
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.
To me, the fundamental problem is what Paul Graham pointed out here: https://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
"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.
I dunno, going back to the article, at some point customers are getting exactly what they're asking for:
"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.
A lot pf good products are a combination of features that customers need and use and features they think they need and ask for, but never use. But the sales wouldn't be as good without them. It's a bit comical once it becomes apparent, but it is a widespread pattern.
Pre-purchase, the customers are just looking at lists of features. Post-purchase, they realize the ovens burn bread and cake 10% of the time and pizza 100% of the time, and they just want a good working oven that doesn't burn food.
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.
> But are they problems worth spending time?
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.
The key difference is the founder built a product in search of a problem to solve, rather than the other way around.
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.
...which is why none of the best software is a product or a service. The best software is always a tool, made by people who have a problem for people who have that problem.
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.
> Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
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.
This may apply to B2C firms, but B2B firms are more likely to be run by people similar to them.
Which is why income inequality is so insidious. The more successful your rich people are the less effective they become.
Depends what kind of market you are going after. Mass market for end users, sure, your argument applies. But there are lots of other types too.
> Enterprise sales isn’t about ovens.
The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.
> The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat.
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.
Yep. I've worked at a couple startups where engineering built a thing, sales was able to sell it but had to give a huge discount. The resulting economics just didn't work. But, each sale was seen on its own as a success even though the generally lost money. Often there was a discount plus some promised bespoke feature that required additional development to close the sale. There was never enough volume and often that additional engineering work never applied to another customer. Nobody wants to say "maybe this deal just isn't worth making" and move on.
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.
I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
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.
Every startup/SmallCo I worked for seemed to fall into this trap. Sales finally finds a BigCustomer, and the company instantly transforms from a product company into a custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer. We're no longer building our own product vision: We're cramming everything BigCustomer is asking for while they hold a carrot tied to a stick in front of us. We no longer have a general product that can be sold to anyone. We have BigCustomer's wish list and they still haven't bought more than a handful of units.
> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
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.
It seems to start with the fact that the founder doesn’t understand the business domain at all:
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?
The problem is that people are not listening to each other. Part of this is just working together is hard, but a bigger part is that there is status associated with being "in charge" of things as founder. The desire to feel like you are controlling the outcome and people need to take instruction and direction from you rather than working together to find a path through the forest.
Your solution is to fire CEOs, shareholders and only make employee-owned businesses? I mean I'm on board.
Sounds great until a hard decision has to be made.
Just because a business is employee owned that does not mean it lacks leadership.
Nothing is stopping employees from banding together to create these obviously-superior businesses right now and eating the VCs' lunch. Right?
This is incorrect. Concentration of wealth is definitely stopping them.
Most people can’t just stop working and start working for no cash.
I might be missing some obvious sarcasm, though!
CEOs are employees...
Except that they usually sit on the board and frequently chair the board.
The fundamental problem is that reality has a surprising level of detail (as described in an article by the same name). The founder is the same kind of guy that believes the government should just get rid of inefficiencies.
Isn’t a large part of fundamental problem the lack of clarity and mental discipline to stay focused on MVP and if it’s clear it’s necessary then pivot but still stay focused? It seems clear to me that real problem is lack of focus and discipline.
Yes, but the subtle issue I've seen in companies is "MVP" easily ends up interpreted as: "add this one small thing since it's quick and easy to implement". Then before they know it you've got this mousetrap-like product that goes in all sorts of directions.
Balance the power between business, engineering, and sales. I suspect this is at least partially why PG likes founders with an even equity split.
There are two fundamental problems: one is the inability to admit mistakes and shed the false aura of omniscience in front of customers, investors or employees. The second (almost a corollary of the first) is overpromising and, as a result, underdelivering because those who face the customers/investors want to appear infallible.
This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.)
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 ?
I'm a healthcare worker, so I'm not immersed in this world at all. I can only speak as person who has to use the oven, but doesn't get to pick which oven is purchased.
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.
It's amazing how much of the world runs on confident CEOs convincing gullible investors to give them money and confident salespeople convincing gullible customers to buy their junk. I wish I re-did my character creation and put all my skill points into charisma.
No. When the chips are down and your back is to the wall, I don't want the charisma guy, I want the indefatigable reality guy.
"Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?"
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.
For me the worst scenario is when a kitchen sink of non-existent functionality the customer never asked for was sold. And in all likelihood it will never be used. But some project manager is hellbent on getting it through the pipeline and checked off!
I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.
Seller here. There’s no justifying the sales fails in this story. It’s strictly cautionary.
In this story specifically they needed to bring technical stakeholders to Mallorca.
from my friends in sales, sales perspective could be: going from meeting to meeting just getting yelled at.
- 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.
Similar story here.
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.
I started OpenOven in my free time of which I had a lot when I was still studying law. Ovens were always something I was interested in and I created FunkyPizzaHeater, as it was named when I started it, only to play around with the tech. I published it on the Italian Oven forums and it really hit a nerve, there were immediately 2 people who took the design a bit further. People tried building them and posted photos, there was a lot of discussion and eventually we agreed on a new name and moved the OpenOven project to github. It was still a project for oven enthusiasts who liked lots of buttons, until it was miraculously featured by a slightly weird but lovable YouTuber with 2 million subscribers who suggested OpenOven to anyone to finally get rid of corporate big oven.
I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:
> 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.)
It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better
This situation does exist though; otherwise startups and new products would never succeed. Big companies have blind spots.
Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.
How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb).
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.
> Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product
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.
Google was definitely "exact same product, but better". It was a search box.
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.
Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
Agreed. This could be a story about my last startup... A good reminder.
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I like this part:
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?
He's coldly rational:
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.
This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.
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!)
I had the opposite reaction, this felt like a story that was literally purpose-built for pandering the hn audience without saying anything interesting.
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
I grant you that it might pander to a certain audience.
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! ;-)
One of the points is that, for a startup, not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely: these patterns of failure and "classic bullshit" are the universal norm. This piece "articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered": that you and your startup are no better than the characters in the tale, and equally doomed.
Yes, that's the Internet Consensus and the reddit comment section every time a startup doing anything is mentioned.
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"
Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.
Yeah because developers never wrote a line in POC which made it to prod ;)
Agreed, I have no experience with VC anything, but I was still nodding along the whole time as I was reading.
same. substitute VC with upper management and I (corporate dev through and through) became more queasy as I read. product and strategic mismanagement is the real deal regardless of the source of capital
Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.
- Mario
Yeah. I find it important to laugh at the absurdities of life. I found this to be a home-run (albeit light-weight).
It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.
I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion.
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.
I work in consulting and have been in many projects where the client was sold promises and features that don’t exist in reality. If I had a firm I would have a rule that whoever sells a project worth > $5M would also be responsible for delivering it.
And consequently, you'd most likely have no projects worth > $5M :)
Or link sales commission to delivery success, and have no sales people...
I was doing contract work last year for a young solo founder, and he promised a feature to a big customer who only signed up because of this one feature. It was a feature he vibecoded and was able to demo in ways that made it look like it was working, when in reality it was a buggy POS. The customer was going to go live on the platform in a few weeks, and this kid expected me to work over my pre-planned holiday to actually get this (frankly rather complex) feature built properly. I told him good luck, ended the contract, and enjoyed my holiday. No time for that BS.
> 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.
Too close to the home, ouch. It’s such a microcosm of things. I can imagine people reading this going “ah, the founder was right, it’s those damn nerds” or “at least WE generated sales” and so on. The more you do startups the more it seems that the time is indeed a flat circle.
> When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth.
This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
> A month later, Mario leaves the company. [...] In the retro, it gets written down as a “learning.”
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
> When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is
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.
I was waiting for the plot twist and it didn't come, so its genre is: horror.
> He offers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of freedom, the perfect oven.
This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.
I’ve felt like this before but I think the responsibility of the founding engineer is underestimated. 20% of the company is a cofounder and a partnership. The failure was compromising on the buttons. An engineer who can say “no” is far more valuable than the one who will grind out features for a sales call.
It's flabbergasting how this story is close to the reality. Bookmarked, I would love to see it printed.
> The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers.
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".
In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it. This clearly is first point where they could "fail fast", but they believe they can improve and they do.
I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
> In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it.
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.
> No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP!
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.
This is so well written. What would really be icing on the cake would be for Mario to join another oven company that had the same premise (or similar vein) where he got to experience that all over again. Either way, there’s always a starry eyed graduate that thinks this is my ticket.
you know the pamphlets passed to soldiers before war.
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 ?
Slow clap… matches my experience in startups. And honestly, big tech as well. I think you can consider an enterprise to simply be a collection of many startups with shared revenue as funding.
This writing is too realistic to feel joy about it. Thanks for putting it together (and then to the HN)
Brilliant! And this isn't really just about startups. Large companies are operating the exact same way.
Small ones, too!
Here is another story: A baker who bakes for her kids every day makes an oven. She spends years perfecting it by herself with details only someone who uses this product would notice. The nuance of gold baked details in just the right places on the bread, the infusion of essences for the cakes. The precise charring on the pizzas. She goes to young founder events to meet likeminded makers and they talk about space ovens and OvenCrunch incubators fund them just on school name and ideas. But the oven maker with the kids doesn’t even get an interview. She applies with a working product and increasing sales year over year for 10 years and no interview. Her over becomes an organically growing best seller and she doesn’t need the seed money anymore. Incubator founders have spend their seed funding on fancy trips and conferences and flying over the Egyptian pyramids on instagram. The Incubator partners say they don’t fund oven makers anymore because the business is too slow to grow and consumer stuff is a tarpit.
But slow organic growth is not a hyperscaling unicorn. Who wants to invest money for a mere 50% return? We need to x100 or x1000 it for it to even be worth to invest.
Without a large funded team the founder who knows what they are building will not build an expansion line into other areas because they can’t support the growth solo. Somebody once said funding is kerosene. You want to pour it into working fire pits, not sparklers hoping one of them will be a dynamite stick.
The sad part isn't that the mom with the kids didn't get VC funding because her startup idea isn't hypergrowth enough. It's that she ever thought she needed it in the first place.
Slow organic growth doesn't need investments. It pays for itself from revenue. If you need investments, it means the business is gearing up to become bigger, and will have jumps in both expenses and income.
So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
Ten years later: The woman's oven is still a niche product, but awareness of it is growing, because the quality is just so good. Professionals swear by it and the name is written only with the utmost reverence in the Italian (and other) forums.
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...
Brilliant. What I liked are the characters - it's hard to make every character motivation reasonable and so well communicated.
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.
Considerable arrogance is required to think you can improve on mature products enough to conquer a large market share. Such arrogance should be supported by having, if not a demonstrably fantastic prototype, at least an obviously good idea; otherwise you are following the example of Juicero or Theranos.
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).
Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol.
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 classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem.
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.
> Engineering stops trying to build a good oven and starts adding buttons and features. Nobody made that decision. It just happened
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 technology is amazing. The marketing around it is a decade ahead of its capability, and the pushiness to make LLMs do what they still can't is just irritating. The question to me is "who is seeing the goal posts?" And the answer is "the marketing department of whoever sells it".
Reading this made me hyperventilate
same
Same here
Wow I was laughing internally. I couldn’t dare to laugh out loud because this story is too real to me. The moment I noticed that I just had to look back my life. Good read
Is this how they view us? Like yeah. I'm going to spend all night arguing with the Haskell lovers (that's a slur in my books) on Reddit, but it's not my hobby. Rather, responsibility demands I direct these functional programmers away from the devil.
Can’t say this is fiction or non-fiction. Totally depressing. Too good.
> “But this is a startup. And startups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sacrifice. You have two weeks.”
If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.
This one hits a little too close to home. I left my company around 9 months ago due to being "Mario" at my old company. It was a good decision because it ended up being a sinking ship. I wish I left much sooner, but I didn't know the red flags at the time. An expensive lesson for me
Do you mind sharing why it was expensive lesson?
I think the opportunity cost for not moving to a different gig really hurt me, since AI/LLMs were just about to explode at the time I noticed the red flags. I chose to stay because I strongly believed in the mission of my last company (aka really wanted to make that perfect oven), and had some misguided sense of loyalty. I ended up staying a few years.
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.
learned a similar lesson at last company. should have left after six months as "lead" engineer (of two people, not really much to lead there... which is related to why i crashed and burned out, funnily enough)
i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
This was an absolute delight to read. I have tried to build so many ovens in my life…
I made an account just to reply to this post. Happened to me. Word per word. From the start until the end. Exactly like it is.
Has anyone ever experienced the alternative? to building products from scratch, growing a business, without the drama?
The only way I’ve seen it happen is to not raise money and build it yourself.
These kinds of companies make hundreds of thousands or even millions a year. But it’s too small to hear about them.
I did at peerdb
Sai? What do you think was the difference?
Sai is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=saisrirampur
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
This was such a great read! Thank you! Too bad Oven Inc never got more headcount. Otherwise the engineers could've had a day hackathon week while the managers and founder went to a retreat for a strategy offsite.
I have started a number of (failed) companies and this, this article summarizes the last 15 years of my life. A software dev trying to play startup founder.
To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
Being able to say no, across the company! Having an engineering team which is allowed to say No the founder. Having a sales team which is allowed to say No to the customer. Having founders who are allowed to say No to themselves, sit patiently and figure the root-causes.
Entertaining, very AI prose though.
Disagree, I assumed it was a 10 year old story because it was written in the personable style of the old internet…
It sounds very slightly AI in some places, but I think this is an example of AI tropes turning up in human writing.
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.
That's quite a complement to AI
Really? Didn't use an llm other than to do a quick grammar check because english is not my first language.
It's worth checking that your LLM actually did just do a quick grammar check, because you've got really quit a lot of LLM tells in the prose.
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.
doesnt sound ai at all to me. great read.
LLMs are often trained and evaled on English speakers in Africa so this checks out.
I disagree, this read very non-AI prose to me. No "its not x - it's y", or em dashes etc.
"It’s not that the engineers are getting slower: it’s that every new button has to coexist with all the previous buttons."
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
nvm author explains in the comment directly below this one, lol
for me, the moral of the story is that it's easier to promise things than to deliver them. or, engineering was the bottleneck. in my experience, this is not particular to start-ups, or even software engineering.
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...
> engineering was the bottleneck
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
Because engineering is where ideas get materialized in reality. And reality has a surprising amount of constraints, unlike imagination. It’s “draw the rest of the horse” turned to eleven.
Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)
I gave up, how did this make it to page 1 jeez.
I've been experimenting with writing longer-form content. I do agree the main point could be condensed a lot and I'm not the a great writer by far. This is kind of a rant and really cathartic for me to write after working more than 5 years on startups. Just wanted to share it.
I read it full and I loved it and bookmarked it.
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.
Really liked it, and somewhat envious that you were able to create such a well-written, cohesive piece of just about the right length. (I blog on different topics and it's so hard to keep things short and not wandering.)
Glad you did share, really enjoyed this... and I've never worked at a startup. Rings true to my hollowed corporate soul. The main difference: your peers might think they're founders; tend to forget they were acqui-hired.
I loved it. It was cathartic to read, too. It's really a rather short story. There's no accounting for taste.
I enjoyed it, but it is uncomfortably realistic.
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.
It's fine, don't worry about it. It's hard for me to read long form on a computer and I read your entire story.
You can't please everyone
On another post from today, titled "Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test", aparently the TLDR is the name of the dead man. The rest of the article explaining how, when, why, with whom the man was there, for some people, is cruft, a total waste of reading time.
I loved every paragraph
You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.
Personally, I really liked both your writing and the fact that you took the time to flesh out the main point.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
Do you need a 7-second TikTok summary?
I loved it.
Different tastes
I would guess you are in Sales ...
Not enough "key insight", "smoking gun", "this closes the gap", "kicker" huh.
I mean, it's read time is 20 minutes at most. I don't think it's long or tasteless or anything.
I LOVE THIS!! well done.
This was exquisitely cringe-laden and I think I may be the Luigi figure
This is like a punch in the gut. Holy buckets. How do you prevent this? Bootstrap?
Only functional startups I've seen solve actual customer problem and don't try to solve all problems. Usually they have tried several things before they found one that actually is worth solving.
But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
The founder should have visited China's oven manufacturing market/industry after raising 5 million. This could have solved their first major client Pepepizza feature problem.
Honest question: Does the founder end up making money this way? Can you really get rich building a failed business?
Totally depends.
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.
Usually no.
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.
Interesting story. This seems a true story of the author? The author understands the characters of the people in the process of business. Understanding reality is not easy.
Not a situation that happened to me per se. More of a mix of situations that have happened to me and I've seen happen to people close to me aggregated into a single metaphor.
I've been working in startups since 2012 and this was a superbly crafted narrative that articulates so many of the odd circumstances that lead to inscrutable decisions in early stage companies...really well done!
Amazing job writing this up!
Brilliant autobiography.
While the majority of comments are absolutely right in recognizing and lamenting such situations plaguing our industry, let's not forget this is an ultimate first world problem. It can be stressful and frustrating but we are a privileged bunch to be able to call this 'pain'.
Startups and this kind of business trap are not unique to the first world. As well, your comment is sort of generic isn't it? I could imagine it on virtually every post here
What? Bro, this is our life.
You don’t have to be beaten and starving to have a perspective and story to tell.
it's a more complex version of what happens in the third world too, it's not about class it's about people
If I didn't laugh i'd cry.
Great story. Reminded me what my professional nightmare would look like. But, I think at the end it started to thin out its allegorical premise when it started including SWE terms like Kanban and retros.
This was actually so good to read. It really reminded me of so many of my past experiences at startups.
Well written. This applies much further than just equity raising startups.
Oh, that one hits hard on the nail.
Daft! And very strangely true. I recognised several moments and events in the story
MCP for browser automation is interesting because Safari's WebKit engine is the one most AI agents can't easily drive (Playwright and Puppeteer are Chromium-first). Having an MCP server for it could fill a real gap in cross-browser testing for agent workflows.
Wrong thread
Well written and it perfectly describes reality, it got me hooked and nodding from start to finish.
This is inkblot test. Some will read it and see fundamental irrationality. Others will read it and say “it could have worked out if a couple of things had gone their way.”
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.
Ouch, that hits close to home, and it seems like it does for a lot of others out there as well.
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.
My personal take:
- 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
If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
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.
> Where did the story go sideways?
When they didn't iterate on PMF with a niche client.
A lot of these things are just inexperienced management:
- 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.)
> Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
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.
> just how little research anyone actually did
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.
yeah i'd agree with you there with lack of experience. and that was definitely a thing at my place. i think it plays a part in the research stuff too. cos if without relevant experience a lot of bad assumptions get made.
"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.
> The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight: manufacture a more efficient oven using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want to work more efficiently? Buy our oven. End of pitch.
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".
This is so well written. Well done!
The more I read into it, the more pain memory flashbacks I got. Bravo
my favorite blog post of all time... this should go in a museum
Unrelated, but does anyone else remember halfbakery.com?
Oh cool it's still around!
This could have all been solved if they added a setting for bread, pizza, or cake.
> The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight
Premise is laughable right out of the gate.
Brilliant. Brutal.
Spoiler: This is not about ovens.
Spoiler: this is not about ovens.
Enjoyed this – very entertaining!
s/oven/cms/g
Every feature you add to you product really explodes the amount of new states you have to take care of, in addition to the risk of diverting the core product vision
I mean sure, but look, I will not make the same mistakes.
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!
How on earth did this post get so many points and comments lol
this is the best thing i've read in a while. it's both triggering and prophetic at the same time. really captures the essence of what happens in startups. well done.
i am completely new to this stuff (just made a mobile app). thanks for explaining (in 5 year-old kiddo style) how funding and corpo slop works. WOWOW
No cap
A legend in the making.
This is such European take on startups. Tesla was making shitty overpriced status symbols/value signalling cars and selling FSD for 10k knowing very well that it will not work with car hardware. It took them 10 years to "fake it until you make it stage".
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'd argue the spirit of entrepreneurialism and salesmanship in the story is more American!
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.
weak minds can't comprehend this but indeed, this is the ultimate goal to reach in life: hyping shit up to out-con the conmen into giving you money so you can disrupt things.
just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it
Yeah bro like why would you just build what you want to your vision? Other people don't want that! Other people know what they want, just build what they want!