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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also the wash is likely going to follow an mx+x (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?
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.
Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
That doesn't help, however, if users are lazy and don't unload the dishwasher after opening it to grab a clean plate or whatever.
It's a nice feature that can be added with existing sensors and one line of logic in the uC. Another one I noticed recently is garage door openers with the photo transmitter/receiver ('beam') to stop the door if someone blocks it can use that same beam to turn on the light if broken when the door is up. Handy if entering a dark garage from outside.
The 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.
Also the wash is likely going to follow an mx+x (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?
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
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.
There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.
I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.
Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)
- Mario
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 ?
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.
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.
why does this happen though? i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time.
also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
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.
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.
You can't please everyone
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
Different tastes
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.
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.
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!
If founder keep iterating and hyping his ovens with enough capital he could become big player in oven maker space and disrupting industry. Learning from this article was that he lacked capital and vision.
I've just been through this process. Very painful. SF based company, US founder.
Same founder story - couldn't focus on customers, couldn't focus on product, always a shiny new idea to distract him from had just been decided or what needed to be decided. Each idea could be the thing that made the difference. Willing to work hard, very capable of talking a good game, not able to deliver.
Tesla had a product that worked, was essentially first and best on the market, not that many models, not that many features. Focusing on the hype and gloss is ignoring a lot of substance. What even is the point of criticising a startup for its hype when its exactly what people want to hear and aligns to a lot of real, significant, ongoing research?
"If the founder had capital and vision" is pretty much tautological. It's true but not particularly useful to know that people who have money and know what to do with it will probably succeed.
just pull harder on the vision bong, and grab some more of that sweet capital bro, or you're not gonna make it