Live data from Hacker News

Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

blog.soylent.com

221–230 of 665 posts

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#221
I find it odd how popular Soylent has become. I always considered it to be the product that it was in the movie: the absolute minimum of nourishment given a lack resources. A dystopian nightmare.

A popular argument seems to be "I don't have time eat something proper". To me, that just replaces the lack of one resource (the ones in the movie) with another (time).

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#222
post #39
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it blow away a clif bar?

As I recall, Clif Bars are predominantly carbs and some fat. Soylent has a reasonable balance of protein and more emphasis on vitamins and minerals. To be clear, I'm not a nutritional expert. But I've had people who know more than me tell me clif bars are basically non-nutritious.

My Choc Chip Clif Bar says 10 of its 65grams are protein with approx 10% of daily values of quite a few vitamins #NotADoctor

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#223

It's a food company, and its product is fully baked. Why aren't they bootstrapping? Are they not profitable? If so, how do they have a business? If I sold ketchup at a loss, would I be able to close a $50M financing round?

If you call it Ktchp.io, you pretend you're using a better recipe generated through machine learning, you create an AR solution to serve it better and more effectively, [insert easy quip about startup culture here], then maybe yes.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#224
post #5

Soylent gets a lot of hate (I'm looking forward to skipping out on this thread before the inevitable negative comments from people who assume that Soylent consumers will eat nothing but Soylent for the rest of their lives), but to me, it's solved a large problem in my life: what to eat when I'm hungry but I don't have enough time to prepare a full meal. It can happen every now and then when I'm rushing around, and so…

Soylent gets a lot of hype, and invariably the hype follows a predictable pattern- "Geez, you don't eat only Soylent! It's just an occasional meal replacement!" "Okay, then how is it interesting when there are dozens of competing products in the meal replacement category?" "Because those aren't a full dietary replacement. You can't live on only Ensure (insert many other products here)." "Okay....but you just said..."…

> it's laughably easy to have a nutritionally complete lifestyle with minimal effort or time.

Care to elaborate? I can cook and know how to eat a balanced set of macro-nutrients, but I find it quite difficult to be consistently health concious when eating out all the time and cooking regularly is anything but minimal effort and time.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protein isn't a panacea. Eating 2,000 calories of Soylent a day would mean consuming 100 grams of protein. That's unnecessary for the average person.

Man, I wish I needed 100g of protein a day. I try to be very conservative on my intake, and I still need 142g minimum at 180 pounds.

RDA for protein is 0.8g/kg (~0.36/pound), so about 65g in your case if you're sedentary. 1g/pound is an old bodybuilder myth according to this article [0] which goes through various studies: "many review papers have concluded 0.82g/lb is the upper limit at which protein intake benefits body composition". This is for strength athletes and bodybuilders, mind you: most people (even many athletes) need far, far less.

[0] http://bayesianbodybuilding.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-pro...

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is kinda silly. Like, the problem here isn't Soylent, it's that you were depressed. And the problem with your friend using Soylent to watch her weight isn't Soylent, it's that she ate more of other crap when she drank Soylent as a meal replacement. I drink Soylent occasionally -- once every two or three weeks, maybe. Normally I use it if I know I'm going to eat a huge dinner, or if I ate a giant lunch an…

Sure, the underlying problem is depression. We can still have a reasonable discussion about things that enable that depression, or extend it. That's not at all a silly concern.

Meal replacement shakes have been around for, what, 2+ decades now? Saying that Soylent has come along and now somehow enables depressed people strikes me as insanity.

Depressed people misuse all kinds of perfectly valid products and services. Being mad at Soylent, or pizza delivery, or the internet, or beds, or any other thing that depressed people might end up leaning on in an unhealthy way seems pretty silly to me.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#227

It's a food company, and its product is fully baked. Why aren't they bootstrapping? Are they not profitable? If so, how do they have a business? If I sold ketchup at a loss, would I be able to close a $50M financing round?

Even if -- some would say especially if -- you are profitable, you might take outside money to speed up the process. Not that unusual.

Speeding up is useful for many reasons. Just to name a few: you have a lead and want to maintain it; you suspect the window for product adoption is limited; you want to grow the business and sell it so you can move on.

They could grow slowly for the next 10 years, or throw lighter fluid on it and grow more aggressively, giving investors a cut along the way.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#228
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soylent has a very high glycemic index, and isn't far off of eating a bowl of sugar. From that angle alone I would categorize it as an extremely poor choice (and indeed this whole discussion is a little surreal -- Soylent would be categorized as garbage, ultra-processed junk food if it didn't have the VC/valley aura around it). I've never bought into the super-food fantasy, because there is utterly nothing qualifying…

>Soylent has a very high glycemic index This is false, particularly for Soylent 2.0. https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212769503-Glycemic... I'm not saying Soylent is a super-food, but it is a food that isn't horrible for you (at least not as horrible as you're letting on!)

Soylent 1.6 has a GI of 65. That happens to be the same GI as sucrose (aka sugar). It is literally spot on, so you don't have to say "particularly" regarding 2.0.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is kinda silly. Like, the problem here isn't Soylent, it's that you were depressed. And the problem with your friend using Soylent to watch her weight isn't Soylent, it's that she ate more of other crap when she drank Soylent as a meal replacement. I drink Soylent occasionally -- once every two or three weeks, maybe. Normally I use it if I know I'm going to eat a huge dinner, or if I ate a giant lunch an…

Sure, but some things are more likely to be misused than others. For instance, Facebook. It's obviously a wildly popular and profitable product, but studies show that the more you use it the more likely you are to be depressed - but Facebook has a financial incentive to addict those users regardless. Anyway, I'm not really a fan of Soylent. I disagree with its health benefits. I think the company is pushing it as a f…

Facebook causing depression when used too much? What were the alternative groups doing? Correlation is a tricky thing to measure. I'm not sure how I feel about these types of studies or what utility they really provide.

Other than maybe giving the reader some perspective on their life. Anything used in a poor context, for example not combined with the right attitude, environment, etc can cause issues.

Often we just fall into negative cycles and need to be kicked in the butt to change them. We often fixate on one specific thing, like I quit smoking and suddenly became healthy (but I also worked out, started eating better, spent less time/money on a neutral/negative activity, etc, etc). There are always so many moving parts.

At most you could critique Solyent if they advertised as the solution to your health problems. Rather than something to replace 1-2 daily meals when you're on a tight schedule. The former is a complicated multi-faceted lifestyle thing that no company could offer with a single product but that won't stop them from positioning the product that way. But we should be smart enough to know it will only ever (potentially) be a component of it.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#230

Aside from brand, how does soylent differ from ensure?

There isn't an Ensure product that is formulated similarly to Soylent at the moment. Ensure has two products with a similar calorie count compared to Soylent (Ensure 350g vs Soylent 400g). Here's how they break down:

Soylent Drink: 400cal, 21g fat, 20g protein, 36g total carb. 9g sugar.

Ensure Plus: 350cal, 11g fat, 13g protein, 57g carb. 22g sugar.

Ensure Enlive: 250cal, 11g fat, 20g protein, 45g carb. 22g sugar.

As you can see, Soylent has more fat, which provides 9 cal/gram compared to 4cal/gram from carb/protein. This allows it to hit its calorie goal without adding nearly as many carbs and sugars.

Post reply on HN