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Half-Baked Product

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Re: Half-Baked Product

#341

Post by FireBeyond »

ashishb wrote: post #336
TrackerFF wrote: post #138

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. Th…

Listen to any on the Elon Musk interviews, he knows more technical intricacies of his 1000+ employee companies than your average startup founder with 10 employees.

Or can sound like it. Like when he talked on an investor call about one of the myriad reasons for vision only: “we are good with rain and fog because our cameras do photon counting and can account for it”.

Except… they don’t.

You need a different type of camera - one not optimized for “vision” (in the sense of “object discernment”) - one Teslas do not have.

And even if they did, to count photons you need an enclosed space in front of your lens, not the … open road.

Which is annoying: Teslas haven’t had that, and could never have that but he goes on an investor call and openly lies about it, and doesn’t get called out. It’s not even an “aspirational statement” it’s a lie that goes against the laws of physics.

He knows a lot, and he also knows enough to be able to be confidently wrong and pass the bullshit meter of people who don’t know any better. They are not the same thing.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#342

Post by albumen »

kordlessagain wrote: post #188
sixtram wrote: post #23

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.

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.

We installed our dishwasher at hip height, with the cupboard for clean dishes directly above. Bending down is a thing of the past.

The two dishwashers idea is neat, but the cupboard capacity is greater than that of a second dishwasher; and we haven’t got the space!

Re: Half-Baked Product

#343

Post by johnfn »

vntok wrote: post #266
BalinKing wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to HN. Just a heads up that, from the site guidelines[0]: > Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. (I'm not a mod or anything; I just noticed that most of your comments have been flagged/killed, and I suspect this might be why.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From the same guidelines: > 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.

I don’t see anything in there about not commenting on whether the author is using an LLM?

Re: Half-Baked Product

#344

Post by AstroJetson »

Waterluvian wrote: post #288
fwipsy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

How did they turn down your Black Olive and Pineapple Pizza? Asking for a friend.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#345

Post by fridental »

whstl wrote: post #250
mpyne wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[flagged]

Re: Half-Baked Product

#346

Post by AstroJetson »

aequitas wrote: post #122
flowerbreeze wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alway…

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.

I have a friend whos kitchen is almost the size of my apartment. They have a "dish" dishwasher and a "glass" dishwasher with different inside configurations. Woe to me that only has a sink and loaded into the wrong dishwasher.

(They also have a fridge and then two pull out drawer units, one is for keeping extra snacks frozen things (like ice, ice cream, juice etc.) and the other is for veggie / meat.)

Re: Half-Baked Product

#347

Post by chairmansteve »

flowerbreeze wrote: post #60
sixtram wrote: post #23

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 alway…

I quite frequently just rinse my plate or cup under the tap and put it on the drying rack. Instant!

Re: Half-Baked Product

#348

Post by [deleted] »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #190
red_admiral wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

...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).…

[deleted]

Re: Half-Baked Product

#349

Post by ValentineC »

ryandrake wrote: post #300
msteffen wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wh…

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…

On the other hand, if they'd focus on building their core product (an oven) while taking BigCompany's money, and without listening to the multitude of smaller requests from potential customers who might not even hand over a single cent, they might have eventually gotten somewhere.

I agree that being a "custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer" might not have been the ideal outcome, but at least the entire company would have gotten some expertise, and probably be able to pivot and finally build their own thing given more resources (*cough*moreVCfunding*cough*).

Re: Half-Baked Product

#350

Post by fragmede »

nikanj wrote: post #319
stickfigure wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

But what were the huge, established companies that had refused to deliver a better product before Google came along?

Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite.com, something Rocket. It was a long time ago and I've forgotten the rest.
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