Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was quite surprised to see the tea-making and sandwich-making robots. I met a startup in Hong Kong, CafeX, who were working on a coffee-making robot, and my first reaction was that they were using cutting-edge technology to solve a trivial problem. I do like good coffee though, so I thought through the business case. It seemed to fit into an awkward gap between "cheap coffee vending machine" and "cafe kiosk with tr…
"People who like quality coffee will usually prefer a trained barista if one is available, unless they want to try the novelty of a robot." That's not why Starbucks is so labor-intensive. Starbucks developed a good automated coffee-making machine, but decided not to deploy it. Instead, they built a lower-profile manual machine which allows their employees to maintain eye contact with the customer. The whole point of…
Re: Startups That Launched at YC S15 Demo Day 1
#41I've only just seen this comment; all I wanted to say is that your interpretation sounds far too cynical. Maybe I just can't fathom what kind of mind gets an ego boost from "making the barista perform".