Half-Baked Product

sscaryterry

Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)

HelloNurse

Brilliant autobiography.

serhack_

It's flabbergasting how this story is close to the reality. Bookmarked, I would love to see it printed.

clan

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!)

ArcHound

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.

richardfey

The more I read into it, the more pain memory flashbacks I got. Bravo

Chyzwar

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.

abrookewood

Brilliant. Brutal.

reactordev

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.

ssenssei

my favorite blog post of all time... this should go in a museum

orliesaurus

This was actually so good to read. It really reminded me of so many of my past experiences at startups.

nostratas

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

mishellaneous

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...

sixtram

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.

avsn

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.

Mizza

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.

rcgs

Enjoyed this – very entertaining!

Angostura

Reading this made me hyperventilate

thevillagechief

Brilliant! And this isn't really just about startups. Large companies are operating the exact same way.

phikappa

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!