Rendered at 12:29:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
sixtram 2 hours ago [-]
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.
flowerbreeze 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Waterluvian 20 minutes ago [-]
Restaurant dishwashers use an enormous amount of water. They require a hot water supply that’s much hotter than residential heaters typically supply. They require a more complete manual pre-rinse and scrub. They only accept kitchenware that’s made for them and destroy the rest.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
askvictor 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
briHass 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
afandian 57 minutes ago [-]
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?
moffkalast 2 hours ago [-]
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.
afandian 2 hours ago [-]
The innovation here is clearly edible soap.
And the 'less water' claim is technically correct, but it doesn't mention the decamethylcyclopentasiloxane. Just because it's complicated to spell, you understand.
Edible soap?!
The solution is clearly edible dishes!
tdeck 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps a match for the UK market? From what I've read they often don't rinse the soap off of dishes there (I wish I were making this up).
ericpauley 1 hours ago [-]
Do you use rinse aid?
marvinstrauch 1 hours ago [-]
Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
clan 2 hours ago [-]
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!)
smugglerFlynn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah because developers never wrote a line in POC which made it to prod ;)
pockybum522 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I have no experience with VC anything, but I was still nodding along the whole time as I was reading.
alias_neo 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.
- Mario
ogoffart 1 hours ago [-]
Similar story here.
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.
avsn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
xg15 18 minutes ago [-]
I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:
> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.
That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.
Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.
(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)
alansaber 2 minutes ago [-]
Entertaining, very AI prose though.
gherkinnn 24 minutes ago [-]
> A month later, Mario leaves the company. [...] In the retro, it gets written down as a “learning.”
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
mpetrovich 1 hours ago [-]
The classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem.
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.
thevillagechief 2 hours ago [-]
Brilliant! And this isn't really just about startups. Large companies are operating the exact same way.
pockybum522 1 hours ago [-]
Small ones, too!
serhack_ 2 hours ago [-]
It's flabbergasting how this story is close to the reality. Bookmarked, I would love to see it printed.
certyfreak 12 minutes ago [-]
Well written and it perfectly describes reality, it got me hooked and nodding from start to finish.
imjonse 1 hours ago [-]
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'.
ludamad 46 minutes ago [-]
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
micromacrofoot 1 minutes ago [-]
it's a more complex version of what happens in the third world too, it's not about class it's about people
reactordev 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ArcHound 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Angostura 2 hours ago [-]
Reading this made me hyperventilate
saadatq 42 minutes ago [-]
Has anyone ever experienced the alternative? to building products from scratch, growing a business, without the drama?
sebastianconcpt 34 minutes ago [-]
I was waiting for the plot twist and it didn't come, so its genre is: horror.
Galus 7 minutes ago [-]
A legend in the making.
dzonga 39 minutes ago [-]
you know the pamphlets passed to soldiers before war.
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 ?
vjsrinivas 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
mishellaneous 2 hours ago [-]
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...
skydhash 26 minutes ago [-]
Because engineering is where ideas get materialized in reality. And reality has a surprising amount of constraints, unlike imagination. It’s “draw the rest of the horse” turned to eleven.
2 hours ago [-]
ares623 2 hours ago [-]
> engineering was the bottleneck
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
AJRF 1 hours ago [-]
If I didn't laugh i'd cry.
HelloNurse 3 hours ago [-]
Brilliant autobiography.
orliesaurus 2 hours ago [-]
This was actually so good to read. It really reminded me of so many of my past experiences at startups.
sscaryterry 4 hours ago [-]
Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)
k7peak 3 hours ago [-]
I gave up, how did this make it to page 1 jeez.
weli 3 hours ago [-]
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.
edu 2 hours ago [-]
I read it full and I loved it and bookmarked it.
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.
bravetraveler 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 1 hours ago [-]
I enjoyed it, but it is uncomfortably realistic.
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.
otherme123 26 minutes ago [-]
On another post from today, titled "Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test", aparently the TLDR is the name of the dead man. The rest of the article explaining how, when, why, with whom the man was there, for some people, is cruft, a total waste of reading time.
jaapz 2 hours ago [-]
It's fine, don't worry about it. It's hard for me to read long form on a computer and I read your entire story.
You can't please everyone
telchior 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
drunkboxer 2 hours ago [-]
I loved every paragraph
achenet 58 minutes ago [-]
Personally, I really liked both your writing and the fact that you took the time to flesh out the main point.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^
worik 3 hours ago [-]
I loved it.
Different tastes
vultour 1 hours ago [-]
Do you need a 7-second TikTok summary?
ares623 2 hours ago [-]
Not enough "key insight", "smoking gun", "this closes the gap", "kicker" huh.
bayindirh 3 hours ago [-]
I mean, it's read time is 20 minutes at most. I don't think it's long or tasteless or anything.
user1338 1 hours ago [-]
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.
nostratas 2 hours ago [-]
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
denis-stable 1 hours ago [-]
Do you mind sharing why it was expensive lesson?
nostratas 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
Mizza 2 hours ago [-]
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.
weli 20 minutes ago [-]
If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.
Take it as a mental exercise.
adithyaharish 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
richardfey 2 hours ago [-]
The more I read into it, the more pain memory flashbacks I got. Bravo
ssenssei 2 hours ago [-]
my favorite blog post of all time... this should go in a museum
2 hours ago [-]
rcgs 2 hours ago [-]
Enjoyed this – very entertaining!
phikappa 1 hours ago [-]
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!
ac50hz 1 hours ago [-]
s/oven/cms/g
virajk_31 1 hours ago [-]
No cap
abrookewood 2 hours ago [-]
Brilliant. Brutal.
Jeff9James 1 hours ago [-]
i am completely new to this stuff (just made a mobile app). thanks for explaining (in 5 year-old kiddo style) how funding and corpo slop works. WOWOW
2 hours ago [-]
Xotic007 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bickov 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
burnout_eng 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
1 hours ago [-]
Chyzwar 2 hours ago [-]
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.
contrast 2 hours ago [-]
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.
isoprophlex 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
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.
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
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.
> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.
That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.
Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.
(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
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.
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 ?
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.
For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.
Take it as a mental exercise.
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