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Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ?
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.
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.
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