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.
The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?
Another defense is that blindingly naïve optimism is sometimes needed to move the needle, as the concept “that can’t be done” simply doesn’t exist to some people.
I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts.
EDIT: The very latest happened only a couple of weeks ago. A startup had reached out to my employer as they’re developing a platform in our domain. Higher ups liked what they’d seen, enough to arrange a real meeting.
Startup is only 3 months old, and the moment I opened the platform I recognized a vibecoded (likely using clause) platform identical to almost all other launched on a daily basis.
So I probed a bit about data sources, serious questions regarding security, etc. but the guy was pretty fluent in consultant (turns out he had worked as a management consultant before launching), and the CTO was just nodding along.
In the end they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features - but as mentioned, I’m sure the whole product was entirely vibecoded.
I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.
The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.
I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.
What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.)
Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?")
Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?")
More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?
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.)
This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.
The most resonant line for me. This line for me is about how good project management meets team culture. You want a high performant team: one that remains focused and motivated - but the goals are carrots, not sticks.
Why did the engineer, "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens", not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but the engineer's "salary isn’t great", and the real goal of building "the oven of his dreams" very much does depend on understanding this.
Or perhaps the engineer wasn't sure whether it was going to work, but the only way to find out was to try. Well, it seems like they tried, and they found out. Oh well.
---
I realize this story is an analogy, but—isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes.
There was nothing really wrong with with the nine founders who failed, they were just unlucky. They can try again.
Put another way: perhaps the thing that went wrong in this story is simply that they didn't "fail fast"?
Disclaimer: I've never worked in this space.
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 ?
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.
I’ve found that most people hate making tradeoffs. They don’t recognize that the things they do like don’t do everything.
So If you focus too much on a customer or worse an internal stakeholder who hasn’t designed or built things, it can became a Homer Simpson designing a car situation.
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.
If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.
To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.
If you think that Musk did his endeavors in order to become rich, you are likely mistaken.
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
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.
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.
I’d like to speak with you, if so.
I achieve the first two goals by simply scrubbing+rinsing dishes after most uses and letting them dry. No glued-on food to go gnarly. They go thru the dishwasher once in a while. It's my personal strategy for being eco without getting food poisoning, but I've never seen a paper that evaluates this method in comparison to more-typical workflows (i.e. in-sink wash-using-soap or in-dishwasher wash-using-soap).
"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 good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them."
Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
This is assuming there IS a way to keep the business afloat. It's this framing of thinking that has caused more suffering, frustration, and bad will in all the places I've worked at which are just reskins of this article.
A business is entitled to it's model but it is not entitled to success. This story which is more than just a strawman or anecdote gets it right: The engineers are doing their job the best they can with unreasonable expectations set by people who do not feel they need to be constrained by reality and just have dollar signs in their eyes. The engineers do not share the same type of blame as everyone else at the company. Their failure was enabling nonsense and greed.
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 originally a lesson he learned from Eberhard/Tarpenning at Tesla, who were only selling the roadster to sports car enthusiasts who cared more about 0-60 than fit & finish, or range, or cost, or anything else).
Anyway, my current interpretation is that the pizza guys shouldn’t have sold to pepepizza (or friends and family, probably). I know startups do this all the time, but whenever I’ve seen it, it always seems to turn into a distraction from the Big Idea that is the company’s thesis. Then Big Customer gets hung up on ancillary requirements and Cool Startup doesn’t really get to test their thesis at all. Maybe the key is to stay small, focus on finding people who really care about the new oven tech, and size the company to that market until you’ve solved enough problems to expand to people for whom the cool tech is concern #2 or #3.
My bosses don't buy the ovens that are the most dependable, the most efficient, nor ones that are even compatible with the other steps in the cooking process.
They're impressed by the AI oven that cooks the pizza mostly right 30-40% of the time. "It'll be more consistent if you let the oven decide how long to cook." But we ignore that because of how stupid it is.
They buy ovens that suck because sales people impress them with baking jargon they don't understand. At least, that's how it comes off when they talk about it. I'm sure getting a good deal is a much bigger factor than they say.
They don't eat pizza. They can't even tell whether it's burnt. They tell me "soon the oven will do everything for us and you won't be needed."
They don't seem to comprehend that an oven can't knead dough or mix ingrdients. And that's even ignoring the fact that the auto-cook features are wrong except in the best of conditions.
The ovens break constantly because of the humidity levels needed to keep the dough nice. They spend more on repairs than they ever did on the ovens. We keep telling them to get the moisture-resistant ovens. They say it's too expensive.
I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.
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!)
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...
If you don’t see the value of your own word, I can’t give it back to you.
These kinds of companies make hundreds of thousands or even millions a year. But it’s too small to hear about them.
Which is a shame, because it makes those constructs less pleasant to read than they used to be. If you squint, and pretend AI doesn't exist (imagine!), then maybe you might be able to enjoy them again.
It is a little bit too long though.
to the Amazon river everything and anything will be a bottleneck
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.
Because they need space, they need even more nasty chemicals than domestic dishwashers, they need a stack of trays to load the dishes on and a crew to load and unload them.
If you want a dishwasher which doesn't require unloading after use you can get 2 of them, one of which is "clean", the other "dirty" or washing. When the "dirty" one is full you turn it on and let it wash while you take whatever you need from the "clean" one. Once the formerly-dirty one has finished it's cycle the roles are reversed and it becomes the "clean" one.
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.
The wash is also likely going to follow mx+c (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.
This allows the pre-wash cycle to get rid of most of the grease and stuff before the main cycle so the main cycle is more effective and the water is cleaner so the final rinse works better too.
"their kitchens are custom-built, so they need ovens with specific dimensions. Oh, and a rotating base like the one they already have."
“My oven at home connects to the fireplace. Does yours?”
“I make a lot of wedding cakes, what have you got for me?”
“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”
Those are all problems.
But are they problems worth spending time? I dunno.
If most founders are wealthy, or even reasonably comfortable, it's possible they're too out of touch to identify a problem shared by enough people.
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). They need to stop trying to sell ovens and start trying to sell baked goods. Maybe once they're good at that, they can also sell whatever oven they came up with along the way.
Good fiction teaches you something you hadn't seen before, or challenges your perspective, or articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered. If it's just "some guy went to work and it sucked and he was right and everyone else was wrong and the Green People did classic Green People bullshit", and there's nothing else complicated or humanizing it, and no real-world lesson or stranger-than-fiction details to it, then what value does it have?
Like, what would happen if you asked a redditor with 10 years of experience reading about startups, but no real exposure to that culture/experience beyond the comment section, to write a story summarizing the consensus opinion on reddit of how startups typically work? Of course, because it's made up it's not wrong, but it exists entirely within the socially-contingent reality of the Internet Consensus.
In the real world there's politics, inter-personal relationships, personalities and personality flaws, and too much detail for "startup flails around" to be something you can reduce to "the startup flailed around". Of course it did, but why and how? A story that says "you know how it goes in all the other stories? yeah, that" or "there was a guy like you and he was good, and all the other guys were idiots and they were bad" has no point
- Mario
The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”
It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.
I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?
I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.
But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.
Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?
You are 100% correct on good fiction.
I have the feeling that you will not like Franz Kafka.
Without elevating this piece to that level I think we can still agree to disagree on what good fiction is.
Or maybe your humor is better aligned with the socially-contingent reality of Franz.
But your perspective is valued. I need to shake of my bias and remember that there are no easy wins. For each point there is a counter. And I find it hard to argue against yours as my bias makes your stance feel very dismissive. Everything then turns into wedge issues.
I would have preferred an argument based on why the piece was flawed not how. Then I could counter with my experience and we could have had a conversation.
Enough Internet for me today! ;-)
It really surprised me how it seems to have polarized people. I never seem to learn.
If it didn't make more changes than you're aware of, then you should be aware that some features of your style are common amongst LLMs, and over-use of them will alienate some percentage of your audience (even if unfairly).
Key ones to look out for:
- Staccato prose: repeated runs of short sentences (e.g. "The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.") - Negative pivots: anything with the structure of '!X; Y' (e.g. 'it’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it')
These are valid linguistic features, but if you use them a lot, it sounds like AI writing, and people are wary of AI writing (because of the tidal wave of malicious, spamming & extractive actors using it). It will impact your audience.
Different tastes
I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.
In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).
The hot water is recirculated during the wash, the rinse uses fresh water from the tap with the excess going out an overflow. A little sump water gets replaced every cycle, but enough stays that it's back up to temperature before you've emptied and refilled it. There's also a small peristaltic pump to top up the detergent directly from the bottle.
Not much benefit in a home setting unless you fancy having it hot and ready 24/7 though.
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.
One pot, no dishes. Each roommate has to keep track of their private spoon. Greedy "clever" roommate who shows up with a liter ladle triggers a spoon fight in the kitchen. Eating from pot by hand is corrected by rapping their knuckles with your spoons. Eventually, all the glassware ends up broken, and some bozo threw out all the used red solo cups, but luckily, the kitchen faucet has a spray attachment.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
Sodium bicarbonate residue won't kill our customers, so consider it technically edible. The issue of taste and efficiency will be approached after MVP
(I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)
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.
I thought it might be intentional though? The first half reads very non-slop, and it just kind of inches its way in as the situation falls apart
A freshly minted founder decides to get into the oven business. He can’t bake a cake or knead bread, but he knows the kitchen appliance market inside and out. He’s analyzed every business in Spain and reached a conclusion: if he sells a new oven to the country’s pizza makers, pastry chefs, and bakers, he only needs to capture 10% of the market to become a billionaire.
10% always looks small when you type it into an Excel spreadsheet.
The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight: manufacture a more efficient oven using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want to work more efficiently? Buy our oven. End of pitch. The founder has experience talking to investors and raises enough money to build an MVP.
The founder looks for someone who knows how to build ovens and finds an engineer from a prestigious school. The engineer has spent 10 years building ovens and knows how to make one. More than that: he’s the kind of person who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens. He goes to oven conferences. When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth.
He’s tired of building ovens at Corporate Oven. Ten years making the same oven he’s told to make. He wants the freedom to build his own.
The founder offers him 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: if things go well, someday he could be a millionaire. And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.
He signs.
With little money and lots of enthusiasm, they build an MVP. Two months later it’s done. It’s a functional oven and, more importantly, it has one improvement over traditional ovens: you input the amount of flour, yeast, and water, and the oven automatically knows when to stop for a perfect bake.
In theory.
In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP. They go to market and sell 5 prototypes: two bakers the founder knows, the engineer’s mother who bakes cakes, and two oven enthusiasts who buy it out of curiosity.
The feedback is unanimous:
“My bread came out burnt.” “The cake was raw.” “Every single pizza burns.”
But all things considered, it’s positive: a third of the time, the prototype worked and produced the perfect cake, bread, or pizza.
“This is just a prototype. Imagine when we ship the real product. Trust us.”
And with that, the founder goes to see an old colleague who now works at a VC: “In 2 months we’ve built a prototype, we already have 5 customers, and it’s very promising. We just need money to scale, build a better version, and sell to every bakery and pastry shop in Spain.”
Nobody asks whether the 5 customers would buy again.
The founder is very good. He raises 5 million. Ovens Inc. is born.
They start improving the prototype. The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers.
The engineer knows exactly where to look. On the Italian forums there are two users he’s spent years arguing with about convection and refractory stone: Mario and Luigi. He’s never met them in person, but he knows their opinions on ovens better than his own family’s. He offers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of freedom, the perfect oven.
They sign.
Meanwhile, the founder needs to sell ovens, but Facebook and Instagram ads get no traction. Turns out nobody buys a fifteen-thousand-euro industrial oven because it popped up in their stories. So he hires a legendary sales team: the best salespeople in all of Spain. People who have never sold ovens, who know nothing about ovens, but who are hungry to sell and very excited about the company.
At first it goes badly. Few people want a new oven; they’re happy with the one they have. Why switch? Most small businesses don’t care about a 15% efficiency gain: the risk of switching is too high. If Juan’s Bakery swaps ovens and the new oven fails, Juan loses his customers and shuts down. For Juan, efficiency is optional; tomorrow’s bread is not. Better to stick with the old oven, even if it’s worse on paper. He’d only switch if Manolo’s Bakery across the street started selling cheaper bread thanks to a more efficient oven and he had no choice. But Manolo thinks exactly the same as Juan, so nobody moves. Perfect equilibrium. Economists have a name for this; Juan and Manolo call it common sense.
Big businesses are another story. For them, 15% efficiency means millions saved every year. And one salesperson manages to make contact with Pepepizza.
Meanwhile, over in engineering, things aren’t going any better. The algorithm is unstable. They’ve gotten the failure rate down from two thirds to one third, but each point of improvement costs twice as much as the last. And then comes the uncomfortable discovery: if the oven only does two of the three things (bread, cakes, or pizza), the algorithm fails just 5% of the time.
The engineer brings the proposal to the founder: let’s sacrifice one market and have a product that works.
The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”
It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.
The engineer goes back to his desk with his three doughs and his 33% failure rate.
Back to sales: there’s contact with Pepepizza, but enterprise deals don’t close over email. The founder flies to Pepepizza headquarters and meets the owner. They hit it off. They hit it off so well they go to Mallorca together. Nobody knows what was discussed there. What’s known is that when they come back, there’s a deal. Nobody has tried the oven yet. No need. Enterprise sales isn’t about ovens.
The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.
And they come. Pepepizza’s operations team sends the list to sales: their kitchens are custom-built, so they need ovens with specific dimensions. Oh, and a rotating base like the one they already have.
Sales replies: “No problem.”
The founder is euphoric. Pepepizza wants to buy an initial batch of 500 ovens. Five hundred. That’s more revenue than everything since they started. For Pepepizza it’s a small pilot, a trial in a few locations before deciding anything. For Ovens Inc. it’s betting the entire company.
“Engineer, we need 500 ovens for Pepepizza. They want specific dimensions and a base that spins. Let’s make it happen.”
The engineer doesn’t faint only because he’s already sitting down.
The algorithm barely works for pizza. The mold dimensions have spent 5 months being optimized in CAD for the standard size. And nobody, ever, has discussed rotating bases on the Italian forums. If it’s not on the Italian forums, does it even exist?
The engineer opens the CAD file in front of the founder. He shows him why the new dimensions break the entire thermal design. The founder looks at the screen, looks at the blueprints, looks at the engineer.
“But this is just changing a number, right?”
“We can’t. Not until we fix the algorithm and redesign the inverter for the new sizes. That’s 5 more months.”
It’s not 5 months.
After many lost weekends and entire nights running on Red Bull, in 3 weeks there’s a prototype for Pepepizza. Compromises were made. The algorithm still fails plenty, but at least the dimensions are right. The rotating base? Doesn’t exist yet. Pepepizza is promised an add-on “in a couple of months.” Pepepizza says fine.
Sales has had a revelation: if you sell the oven that exists today, you don’t sell ovens. You have to sell the oven that will exist in 6 months. Promise features. It worked last time: they promised Pepepizza the impossible and the team delivered in 3 weeks. What could go wrong?
Sales, of course, has no idea what happens after the contract is signed. The commission is paid at signing. Whatever comes next is another department’s problem.
Though there’s something nobody in engineering wants to look at: Ovens Inc. doesn’t live off selling ovens (for now). It lives off raising rounds. And rounds are raised with projections, and projections are manufactured out of whatever sales promises. The “No problem” people are also the only life raft.
And then the daily requests begin:
“A lot of our potential customers make birthday cakes. When they ask if we have special birthday-cake features, we have to say no, and we lose them. Can we add the feature?”
The founder has no doubts. Last time a feature was requested, they estimated 5 months and did it in 3 weeks. And this is much easier. “It’s just a simple button that adds candles.”
The engineer is climbing the walls. They still haven’t finished cleaning up the Pepepizza wreckage. This is absolutely not what people discuss on the Italian forums. Adding a candle button is an insult to the state of the art, or rather, the state of the oven.
But he caves.
“Just this once.”
Sales sells 2 more ovens a month thanks to the new button. Or so they believe. They have no way of checking whether they’d have sold them anyway without the button.
Soon after, more feature requests arrive.
“My oven at home connects to the fireplace. Does yours?”
“I make a lot of wedding cakes, what have you got for me?”
“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”
They build all of them.
Engineering stops trying to build a good oven and starts adding buttons and features. Nobody made that decision. It just happened, one ticket at a time.
And there’s a detail everyone seems to ignore: each button takes longer than the last. The candle button took three days. The fireplace one, a week. The latest one took three. It’s not that the engineers are getting slower: it’s that every new button has to coexist with all the previous buttons.
Meanwhile, customers who buy the oven return it within a week. The reason? The bread and cakes still burn 10% of the time. The MVP problem. The original one. The one from day one. Underneath the twelve new buttons sits the same algorithm from the very first day, and a baker who loses one out of every ten batches is not consoled by the fact that the oven does candles.
When a customer calls to cancel, support tries to retain them by offering what’s available: the new button from the latest release. The baker whose bread keeps burning is offered Ramadan mode. The baker leaves anyway. It gets logged as feedback. Engineering has no time to stop and rethink their approach, because stopping isn’t in the backlog.
And then the worst day arrives. Pepepizza calls:
“Where is the rotating base?”
The founder swallows hard. The ticket has been sitting on the kanban board for a month and a half. It’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it. The candle button. The fireplace thing. The Ramadan thing. The rotating base was always the second-highest priority, and the second-highest priority never gets done. So he answers with conviction:
“Almost finished.”
“Guys, these next two weeks we’re going to focus on the rotating base,” says the founder.
The team can’t believe it. They already said the rotating base was impossible. They already explained why. Besides, Mario has vacation planned, the vacation he was promised after the Pepepizza crunch. And Luigi’s performance has been slipping for weeks and nobody knows why.
The engineer tries one more time:
“We can’t do the rotating base right now. We need to refactor, consolidate, and add an abstraction layer for compartments and buttons. Otherwise, every new feature takes twice as long as the last. Also, Mario has vacation planned, and I’m not sure Luigi is in a good place to be asked for more.”
The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.
“But this is a startup. And startups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sacrifice. You have two weeks.”
And he’s not saying it from the couch: the founder takes the lowest salary in the company and hasn’t had a vacation in two years (Mallorca was work). He’s the first to live the speech. That is exactly the problem.
There’s a new crunch. This time with less enthusiasm and less passion. The first one was an epic feat; this one is paperwork. Mario cancels his vacation. Luigi keeps showing up. Nobody asks how he’s doing.
Two weeks later, the result: a rotating base that requires three special button combinations. It’s incompatible with every other mode, but it’s not like nobody tested it.
It gets installed at Pepepizza. Pepepizza’s response:
“It doesn’t rotate clockwise. We’re going with Corporate Oven.”
The team: devastated. They just lost their most important customer. Nobody in product ever communicated that it had to rotate clockwise. Somewhere between sales, the founder, and the backlog, the single most important requirement of the project simply never existed.
And the worst part isn’t losing Pepepizza. The worst part is that the changes made for the rotating base will haunt the oven’s design until the end of time. The customer leaves now. Their rotating base stays forever.
A month later, Mario leaves the company. He’s not going to a competitor and he hasn’t found anything better: he leaves because it’s the only way he can see to get a vacation. In the retro, it gets written down as a “learning.”
Luigi stays. He now maintains the candle button. It’s his specialty, they say. Nobody remembers who decided that, but it’s his specialty. He keeps showing up every day, keeps doing his work. On the Italian forums, people ask why Luigi hasn’t posted in 5 months. In standups he says “no blockers” and everyone moves on to the next person.
Six months later.
Ovens Inc. is still alive. Technically. There’s money for eight more months and a new version of the pitch deck where the word “oven” no longer appears: it’s now an “intelligent baking platform.”
The engineer left in March. He didn’t slam the door or write a viral thread about his experience. One day he simply stopped arguing in meetings, a month later he stopped showing up, and his farewell was a three-line email. Nobody has touched his code since. Nobody dares.
The founder has it all figured out: the problem was never the plan. The problem was the execution. He needs another engineer.
And he finds one.
Young, graduated from a prestigious school, has spent years building ovens at Corporate Oven and he’s tired. More than that: he’s the kind of person who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens. He goes to oven conferences. When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian oven forums about which type of oven is best. On the forum an old user warns “Make sure that you support rotating bases day 1”. The young engineer laughs. Who uses rotating bases in an oven?
The founder offers him 5% of the company. It can’t be 20 anymore; there’s been dilution (funding-round stuff, it’s complicated). But the salary doesn’t matter, because he’s offering the important thing: total freedom to build the perfect oven.
The kid smiles.
He signs.
(No, from dry-cleaning)
https://stroodles.co.uk/collections
I bought some edible cups out of curiosity a few years back. Nice for coffee. I did end up eating them all, although some of them were still dry at the time of consumption.
I think edible soap has better behaviour-adjusted shelf-life here.
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
i was definitely the another Engineer in my story.
Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there
When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had
For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters
Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those
Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work
Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind
There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet
ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features
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 ^_^
But everyone makes mistakes and bad deals in product development or they go out of business.
The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk.
Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk.
If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million.
If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.
If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal.
More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.