I think underlying a lot of this is a disdain in America for blue collar workers. People at the top thing of them as dumb monkeys and that there is nothing to what they do. Hence the falsely assume a computer or robot can do the job just as well.
The Japanese showed that by utilizing what humans are actually got at you get better productivity. Using humans the same way as robots is a very bad way of utilizing the flexibility inherent in a human.
It could simply be that everybody knows that blue collar job are eventually going to disappear. You don't want to build your latest factory using technology that will make you obsolete in a few years.
Obviously we were not quite there yet in the 80's/90's. Otherwise you would be reading the opposite story on how Japanese Car Factories failed because they used human instead of machine like in the US. Actually you can replace "Japanese Car Factories" in the previous sentence with a lot of thing that are actually true today.
Now, about Tesla, there is some relevance. They are still building car that are very much like regular cars and other manufacturer are building their own factories regularly for new platform/model, not held back by legacy issues. So it does indeed seem that Tesla is at an experience disadvantage.
I guess what happens is that this is Tesla trying to leverage a manufacturing bet on top of its successful "electric car" bet. You can see that on how harshly they lashed at journalists talking about their manufacturing safety, and draw some parallel with the initial review of the model s ( compared to today where you can make a 100 million view video bad mouthing about their car and Musk would probably not even be notified )
Tesla real goal is to find a manufacturing process that can get them producing car 1 order or 2 order of magnitude faster than the competition (and you know such a process cannot include human). They want to be the market leader by volume on every single class of electric vehicle in 10 years.
Everybody does not know that. Indeed, a lot of people know the opposite. Including Toyota, who went from a small-time player in post-war Japan to the world's largest car company based on the belief those jobs weren't going anywhere.
How is just assuming that without evidence not disdain for blue collar workers?
> Tesla real goal is to find a manufacturing process that can get them producing car 1 order or 2 order of magnitude faster than the competition (and you know such a process cannot include human).
I'm not sure this is true, and if it is, I don't think it's a particularly smart goal. Toyota spends ~30 worker-hours on building a car. Getting that down to 3 doesn't do much to reduce costs, and getting them down to 0.3 does way less.
To make that happen, Tesla will have to invest a lot of money in less flexible, less repurposable hardware and software. This a) doesn't save money in the short term, b) can introduce significant lags (because they're spending time up front to save time later, and also because they've increased delay risk), and c) may lock them in to suboptimal techniques in conditions where human workers could keep improving.
In order for that to be disdain, you need to associate people identity with their job.
I'm not a millennial, but I'm still young enough that the concept of job as identity does not fit the social reality of the people I know. They have moved between position enough that they cannot just be summarised by their present occupations.
So this is not disdain for the people, but for the jobs. And not only those jobs, but all the jobs, including mine. I want Star Trek for my great-great-grand-children, not grinding at work till they drop.
> I'm not sure this is true, and if it is, I don't think it's a particularly smart goal. Toyota spends ~30 worker-hours on building a car. Getting that down to 3 doesn't do much to reduce costs, and getting them down to 0.3 does way less.
I don't know what Tesla is doing, but what you say is correct, there is no gain to make by replacing a human by a robot if the robot is not providing massive economies somewhere. I personally don't think that hate of blue collar worker is really that valuable to Tesla, so I'm thinking more of massive throughput increase. Since it appears that Tesla want to spread in every market segment, being able to build a "10x" production line would allow them to do it at a fraction of the time of their competitor.
Note that I'm not suggesting that Tesla is going to make it, or that the technology is ready. Musk and Tesla investors do.
Another point which one always has to keep in mind with Musk. Maybe that's also related to SpaceX. If humanity has a future in space, it needs to be able to build stuff with as little human as possible.
edit: I just noticed that I missed the proof. Like the majority of the people on HN, I'm in the business of automating other people job away. I have friends working in the engineering field and I have yet to hear a story about some new tech requiring more human being than before. It is the same as white collar work: next release will require less people or less qualified people.
Plumbers are not going to disappear. There is heaps of repair work that won't disappear.
But beyond repair, look at construction. There are all sorts of claims about how 3D printing and full automation of house construction is coming, but go and look at almost any construction site you see.
(edit: Innovation is hard with construction in part because people want things that will definitely last 50 years. Fail fast is great on a web app, but what about failure in 10 years because 3D printed concrete doesn't work correctly in your location? How about brick laying robots cement failing in 15 years when the company is insolvent? Are you up for the risk? )
Power tools introduced in the 1950s or earlier have made a huge difference, but these jobs do not appear to be disappearing.
In Australia I've heard of teachers and people who can write mean python code quitting to become builders.
People with power tools are productive and very flexible. We're a long way off from a machine that can attach a deck to a house and make a hole in a wall for a window.
This is circular reasoning. Blue collar jobs will only disappear if no-one builds factories using them, because everyone knows these jobs will disappear.
> you know such a process cannot include human
Sounds like you're just assuming this is true, because "more tech is always better/faster/etc". I'm not so sure this is correct.
$6 for a tiny, soggy microwaved cheese sandwich. $3 for a tiny bowl of soup.
Real estate wasn't the source of their failure.
> while yes, the headaches of real estate in the Bay Area—where The Melt first set roots—are well established, fingering real estate is a bit like pointing out that it gets cold every winter
Also, you said you haven't heard of them, but you made the claim that it's a microwaved soggy grilled cheese sandwich. I've never had a soggy grilled cheese at The Melt.
I remember when this image was making the internet rounds a couple years ago and I was surprised how many people hadn't thought about the issues with it. Luckily, I know no one that had tried it for real.
Overall, I never liked the idea, and I told her that. I said it was way too expensive and they would have to decrease the price by 80% for it to be viable. But for the people who got it, mainly celebrities and millionaires, they loved it. I think I remember that Beyonce or Katy Perry or Britney got it for all of her dancers, etc.
The entire "green juice" industry is large, and the founder made his first millions by selling chains of these types of juices. The target was to make a glass of green juice less expensive than what you would find at a high-end gym or juice shop. The plan was to build it out with the people who were willing to pay for them, like celebrities and influencers, and then make them mass-market. The biggest expense was getting the food chain up and running, trying to get enough local farmers, etc, and getting the freshest ingredients possible. The internet connection, while ridiculous on the surface, was necessary to ensure that the ingredients were still fresh, because they literally had no preservatives. They wanted to avoid having people drinking a glass of mold or worse especially if they weren't mindful of expiration dates. This could also help if they sold these presses to juice shops (a later business strategy) and the person selling the juice might have old expired stock.
But once it was set up, the plan was to scale out and lower prices through higher volume. Unfortunately, the bad press hit just as they were doing a round of funding and went bankrupt soon after because funding dried up.
Do I think it would have been a hit? Probably not. But the idea wasn't absolutely stupid. It's about the same as any other Silicon Valley idea I've heard. Cater to a very select market of influencers first, and then scale out and create a new market based on green juices. The company absolutely believed that green juices would help the world, because it's a lot healthier, etc, so if you buy into that mindset that they could create a new industry, then it made sense.
Did they make pure business strategy mistake? Yes, just like other companies. Did the founder have too much of a Steve-Jobs-Deity complex by trying to over-design the press? Yes. But it's not nearly as bad as people believe from the headlines. The goal was to create a new market, like how Uber created a market by lowering prices for ridesharing. If you could lower the price of green juice to the price of a Starbucks latte from $15, then they really felt like this company would be a tremendous success.
They started in 2013, long after books like "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" explained exactly why scaling up before you have traction is a huge mistake. They could have learned the "this isn't working" lesson for an order of magnitude less money. If they had done that, they a) would have had capital to recover from their early mistakes, and b) would have been much better placed to find that low-cost solution.
When I look at a crater like that, I think about the 50+ seed rounds (or 20 A rounds or whatever) that could have happened but didn't because they got high on their own slide decks. They blew up not because they couldn't have discovered these problems, but because they didn't want to.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/20/health/romaine-lettuce-e-coli...
Was it overengineered? Yes and they wasted a lot of money. But my point is that there were reasons that weren't completely insane.
Not to mention that even this doesn't require anything fancy. The screw press was invented two thousand years ago by the Romans to make JUICE!
It was ridiculous on the surface, but also ridiculous all the way through to the core. We eat a lot of perishable items, and we have a well understood mechanism for dealing with it: Expiration dates. Making the expiration date into a QR code that gets scanned and then sent to a server so it can be checked by a computer is a thing you can do, but you can also just put it on the packaging, the way every other item in your pantry and fridge do.
If you really wanted to be crazy, you could encode the expiration date in the QR code and check it that way - again, without a net connection.
> But once it was set up, the plan was to scale out and lower prices through higher volume.
Not a bad plan. But as has been pointed out ad nauseam at this point:
1) One of the reasons the price was high is that the machine was poorly designed and hideously over-engineered. Relying on prices to drop as your volume increases is great, but if you do an even mediocre job at product design, you need to rely on a lot less volume.
2) The fundamental idea of the machine wasn't very good. A supply chain to ship bags of high quality juice to people? Great idea. A fancy machine to (effectively) open the bag? Not a great idea.
> But the idea wasn't absolutely stupid.
There were elements of the idea that weren't absolutely stupid. But taken as a whole, as implemented by Juicero? ...yeah, it was absolutely stupid.
Let's be clear: The business model was selling a hideously expensive gadget for very high prices, so that you could then sell the buyer a bunch of juice packs. Selling a cheap gadget for high prices and abandoning the juice packs might have been a good strategy (albeit scummy); the mainstay of stupid infomercial gadgets. Selling an expensive gadget for a low price so you could make it up on the juice packs might have been a good idea (it's a tried and proven strategy). But an expensive gadget at an expensive price, so you can sell juice? All you're doing is crippling the sales of the juice packs.
> Did they make pure business strategy mistake? Yes, just like other companies.
Just like other failed companies, yes. The only companies to succeed after that level of strategic failure were the ones lucky enough to pivot. This wasn't a viable idea!
> If you could lower the price of green juice to the price of a Starbucks latte from $15
I dunno about where you live, but around here a green juice from a juice bar is already a lot closer to a Starbucks latte than to $15, and the Juicero packs were actually more expensive than just going to a juice bar.
You're totally right that cheap, high-quality juice for the masses is a viable idea. And you're right that initial high prices, falling due to volume is a good idea. What I think you're missing is how little these things have to do with Juicero.
The expiration of these packets were measured in days or maybe a week, not weeks. Also, as I mentioned above in another comment, there could be particular product recalls like the current romaine lettuce recall. I'm not arguing that it wasn't overengineered, I'm just pointing out why they did it. I wouldn't have done it, but they chose to.
> One of the reasons the price was high is that the machine was poorly designed and hideously over-engineered.
It was totally overengineered. When my friend read the product breakdown from one of the blogs about how it was as if completely unexperienced mechanical engineers had designed the press, she said this wasn't too far off the mark. But the main reason for the failure wasn't the press, it was the food supply chain. That was way too intensive and expensive and wouldn't scale the way they wanted it to. They spent money on food scientists to make sure that the combination of vegetables they used wouldn't interact during the time that they were packaged together, etc. The people they were marketing to were pretty price-independent. $600 for a dumb press wasn't a big deal if they got a great green juice, which they did. Their phase to expand and lower the price was in the future, before they died because funding dried up.
> Just like other failed companies, yes. The only companies to succeed after that level of strategic failure were the ones lucky enough to pivot. This wasn't a viable idea!
Firstly, 90% of all startups fail.
I never said it was a viable idea. I thought the idea wasn't good. But the investors took a chance. That's how it works. Even YC admits that the idea is less important than the people who are attempting the startup. The founder had fundamental experience with launching juice bars on the East Coast, and the idea to create a new market wasn't horrible. Investors took a chance, and then the management fucked it up.
And yes, you can laugh at how dumb the idea is now, but the same goes for Soylent, or even the infamous Dropbox comment in HN. But at least their idea wasn't just "sell $600 juicers ad infinitum and make $$$$". That's my point. A lot of the article miss this.
Juicero is just another failure like all other failures we see all the time in Silicon Valley. There are far worse examples of bad investments out there. I'm sure it's definitely in the bottom quartile of bad investments, but in my opinion it's not like it's the worst ever and doesn't deserve the level of humiliation associated with it. It was just a mismanaged idea that got bad press and then the Internet Lynch mob jumped on it.
I don't know if you can give this as an example in support of internet connectedness - we seem to be doing OK with the romaine lettuce issue without overpriced IoT salad bowls.
That isn't a particular hurdle. There are plenty of products in my local supermarket that have an expiration date measured in hours after purchase (usually about 3 or 4 days in total, the sticker is printed on-location, this especially concerns some raw meat products).
>Also, as I mentioned above in another comment, there could be particular product recalls like the current romaine lettuce recall.
That might require an internet connection but not permanent either. The juicer could simply have a blacklist of product IDs. Supermarkets also already implement this at the checkout. The cashier will be unable to add the item to the bill, even if a supervisor gets out their admin keys and tries it manually (the computer will even block same-price manual entries after a blocked item is scanned during checkout).
In the lean startup world, people talk about early products in "painkiller vs vitamin" terms. If you're going to build a new kind of business, you want a product that people are desperate to have. If it's a nice-to-have, it's much harder to find enough early adopters to build a sustainable business. (Not impossible, but it takes a lot more capital and is much riskier.)
Juicero was literally a vitamin play. Nobody needs it, but some people like it. Coffee, on the other hand contains an addictive stimulant that 60+% of Americans consume every day. People need their morning coffee, and will literally develop headaches if they don't have it often enough.
Juicero=Nespresso is one of those comparisons that only makes sense if you don't think about the details. Sure, it's got some surface plausibility, but only if you don't think much about the details.
Royalty would pay the equivalent of millions of dollars today for spices because they would balance your humors.
A source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
The US used graphite and paid ridiculous amounts of money for it. The USSR greased pencils or out right crayons instead.
It's okay to be wrong. I distinctly remember believing the (false) pencil story once, before reading more about it and learning the (far more interesting) actual story. And also realizing that the false pencil story pushes certain goals and agendas, too, so probably isn't accidental.
Always good to be humble and remember that I'm not smarter than a rocket scientist in their own field.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
In some ways, I think the long software-is-eating-the-world boom has been bad for us as an industry. We have been so successful with "throw tech at it" solutions that we don't know when that isn't a good idea. E.g., the Silicon-Valley-reinvents-grilled-cheese flop The Melt [3], or the $120m clown show that was Juicero [4].
American car companies spent decades trying and failing to learn Toyota's approach. They even had enthusiastic help from Toyota, who even went so far as to take GM's worst plant and redo it as a joint venture. (Interestingly, it's the same plant that Tesla now uses. [5]) For those unfamiliar with the story, I strongly recommend This American Life's episode on it. [6] But my takeaway was that executive arrogance kept GM from learning that there was a much better way to make cars. That sounds more and more familiar these days.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40461624/how-toyota-is-putting-h...
[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18960044/ns/business-autos/t/study...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-trendiest-grilled-cheese...
[4] https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
[6] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015