Even call it a "robot" pizza company is strange...I can't imagine that the inside of any factory for frozen pizzas would look that different than what this company was offering.
Very different. Frozen pizza factories are impressively efficient (with decades old tech).
Compare random frozen pizza machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7anib2L7uUk with the hilarity that is Zume https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFSdxwRVh8A
Thanks for the links. Indeed, hilarious to watch it side-by-side for some extra entertainment! With the volume of pizza they're making in that Zume factory, it doesn't seem like there's even any extra benefits of using robots — and these robots seem to be placed there more as an obstacle to overcome than actual help; also, they didn't even use it for cheese dispersement, which was still done by hand? LOL, robots-made pizza!
The six-axis robot being used to move a pizza 2 feet was pretty amazing -- I have to imagine they had grander plans but had no idea how to utilize it yet.
The mobile ovens are kind of absurd. I mean, warming it doesn't seem like a bad idea. Maybe even baking it on the way is fine (so long as all the toppings didn't slide off), but what do they need 56 bays for? If they're planning on loading up 56 pizzas and baking them on the way, latency on orders will be horrible. Huge orders are like, 10 pizzas. Seems like if they just baked them and stuffed them right into a warming compartment that'd be more than sufficient.
The saucing of the dough in particular was absolutely slower than a reasonably experienced human worker. For a human worker in a typical pizzeria, the sauce takes two seconds.
Useless in this application, but a lot of fun for an engineer to play with.
you mean other than the $375M you can walk away with by claiming you're using robots to make pizza.
Your insight re: the parallel to software design is a valuable one, thank you.
I had family working in a plant for one of the big name pizza places, and you can see the whole process for on-demand pizza at many brick oven pizza joints. I don't know how you could go to either of those places, look at zume, then conclude that zume had any advantage or was solving a problem from either side (on demand or automation).
To honest though, they look like fresh pizzas. And if by some chance, the system yields stable long term value (happy employees and eaters) then.. why not.
That said anybody gets depressed by the dehumanizing aspect of this era ? drone delivering robotically made pizzas.. it looked funny in the jetsons but in reality I'd like to keep the good'ol restaurants with noisy people in it.
[0] "that we have yet to master" because it's so useless and we're so unqualified to understand it
Has anyone explained to Zume that the restaurant business is low-margin?
Industrialization has pretty much solved mass production.
AI can automate intelligent decision making, but with industrialized production system the design has removed all need for intelligence.
An intelligent system will always be more expensive than a non intelligent system.
Robots could only become useful, once there are decisions to make. Like when you want to order truly customized pizzas, e.g., arrange the cheese such that it spells your name. Or give it a keyword, and then the robot should arrange all ingredients, such that the pizza looks like a painting about that keyword
I was like “oh these pizzas aren’t in a straight line, I wonder if a human needs to line them up now, or if there’s a visual sensor that detects edges”.
Then the simplicity of the solution blew my mind!
Sure, Rademaker doesn’t put their enormous frozen pizza technology in a van. But making pizza with robots? Dude, that’s been done before.
I bet if you gave them enough money to bother trying, they could squeeze a pizza machine into a van. Making a pizza in a van seems possible, but pointless.
Serious question: would this investment have been awarded if the cofounder weren't a minority female?
"Bruno is a very powerful robot. He's a 6-axis robot. You've seen this kind of robot mostly in manufacturing settings. We're using this robot to make pizza."
Bruno then moves the pizza 5ft.
I have to believe they bought it with the idea of doing much much more but hadn't figured out how.
Overall, it seems they knew they wanted to "automate pizza" but really had no idea how. Another comment shows a real pizza assembly line that looks both simple and efficient.
Lets talk a minute about their "mobile ovens". WTH do they need 56 ovens for? It seems like assembly still has to happen at a "hub", but how many pizzas do you really need to bake on the way? Maybe a max of 10 for huge orders?
> Serious question: would this investment have been awarded if the cofounder weren't a minority female?
Lets not go there.
The video gave me the impression of a kitchen designed by a chef or line cook, with a manufacturing robot tossed in there. If the goal was automated centralized production, any competent manufacturing engineer would have designed a radically simpler setup. Of course, finding machinery that didn't have a production capacity too far beyond Zume's needs would probably have been a challenge. Hundreds of pizzas an hour--let alone thousands--is well beyond anything Zume could have handled, because their biggest bottleneck would have always been delivery.
> Lets talk a minute about their "mobile ovens". WTH do they need 56 ovens for? It seems like assembly still has to happen at a "hub", but how many pizzas do you really need to bake on the way? Maybe a max of 10 for huge orders?
The entire concept is a bit wacky. You don't need to bake the pizza entirely on the way; just scale up how New York pizzerias handle pizza by the slice.[0] A plain pizza gets half-baked and when a customer orders a slice, toppings are added and it's put in the oven for a couple minutes until fully cooked. Prepping whole pizzas at a central kitchen and then putting them in a delivery van that finishes cooking the pizzas is something I could maybe see being viable with minimal investment. A very hesitant maybe.
But there are no robots and no wizards (er, machine learning some of Zume's early coverage discussed) for that kind of business. And that probably means no big investments as there are some articles where I can't help but substitute "magic" or "wizards" for certain words and think "yeah, that's probably closer to what some investors or journalists heard."
0. https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/10/new-york-pizza-slice-his...
And didn't bother to do a simple Youtube search, watch one of the "how it's done" programs on TV, or talk to someone in the industry.
Being a little bit more active in my local start-up scene now also means following stat-ups in general. And a lot of these companies, including one I used to work for for a short period, seem to ignore lessons other learned, the hard way. If these lessons are concerning your USP, ignore them, because it is where you inovate. regardless, you should have understood these lessons before ignoring them.
Ignoring these lessons in any other part of your company is just stupid. Like not managing your cash flow.
Yes of course. If you read the history, it was the male cofounder that was the “charisma” behind the business.
If anything the minority female is there as the token PR stunt.
One, if that's really the model, then founders had better stay as far away from venture capital as possible. Whether your motivation is "change the world"/"deliver on the vision you have" or "make money," that's not your investor's model. Your investor's model is to convince you and a hundred people like you that each of you is special and going to change the world, while expecting only one of you to succeed. Your investor's model is to push you to be Uber-scale even if you're overextending yourself and to convince you that you can do it even if you probably can't, because it's better to let you fail and cut you loose than to let you have a modest and small success that doesn't make a dent in the portfolio. If you and everyone else is aiming for safe successes instead of high-risk-high-reward gambles, then the let-a-thousand-startups-bloom approach stops being profitable for the investor, so investors can't let that happen.
Two, I think the rest of the world - and perhaps even the industry itself - doesn't quite intuitively understand that. If that's really the model, "We have $375M from SoftBank" isn't an indicator of anything, neither to other investors nor to potential employees.
Two: It's not as simple as just throwing money at a bunch of random things and hoping one sticks. They work hard to invest in companies they think will make large returns, knowing that despite their best efforts a large portion likely won't. This is intuitively understood. But this more nuanced understanding leads to the conclusion that "[w]e have $375M from SoftBank" is meaningful because they're a successful entity in that space, with subject matter experts, and if they invest in you it indicates you're doing something right.
There's always tradeoffs. You seem to think that no VC money is safer, but that not necessarily true.
Without capital, you spend 10 years finding out that your bootstrapped robot pizza company is in fact utter garbage. With capital, that would have taken 2 years.
> that's not your investor's model
And it's not my customer's model either. Or my employee's model.
Just because we don't all have the same exact goals doesn't mean we can't create a mutually beneficial arrangement for all parties.
I mean, that's one possibility. The other is that without capital, everyone looks at your robot pizza company and says "There's no way that's going to work" and you find out in 0 years and you go work on something else, like a normal pizza company (or a normal office-leasing company, or a normal blood-testing company, or a normal juice press, or whatever). My worry is that if a founder goes to a venture capitalist with an idea that's probably bonkers but might work, the VC's interest is in making the idea even more bonkers and saying "No way, man, you're gonna change the world" and not "Hey, here's how to make your idea a little more grounded so you actually deliver something successfully."
I guess it depends on what you want as a founder. If you want the best shot ever at making your world-changing robot pizza company work, sure, go for the VC - if you bootstrapped it, you'd spend 10 years worrying it wasn't taking off because you didn't have the resources. If you want to succeed at something, and you're okay with succeeding even if there aren't pizza robots on every corner, find a route where you're not working for mega-growth-or-bust. (Which could include modest amounts of venture capital! Or could include loans or whatever.) And honestly, if you really care about pizza robots and it doesn't matter to you how many pizza robots there are as long as you can work on pizza robots for ten years... bootstrap.
> Just because we don't all have the same exact goals doesn't mean we can't create a mutually beneficial arrangement for all parties.
My concern here is that it's in the VC's interest for you to be more ambitious and fail instead of staying cautious and succeeding. Nobody else has that in their goals. No (actual, paying) customer would say "Your product is great, but if you can't add these features, we'd prefer it if your product didn't exist." No (current) employee would say "I love this company, but if we can't hire ten times as many people, I want to be laid off." Everyone else has an interest in you staying afloat and alive, even if they have different opinions on what you do.
The VC's interest is for a very high-worth company.
The customers interest is you providing them an good product/service at low cost.
The employees interest is you providing a paycheck.
All of these are willing to compromise your profitability or risk goals.
Fortunately, even diverging goals can be managed to be cooperative. And this happens over and over again in business.
> I'm not sure if SoftBank is suddenly performing worse than they have been in the past or if people simply just care more about the losses since they had such a major one recently.
The only reason people like talking about anything SoftBank is because (1) its so abnormal in the investing world...it's essentially an unproven model, (2) SoftBank's fund is basically "Masayoshi-son made the most significant investing venture bet ever in history with Alibaba and we want to try to do this 100x more" (3) the investing principles are so abnormal (Masayhoshi-son basically has to bless the founder/idea) that it makes for great headlines.
Masayoshi-son has proven he can throw he dice pretty well, however the jury is still out on whether this model will actually produce outsize returns.
So SoftBank was betting on a >20% chance that Zume would succeed to that degree.
This is quite different from traditional VC, which expects much lower probabilities of success in each investment.
Ironically, SoftBank is one of few investors to lose money by investing in Uber.
"VC" is not a synonym for "smart money," and "the idea behind VC" being "everybody is betting tho" doesn't explain their outsized presence and outsized effects.
> “There were many naysayers when SoftBank invested last year at a valuation around $49 billion,” said Chris Lane, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “The successful IPO of Uber at a valuation anywhere near $100 billion will be a strong validation for SoftBank and its Vision Fund. This is also very good news for SoftBank’s other ride-hailing investments.”
Oops.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-12/softbank-...
> Oops.
But the current UBER market cap is $68 billion. So if softbank invested at $49 billion and now UBER is worth $68 billion, how exactly is that an oops?
Venture capital isn't a monolith.
Investing in pre-seed, seed, or series A rounds are significantly different than coming in as an investor in a later round.
For Softbank to whiff so badly on such late stage investments is drastically different than an early stage investor failing with a similar portfolio. The risk and uncertainty profiles are starkly different for the early stage and late stage investor.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/03/softbank-more-than-600-milli...
". The Japanese conglomerate spent about $6.6 billion to buy just over 200 million shares from existing investors, including former CEO Travis Kalanick, at around $32.87 a piece. It provided another $1.05 billion in fresh capital to Uber, buying 21.45 million shares at about $48.77 each."
$375 million sounds like a lot of money, but it's 0.3% of their investment fund.
I'm not sure if SoftBank is suddenly performing worse than they have been in the past or if people simply just care more about the losses since they had such a major one recently.