Ok, not The Pippin:

The Apple Pippin is a defunct open multimedia technology platform, designed by Apple Computer, and marketed as PiPP!N.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin

Does anyone know where their factory was?

> I have a degree in Statistics & Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where I stayed up all night writing algorithms that arbitraged textbooks to pay my tuition. Before, I attended Phillips Exeter Academy ...

This is exactly the type of person I expect to know fuckall about building. I read /r/Construction and it's fascinating, not to mention daunting, how much goes into modern building. Huge debates from blue collar workers on the best way to frame, or pour concrete, or the amount of reinforcements needed. It looks as complex as software engineering but much more costly to make mistakes. Compare to another tech-meets-legacy industry company like FarmLogs, that's been going for 11 years. It worked because the founder grew up and worked on his farm as a kid. He knew exactly how to improve processes because he knew them inside and out.

I’d love to know more about what drove the mismatch of hiring unskilled labour for the unproven production line. Or rather, what went into the belief that the production line concept would cover for a lack of technical skill.

If lesson 2 was, “we should have taken the short-term more painful and expensive path of hiring experienced leaders for each trade or station” then that seems to suggest there were no experts.

So then how was the line designed and tested? Who were the people who built the first few houses before the unskilled workers were brought in? Who was training them? Where did those trainers go? How were the founders so confident in the absence of any trade leaders?

I suspect I am misunderstanding the situation, and that there were skilled experts who know how to build houses, but they weren’t appropriate to be actual builders for long?

—edit—

Did some reading on this project and it seems they intended to do 10 units as a test run, just wondering if they get to keep them or if the homeowners have to buy them out?

That makes it sound like the customers are renting their back yards to third parties, and the company was just selling a product.

I would have thought a company like this would start out maybe with 1 unit a quarter, then 1 unit a month, then 2 units/month, etc. while seeking product/market fit. Use a general contractor who's good at assembling teams. Keep the core staff minimal.

They fit my budget/needs and were way better than being homeless. I don’t see the problem of people building housing to serve the left third of the economic distribution.

My oh my. Will they ever learn?

You could power a small town by attaching a generator to the (imaginary) revolving door of my company used by bootcamp grads, overseas devs and relatives of senior management who tinker with computers.

That last one is not made up!

Its exactly the kind of thing I expect from when people in tech go try do something in other sectors without an adult in the room.

Thoughts on the "lessons" (out of order, deliberately).

Lesson 2: Word salad that basically means "we hired people who didn't know what they were doing, and expected the performance of professional tradesmen to just magically happen".

Lesson 1: see lesson 2, but with additional process issues that anyone with any construction experience could have warned you about, and chronic understaffing to keep a lean headcount.

Lesson 3: basically they decided to ignore tried and tested business strategies for growth and wing it instead. This didn't work.

Lesson 4-6 mostly, again, are poor business planning.

See also: recent HN threads of Hackernews readers largely incorrecting each other about work in the trades.

Skilled laborers cost money not for what they're doing for you, but for the years and sweat they put into knowing safety practices, codes, and proper workmanship.

Exactly. And in this case, the physical product was to be housing. We have building codes for a reason...

Home owners who aren’t experts should be able to build their own house.

They can.

There's a massive difference though between self building for yourself, to live in, and building commercially for other, paying people to live in.

While both need to be at least compliant with minimum standards of some form, commercial builders must be held to a higher standard given the third parties they are putting at risk.

The hyperbole and disdain is unappealing.

It doesn't work when you are building houses for people to live in, where mistakes (say, electrical, structural, or plumbing wise) can lead to fatal incidents.

This lot were the absolute definition of fucking cowboys.

This startup could have focused on design sales permitting etc and built a couple as test, but it seems vastly more efficient to contract with an existing player than to try to everything from first principles

I have worked outside "my domain" multiple times through my life but I was willing to spend a year or years learning about the new domain before raising money. Really needed to make the case that I knew what I was talking about to investors who knew more about the domain than I did.

I spent my life in corporate. Lesson 6 (Planning is often the highest leverage work) touched something inside me. In a large corp, I have complained how slow we move, how things are planned to a ridiculous level, how there are people whose job it is to just to this function (or something related like strategy). It is interesting to see a start-up that follows the hacker ethos, but then gets in trouble due to lack of such functions.