Discussion summary
A discussion about a product issue where a simple setting for bread, pizza, or cake could have solved the problem. Participants found the situation relatable and entertaining.
What the discussion says
- Some users appreciated the humor and relatability.
- Others suggested a simple setting could have fixed the issue.
- Participants enjoyed the entertainment value of the discussion.
“This could have all been solved if they added a setting for bread, pizza, or cake.”
“Enjoyed this – very entertaining!”
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- Hacker News
- > 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.
This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.
by hitekker - Too close to the home, ouch. It’s such a microcosm of things. I can imagine people reading this going “ah, the founder was right, it’s those damn nerds” or “at least WE generated sales” and so on. The more you do startups the more it seems that the time is indeed a flat circle.by avsn
- I like this part:
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?
by icegreentea2 - The founder portrait is surprisingly sympathetic given what a train wreck is being described. This one stood out for me:
> The founder has it all figured out: the problem was never the plan. The problem was the execution
"Execution" being one of those magic business words, I've said this exact thing but only once lampooned thusly did it dawn on me how psychotic it is. If VC-funded startups are almost by definition about "a big vision", then the vision is never wrong -- a self-consuming logic answered by the magic of Execution.
Interestingly, what is ignored there is the founder is also the CEO here, so if the execution was bad ... shouldn't he be fired?
by spopejoy - He's coldly rational:
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.
by rdbl27 - I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion.
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.
by move-on-by - I was doing contract work last year for a young solo founder, and he promised a feature to a big customer who only signed up because of this one feature. It was a feature he vibecoded and was able to demo in ways that made it look like it was working, when in reality it was a buggy POS. The customer was going to go live on the platform in a few weeks, and this kid expected me to work over my pre-planned holiday to actually get this (frankly rather complex) feature built properly. I told him good luck, ended the contract, and enjoyed my holiday. No time for that BS.
- > There seems to be no downside.
If you don’t see the value of your own word, I can’t give it back to you.
by DANmode - How is that company doing today?
I think there’s a balance to it. You have to meet the customer, and also understand your boundaries. I’ve sold non-existent features that I was unsure if I could deliver, but always solved it since I’m good at smooth talking. I’ll make sure what I deliver brings value, and keep a dialogue with the client. Sales relations are rarely static from my experience.
by estetlinus - I work in consulting and have been in many projects where the client was sold promises and features that don’t exist in reality. If I had a firm I would have a rule that whoever sells a project worth > $5M would also be responsible for delivering it.by chasd00
- This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.
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!)
by clan - Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.
- Mario
by alias_neo - Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.
- I had the opposite reaction, this felt like a story that was literally purpose-built for pandering the hn audience without saying anything interesting.
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
by weitendorf - Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.
- Welcome to HN. Just a heads up that, from the site guidelines[0]:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
(I'm not a mod or anything; I just noticed that most of your comments have been flagged/killed, and I suspect this might be why.)
by BalinKing - Agreed. This could be a story about my last startup... A good reminder.by sgallant
- Similar story here.
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.
by ogoffart - I started OpenOven in my free time of which I had a lot when I was still studying law. Ovens were always something I was interested in and I created FunkyPizzaHeater, as it was named when I started it, only to play around with the tech. I published it on the Italian Oven forums and it really hit a nerve, there were immediately 2 people who took the design a bit further. People tried building them and posted photos, there was a lot of discussion and eventually we agreed on a new name and moved the OpenOven project to github. It was still a project for oven enthusiasts who liked lots of buttons, until it was miraculously featured by a slightly weird but lovable YouTuber with 2 million subscribers who suggested OpenOven to anyone to finally get rid of corporate big oven.by hwh
- I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:
> 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.)
by xg15 - This is very insightful. I would be interested in reading an elaboration of your thoughts on this, particularly the role of BigCos and startups and the core nature of the problem in striking out on your own.
- It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x betterby nikanj
- This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.)
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 ?
by phtrivier - from my friends in sales, sales perspective could be: going from meeting to meeting just getting yelled at.
- previous customer yells at you for not delivering required features. You ask the engineer about the status of that feature
- engineers write a manifesto on #general complaining about you for asking them about the status of the new feature
- PM calls you in to yell at you for trying to jump the roadmap
- you start prepping for weekly call with the CEO. at least doubled your numbers this quarter!
- while you're prepping you get a response to one of your cold emails from the day prior, someone calling you "gauche" and "annoying"
- go into CEO meeting. CEO yells at you for being 80% under the quota, because the psychotic quota was set to 10x last year's numbers.
- long day! go home. husband yells at you for working late
etc.
by mepiethree - For me the worst scenario is when a kitchen sink of non-existent functionality the customer never asked for was sold. And in all likelihood it will never be used. But some project manager is hellbent on getting it through the pipeline and checked off!
I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.
by dirkc - "Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?"
Not if they're building inverting ovens for another big corporation. If you do one truly worthwhile thing better than everyone else, do you still need to chase after marginal opportunities to stay afloat? I'm sure there are many, many small companies (not "startups") who are just quietly filling a niche.
by fwipsy - Seller here. There’s no justifying the sales fails in this story. It’s strictly cautionary.
In this story specifically they needed to bring technical stakeholders to Mallorca.
by Tactile6700 - I'm a healthcare worker, so I'm not immersed in this world at all. I can only speak as person who has to use the oven, but doesn't get to pick which oven is purchased.
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.
by engeljohnb - We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be?
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.
by brap - The fundamental problem is that reality has a surprising level of detail (as described in an article by the same name). The founder is the same kind of guy that believes the government should just get rid of inefficiencies.by post-it