Now, execs will be focused on trying to soften the landing for employees
Whatever you are smoking dude, it's something very cool which is not a crime, but you are not sharing. That is.
Crushed Juicero now officially a fruitless endeavor
On Friday, embattled "smart" juicer startup Juicero shut down. Executives announced that the company would be suspending sales of its juicers and "produce packs" and looking to sell what's left of its business to a larger chain. This after Juicero said in July that it was cutting staff and looking at ways to drop the price of …
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 20:26 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: I bet... @John McCallum
In his earlier videos it was "keep your stick on the ice" (Canadian, Ice Hockey, obviously), but at some point, it changed.
It was his breakdown of the 'digital motor' from a Dyson hair drier that got me hooked. I wanted to know what made it digital, and he nailed it. There's a real desire to let his audience know how things really work.
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Friday 1st September 2017 21:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hipsters
The real laser etcher/cutter costs (IIRC) £2500/£5000 and their Kickstarter worked well, they delivered late, but delivered quality. They are offering high quality but at a fraction of the cost of high end/bulk production industrial models. But still a niche market/use.
Tested (Adam Savage) has used the industrial: https://youtu.be/0eGiQzf6nac
And the Kickstarter versions: https://youtu.be/9O2a8CSzOI4
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 20:09 GMT Justin Clift
Re: Hipsters
> The real laser etcher/cutter costs (IIRC) £2500/£5000 and their Kickstarter worked well, they delivered late, but delivered quality.
On that note, one of the co-founders of Glowforge just left:
Seems like they've finally started shipping though. 2 years overdue (?), but at least it it hasn't imploded with everyone losing their money.
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 06:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hipsters
There's an easy way to establish it beyond common sense: the value of a product of service is inversely proportional to the amount of MBA speak in its description. I can even accept mission statements as long as they genuinely seek to state something focused and clear, but as soon as they veer into nebulous BS territory a sensible* investor ought to skip that "opportunity".
That said, as far as I can tell Juicero's primary mission was to juice investors. No doubt the people involved in that will now be engaged in new startups, having learned that the art of bullshit has still kept them off the street for a year at an undeserved salary.
The only argument I can see that gets many of these crazy things funded is that someone needs money laundered, but as far as I can tell it's safer to do this via real estate because that has practically no KYC requirements. The only thing you must avoid then, of course, is becoming president..
* Yes, yes, I know they are apperently as rare as honest politicians
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 20:13 GMT Nolveys
Re: Hipsters
I read that as KFC the first few times to much confusion.
I think that chicken juicing will be the next big thing. People love chicken, but who can find the time to actually sit down and eat a meal? Now you can have the delicious taste of chicken without the mess and the chewing.
This could be as big as the Bass-o-matic 76.
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 12:46 GMT Blank Reg
Re: Hipsters
Having spent more time than I'd like talking to VCs, there are a surprising number of them that are not sensible, or at least lack the technical understanding to realize they are being had.
This is far from the first train wreck that was easily predicted before it even left the station. It's too bad more of these companies don't go public earlier, there could be a lot of money to be made shorting these obvious failures to be.
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Monday 4th September 2017 08:51 GMT itzman
Re: Hipsters
Remember when good products didn't need a "mission"? They just did something useful at a price that was reasonable. I believe it was called "value".
Yeah but that means hard work by engineers and people with STEM qualifications.
What did you do with all the people with degrees in Art History?
Marketing.
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Friday 1st September 2017 23:43 GMT John Brown (no body)
Start off by going national?
Maybe they should have stuck to a city or a state before making the obviously very, very capital intensive leap to going national.
It seems everyone wants to be the next Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon *now*, not after a few years of steady growth. Not helped by the "market expectations" that if a company isn't growing then it must be a "dead man walking".
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 09:09 GMT Pascal Monett
"disgruntled investors" ?
I'm sorry, you decided to put money into a souped-up juicer that 1) brought nothing more to the table than the humble $2 plastic kind you use manually and 2) tried to create (and lock users into) a Nespresso-like ecosystem for juicing fruit with expensive written all over it.
Nespresso works because people cannot easily grind coffee beans manually. Plus there's Clooney.
Anybody can juice fruit by hand for next to nothing.
If you're a disgruntled investor in this completely-foreseeable fiasco you only have yourself to blame.
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Monday 4th September 2017 04:55 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Re: "disgruntled investors" ?
For all I know I might be one without knowing it, so to speak.
Where does VC money come from? At least some of it comes, directly or indirectly, from institutional investors. So there is the the possibility that a fraction of the money that went into the Juicero came from my pension fund or life insurance etc. Without any way for me to know, let alone a way to influence it.
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 12:56 GMT MK_E
Re: "disgruntled investors" ?
It's not so much the grinding part as the fact that fishing coffee grounds out of the machine after you've used it is a royal pain in the arse and you don't want to clog the drains by tipping them down the sink.
I swear my potted plants have more coffee than compost at this point.
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 12:49 GMT Teiwaz
Re: They got squeezed
Pod coffee, pod juice, pod people.
There's the next investment opportunity right there, a people juicer - you've got the justification for the expensive pods right there.
I'm sure someone will be able to think up a mission statement - hell 3D could even do a Jeffrey Dahmer likeness for the adverts....
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Monday 4th September 2017 03:28 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: They got squeezed
"...people juicer..."
The Ave tear down of the Juicer, and this 'people juicer' comment, reminded me of the Sci-Fi short story about the Transporter System...
Telephone Booth sized, people would enter one booth in (for example) NYC, and a minute later step out in London. One day there was a glitch, so the guy tried again. Worked normally the second time. But then he saw someone wearing the same clothes walking only a half-block ahead. He ran ahead, and discovered it was... ...himself.
Senate inquiry follows. We hear only the Senator's voice booming through the closed doors of the chamber. "Scan and Copy? Not really a 'Move', more like a 'Copy'...and Destroy Original?" "Grated Floor?" "Piston in the ceiling?" "Jammed Piston? Unforeseen failure?" "Sound-proof booth to cover the screams...?" At this point everyone starting counting the number of times that they'd been juiced.
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Monday 4th September 2017 16:13 GMT Alister
Re: They got squeezed
The Ave tear down of the Juicer, and this 'people juicer' comment, reminded me of the Sci-Fi short story about the Transporter System...
Which made me think of Douglas...
“I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg.”
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 16:01 GMT jason 7
A lesson to youngsters/young 'would be entrepreneurs'...
...if there is a guy over the age of 30 who has an opinion that there might be a few flaws with your precious golden idea...then it's a good idea to listen to him, rather than run away or just fire him. He may have a valid point.
He is probably just trying to save you a lot of money and grief.
Folks just don't want to be told what to do anymore.
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 16:12 GMT Paul
I guess it *is* possible to over-estimate how lazy people can be.
If you can persuade people to pay good money for a coffee pod because cleaning a cafetiere is too hard (or even rinsing out an aeropress), then it doesn't seem unreasonable to hope they'll pay money for juice pods. Seems they were wrong.
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Monday 4th September 2017 14:22 GMT Lotaresco
"If you can persuade people to pay good money for a coffee pod because cleaning a cafetiere is too hard (or even rinsing out an aeropress)"
Both a cafetiere and an aeropress make awful coffee as does the "Nespresso" machine. I have both a bean to cup machine (at my main residence) and a pod machine at the flat that I rent for work. The pod machine needs cleaning, so it's not that it reduces the labour involved, so it's not "lazy". The reason for using a pod machine is that it's cheap - EUR 40 compared to about EUR 250 for the bean to cup version. Yes, like an inkjet printer you pay the cost in refills but the pods are good for occasional use. Also you can let someone else use the pod machine (as long as they buy their own pods!) without worrying that they are going to break it by failing to follow the maintenance regime needed for a bean to cup machine.
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 18:12 GMT JulieM
Doomed from the get-go
This whole scheme seems to have been doomed from the get-go.
It was a beautifully-made machine, as the teardown already referenced above will attest. There was attention to detail everywhere -- even the PSU would have been simple to modify for 230V operation. In fact, the only thing it really lacked was a compelling reason to want one.
What they overlooked in all their haste was the point that if someone wants juice but doesn't want the extra work of clearing up the mess afterwards, they'll just get it out of a carton and benefit from the economies of scale inherent in industrial juice production.
Of course, all the foregoing presumes there was ever an intention to put a juicing machine in every home in the first place, and it was not all some elaborate scheme to launder money by repaying investors with dirty notes, so spreading them far and wide .....
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 19:35 GMT Version 1.0
Re: Doomed from the get-go
I believe that the plan was, once a good number of these had been sold, to introduce a pack of weed that could be juiced ... “You extract the water molecules, the delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the anthocyanin and the flavonoids and the micronutrients. You’re getting this living nutrition. It’s like drinking the nectar of the earth.”
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Saturday 2nd September 2017 19:41 GMT Milton
Let's save everyone some trouble ...
... and start a list of all the things which will deliver no worthwhile benefit whatsoever from being connected to the Internet of Shit.
I think events have already dealt with juicers and kettles but I am sure there are several dozen other perfectly adequately functioning things in your house which simply do not need to be online.
With luck we may get ahead of the tide of Connected Turds and save someone the trouble (and VCs the expense) of the Connected Toothbrush, Online Bog-Roll Holder, SatNav Dog Collar, Web-Enabled Vacuum Cleaner, World Wide Hamster Wheel ...
... {enter next IoS item here}
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Sunday 3rd September 2017 00:25 GMT 404
I admit that I own a...
... Keurig Vue that I got a killer deal on a few years ago, but I've never purchased the pods. First thing I did was buy a couple of those Solo pod/basket adapters so we can run any brand of coffee we wish.
Thing does make excellent coffee, btw. Much better than our Mr Coffee drip and we don't waste any coffee.
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Sunday 3rd September 2017 15:40 GMT scrubber
Good
Can we now also get rid of the idiocy of Twitter, Uber, Solar Roadways, Self Filling Solar Water Bottles, Hyperloop and all the other nonsense that has never turned a profit and has no realistic prospect of doing so yet have gotten millions upon millions in funding, yet my ideas that would turn a profit in 6 months get nothing ... mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
