Feels like it’s easily solvable… change cheese, heat it differently, apply it differently? Like it’s literally a robot with repeatable behaviour, you can fine tune the shit out of that thing.
The pizza was being cooked on a moving truck, so that’s why the cheese was sliding off. I’m not sure what their business model was that required cooking pizzas on a moving truck, but I can see why fine tuning the robot wouldn’t help.
I dont know about you. But I have been on an RV before with a microwave and heated up crappy supermarket pizzas before.
I have never had an issue with runaway dairy.
>not sure what their business model was that required cooking pizzas on a moving truck
It was to deliver the pizza while it was being made so that it would come out of the oven just as it arrived.
or.. cook ingredients separately, bake the pie and sauce only, any toppings can be placed in the last second, the cheese placed the last second and broiled from the top.
You're not looking at the correct constraints. The requirements are as follows:
* Needs to be able to make a pizza inside a moving vehicle.
* The pizza needs to be good enough to sell at a manageable price-point.
* The margins need to be larger than having a human.
So changing the cheese could make the pizza taste worse, to a point no one would pay the price-point where this makes sense (lets say $4 a slice).
Heating it differently, or applying it differently, might mean you have to modify and make the robot more complex, to the point it'd be cheaper to get a human to do it. Meaning you'll never recoup your R&D investment.
And this takes time, and each time it means it'll be longer and longer before you've gained more than you've invested in. Especially tough in a market that already has very thin margins such as food-service.
So you do what these guys did. You decide to reassess, see what you have, and see what opportunity, if any, are available to work on. And that's what these guys did, in 2020 they pivoted into sustainable containers (probably because food trucks wouldn't make sense, but, IMHO, cook as you deliver would have been an interesting field to explore in 2020).
And that didn't work.
Thing is, I think of automating the cooking as the "attractive offer" but the wrong one to automate with AI. Food is chaotic and unpredictable, and you need to adapt things in a way that is nice-looking for humans, these are things any random human is good at, but AI's struggle with. And the reality is that AI's and AI machines are expensive, far more than a minimum wage (and this is ignoring that you can pay them less by having them depend on tips) in the US. Saving on time is useless too. If you are able to somehow keep a pizza-hot oven inside a moving car just fine, then you can simply bake the pizza at the place. It takes ~5 minute to bake, with 10 to set up. You could have an offsite location that prepares the dough, cheese and ingredients, so you only assemble and bake. But the only advantage is that the pizza won't be cold. You could instead pay to keep the pizzas warm, at much cheaper, and use a central oven in the location. You could use a single food truck to move to the location. But then you're no better than a dominoes food truck.
But it sounds hot to investors that don't understand the tech but are desperate to be the guys who find the next unicorn. See even you easily thought "it should be doable, the problems fixable" but you'd be deluded my friend, an easy mistake to do, but there's a reason why we are not seeing robots automate food industry. Take the textile/clothe industry; it's been fully automatable (as in some of the oldest computers had code which told the machine how to weave clothes) for ~150 years now, and yet most of the steps are still made by people.
If any part may be replaced in the fast food industry anytime soon, it'd be middle management, but I don't see that exploding this decade either.
For half a billion dollars they couldn't just park the fucking truck to keep the cheese on the pizza?? Why in the world would the truck need to be moving while the pizza is being cooked?
When i first heard about this company i thought it was a joke from the show Silicon Valley. There are so many reasons this is a stupid idea and almost none why it would be a good one. For the money spent it also seems like their efforts were in all the wrong places too.
But you know what's even crazier?
Pizza robots already exist and have been placed in the public.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/fresh-pizza-vending-machine-prompts-curiosity-horror-rome-2021-05-06/
I think the cheese issue was just an convenient ill-thought-out excuse to say we tried our best but we pissed away your 500 mil on unnecessary headhunting of spacex alumni.
This is Pizza Theranos.
And I love how so many failures in the last few years were blamed on the pandemic, when you just know many of these sorts of bullshit startups just used it as an excuse.
Ikr
Makes you wonder. These guys had the automatic pizza making thing theoretically solved. So why not just open thousands of stationary automatic pizza joints in every uni campus.
Tweak your business idea a bit.
While your competition was sick with covid, your little robot arm is making covid-free pizzas for hungry hungry students.
If I was the investor, I would be calling bullshit on the sliding cheese excuse and asking why this wasnt a thing.
Th venture capitalists that fund these nonsensical companies aren’t interested in doing things better right now. They’re interested in replacing humans is as many places as possible in the long run.
"”We’re not trying to be the Italian, fresh-out-of-the-oven, Neapolitan pizza," Stellar Pizza CEO and co-founder Benson Tsai, who has been headhunting other SpaceX alumni for his new venture, admitted to Bloomberg earlier this year, adding that the company is aiming to compete with Domino's, rather than high-artisanal pizzerias.””
Translation:
We are not aiming to make an actual high quality product but just something barely above the level of garbage and hope you are ok with that
>We are not aiming to make an actual high quality product but just something barely above the level of garbage and hope you are ok with that
Yeah so, Domino's?
Didn't know I still had a gag reflex. Which is actually good to know for my next orgy. Please for all that's good in the world, don't use pizza grease as lube. It's not just gross, you'll get an infection.
I think it's gross but you do you(or anyone else).... And, no, You still shouldn't use it as lube. Not bc i think it's gross but, bc it's a health risk. I can hook you up with a chemist who can make you a properly sterile and safe lube that looks, feels and smells like pizza grease if you desperately want that but, just don't use actual pizza grease.
But, seriously, the gross part is how pizza grease feels on the skin. Eating Domino's already makes me feel like I need a shower i can't even imagine how unpleasant it would feel as a lube.
I never understood the existence of Domino's in NYC. So many mom&pop pizzeria options and you're choosing fucking Domino's?
At least with Little Caesar's it's a great value even if it might not have the best taste.
>We are not aiming to make an actual high quality product but just something barely above the level of garbage and hope you are ok with that
Eh, I don't always want a "good" pizza. There's a certain appeal of the "American style" for which a craving isn't satiated by a wood-fired neapolitan with fresh mozz, etc.
Ehh, I feel the Dominos-tier of pizza vs italian pizza are quite distinct, quality aside. The Dominos one is way heavier on the cheese, fat and meat content, and often has thicker dough. There's a time and a place for either, but I don't often think of those two as competing
They were throwing money around like a drunk sailor on shore leave. The quality of startups they were investing in kept going down as they spread more and more money around, because all of the good ideas went to other investors.
But the key is that they were just buying lottery tickets.Hoping that one of the teams they were investing in would pivot to something insane and have a crazy 100x win.
Déjà vu - Zume Pizza went though this [years ago](https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/zume-pizza-startup-shuts-down-18136126.php). BTW, their pizzas were quite good and very affordable.
>"We’re not trying to be the Italian, fresh-out-of-the-oven, Neapolitan pizza," Stellar Pizza CEO and co-founder Benson Tsai... adding that the company is aiming to compete with Domino's, rather than high-artisanal pizzerias.
This feels like they're operating on the "Aim so low, no one will even care is you succeed" philosophy.
Feels like it’s easily solvable… change cheese, heat it differently, apply it differently? Like it’s literally a robot with repeatable behaviour, you can fine tune the shit out of that thing.
Yeah, but the point was to get investors money not to make a successful business.
Bingo. Do the founders have to pay back those millions they took in salary? Nope. It’s about getting rich by not doing anything.
The pizza was being cooked on a moving truck, so that’s why the cheese was sliding off. I’m not sure what their business model was that required cooking pizzas on a moving truck, but I can see why fine tuning the robot wouldn’t help.
I dont know about you. But I have been on an RV before with a microwave and heated up crappy supermarket pizzas before. I have never had an issue with runaway dairy.
See, ironically I *have* had issues with runaway dairy... just never in the context of making a pizza.
Hello fellow Lactaid enthusiast!
Gyroscopic table. Boom. These bandits skedaddled
>not sure what their business model was that required cooking pizzas on a moving truck It was to deliver the pizza while it was being made so that it would come out of the oven just as it arrived.
Honestly pretty cool if it was an honest business.
Have you ever seen a spillnot?
Maybe they were hoping to deliver the freshest pizza possible?
[удалено]
That’s basically what those gas station nacho cheese dispensers are. Could’ve just used one of those.
Or just use real cheese
Company: Spends a few hundred million trying to solve the cheese problem, fails A random person on Reddit: "Feels like it's easily solvable"
or.. cook ingredients separately, bake the pie and sauce only, any toppings can be placed in the last second, the cheese placed the last second and broiled from the top.
You're not looking at the correct constraints. The requirements are as follows: * Needs to be able to make a pizza inside a moving vehicle. * The pizza needs to be good enough to sell at a manageable price-point. * The margins need to be larger than having a human. So changing the cheese could make the pizza taste worse, to a point no one would pay the price-point where this makes sense (lets say $4 a slice). Heating it differently, or applying it differently, might mean you have to modify and make the robot more complex, to the point it'd be cheaper to get a human to do it. Meaning you'll never recoup your R&D investment. And this takes time, and each time it means it'll be longer and longer before you've gained more than you've invested in. Especially tough in a market that already has very thin margins such as food-service. So you do what these guys did. You decide to reassess, see what you have, and see what opportunity, if any, are available to work on. And that's what these guys did, in 2020 they pivoted into sustainable containers (probably because food trucks wouldn't make sense, but, IMHO, cook as you deliver would have been an interesting field to explore in 2020). And that didn't work. Thing is, I think of automating the cooking as the "attractive offer" but the wrong one to automate with AI. Food is chaotic and unpredictable, and you need to adapt things in a way that is nice-looking for humans, these are things any random human is good at, but AI's struggle with. And the reality is that AI's and AI machines are expensive, far more than a minimum wage (and this is ignoring that you can pay them less by having them depend on tips) in the US. Saving on time is useless too. If you are able to somehow keep a pizza-hot oven inside a moving car just fine, then you can simply bake the pizza at the place. It takes ~5 minute to bake, with 10 to set up. You could have an offsite location that prepares the dough, cheese and ingredients, so you only assemble and bake. But the only advantage is that the pizza won't be cold. You could instead pay to keep the pizzas warm, at much cheaper, and use a central oven in the location. You could use a single food truck to move to the location. But then you're no better than a dominoes food truck. But it sounds hot to investors that don't understand the tech but are desperate to be the guys who find the next unicorn. See even you easily thought "it should be doable, the problems fixable" but you'd be deluded my friend, an easy mistake to do, but there's a reason why we are not seeing robots automate food industry. Take the textile/clothe industry; it's been fully automatable (as in some of the oldest computers had code which told the machine how to weave clothes) for ~150 years now, and yet most of the steps are still made by people. If any part may be replaced in the fast food industry anytime soon, it'd be middle management, but I don't see that exploding this decade either.
For half a billion dollars they couldn't just park the fucking truck to keep the cheese on the pizza?? Why in the world would the truck need to be moving while the pizza is being cooked?
When i first heard about this company i thought it was a joke from the show Silicon Valley. There are so many reasons this is a stupid idea and almost none why it would be a good one. For the money spent it also seems like their efforts were in all the wrong places too.
Middle out pizza!
New Dominos
That’s so fucking stupid I refuse to believe this wasn’t some sort of scam to get away with the investors money.
But you know what's even crazier? Pizza robots already exist and have been placed in the public. https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/fresh-pizza-vending-machine-prompts-curiosity-horror-rome-2021-05-06/
Yeah, we have something like that in Sweden too https://en.fizza.fi/ They are pretty good actually
That's nifty. I'd definitely give it a try.
Yeah, not in a moving truck through. That’s the stupid part.
Followed by throwing money at this dumpster fire.
Cars and pizza are a couple things tech-bros should leave to the pros.
It was a good idea, poor execution
I think the cheese issue was just an convenient ill-thought-out excuse to say we tried our best but we pissed away your 500 mil on unnecessary headhunting of spacex alumni. This is Pizza Theranos.
And I love how so many failures in the last few years were blamed on the pandemic, when you just know many of these sorts of bullshit startups just used it as an excuse.
Ikr Makes you wonder. These guys had the automatic pizza making thing theoretically solved. So why not just open thousands of stationary automatic pizza joints in every uni campus. Tweak your business idea a bit. While your competition was sick with covid, your little robot arm is making covid-free pizzas for hungry hungry students. If I was the investor, I would be calling bullshit on the sliding cheese excuse and asking why this wasnt a thing.
Th venture capitalists that fund these nonsensical companies aren’t interested in doing things better right now. They’re interested in replacing humans is as many places as possible in the long run.
"”We’re not trying to be the Italian, fresh-out-of-the-oven, Neapolitan pizza," Stellar Pizza CEO and co-founder Benson Tsai, who has been headhunting other SpaceX alumni for his new venture, admitted to Bloomberg earlier this year, adding that the company is aiming to compete with Domino's, rather than high-artisanal pizzerias.”” Translation: We are not aiming to make an actual high quality product but just something barely above the level of garbage and hope you are ok with that
>We are not aiming to make an actual high quality product but just something barely above the level of garbage and hope you are ok with that Yeah so, Domino's?
No he said ***above*** the level of garbage.
What’s wrong with dominos? Its like ever other pizza joint.
[удалено]
I disagree, because I can eat pizza from other pizza joints.
You need to seek out higher quality pizza.
It's the only pizza joint where you can turn a slice sideways and get enough grease spilling off to lube up an entire assembly line.
This is actually good to know for my next orgy (it’s my turn to cater).
Didn't know I still had a gag reflex. Which is actually good to know for my next orgy. Please for all that's good in the world, don't use pizza grease as lube. It's not just gross, you'll get an infection.
What you’re doing is called kink-shaming and you are now automatically a bad person because of it.
I think it's gross but you do you(or anyone else).... And, no, You still shouldn't use it as lube. Not bc i think it's gross but, bc it's a health risk. I can hook you up with a chemist who can make you a properly sterile and safe lube that looks, feels and smells like pizza grease if you desperately want that but, just don't use actual pizza grease. But, seriously, the gross part is how pizza grease feels on the skin. Eating Domino's already makes me feel like I need a shower i can't even imagine how unpleasant it would feel as a lube.
Look, I’m already sold. You don’t need to titillate me even more with health risks.
No, it’s not.
You have not had even “decent” pizza if you think pizza places are like dominoes
If you think dominoes is pizza, I can’t wait for you to try real pizza. It will blow you away.
For me these joints are all the same. Good pizza is some where else for sure.
> Its like ever other pizza joint. That's what's wrong with em
I live in the NYC area. Dominoes isn't that bad. They make enough options where you can find something decent.
I never understood the existence of Domino's in NYC. So many mom&pop pizzeria options and you're choosing fucking Domino's? At least with Little Caesar's it's a great value even if it might not have the best taste.
Sometimes you just want Dominos . Sometimes I just want decent pizza without having to have cash on me and not talking to a person.
>We are not aiming to make an actual high quality product but just something barely above the level of garbage and hope you are ok with that Eh, I don't always want a "good" pizza. There's a certain appeal of the "American style" for which a craving isn't satiated by a wood-fired neapolitan with fresh mozz, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9NG7AWiRk4&t=606s It’s still pretty great pizza! Give us a try if you are in LA!
How much did you pay for this account? Sucks the $ was wasted on this L.
Ehh, I feel the Dominos-tier of pizza vs italian pizza are quite distinct, quality aside. The Dominos one is way heavier on the cheese, fat and meat content, and often has thicker dough. There's a time and a place for either, but I don't often think of those two as competing
I dwear every single failed tech startup with insane amounts of money was funded by SoftBank. Almost starting to feel bad for them
They were throwing money around like a drunk sailor on shore leave. The quality of startups they were investing in kept going down as they spread more and more money around, because all of the good ideas went to other investors. But the key is that they were just buying lottery tickets.Hoping that one of the teams they were investing in would pivot to something insane and have a crazy 100x win.
The problem of having too much money. And others knowing that you have too much money.
This reads like a Tim Robinson skit
They're saying I stole all that investment money! They're saying it's not a coherent business model! I didn't steal shit! The cheese was slidin off!
It’s *not* a restaurant— it’s just hours and hours of cheese slidin off of shit dough and hittin concrete
Fuck it, it’s garbage. Dump it!
Not today AI
"Fuck it I can't get the cheese right!" That robot probably. Even robots are running out of spoons in this hellscape we call a planet.
I bet their customer support chatbot says, "You're holding it wrong!"
Déjà vu - Zume Pizza went though this [years ago](https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/zume-pizza-startup-shuts-down-18136126.php). BTW, their pizzas were quite good and very affordable.
A recession is coming and labor will be cheap. Why bother investing in robotics when you can pay someone $7.25 an hour to do it?
Zero and Gene got this scam right.
i'm just waiting for the first time the robot inadvertently serves rotten food because it can't distinguish between mold and food.
I hope our future AI overlords improve their pizza making skills so they can throw pizza parties when we make our paperclip quotas.
Sounds like they took the money and ran and this is the best technical excuse they could give. No return on investment due to misbehaving cheese.
This sounds like an I Think You Should Leave sketch
>"We’re not trying to be the Italian, fresh-out-of-the-oven, Neapolitan pizza," Stellar Pizza CEO and co-founder Benson Tsai... adding that the company is aiming to compete with Domino's, rather than high-artisanal pizzerias. This feels like they're operating on the "Aim so low, no one will even care is you succeed" philosophy.
Awww it did the best it could lil guyyy