
We’re F*cked, It’s Over. Or Is It? - gvasilei
https://medium.com/the-mission/were-f-cked-it-s-over-or-is-it-5abe1432471d#.dx6055kel
======
dleslie
Let me save you some time:

In the end they ditched their "sharing" economy model of food production and
delivery, rented a kitchen and hired staff, and became a delivery service with
a teeny tiny menu.

It may be successful; the model is as old as civilization and the market
allows for new entrants. But it's not easy.

~~~
athenot
And their conclusion that "cooking is dying" is a huge stretch. It might be
more believable if they had a huge menu of truly authentic items, but that
would eat into their business model.

Similarily, claiming that "fast food is dying" is because they haven't
realized what most fast food engineers have discovered through many years of
iteration: at scale, the masses prefer salty, greasy food with habit forming
taste characteristics.

Still, I wish them luck in their current business.

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pavel_lishin
> _The plan was simple yet ambitious:_

> _One month to set up a new business (rent a kitchen, hire a chef, hire
> motorbike drivers, create the menu, design logo, website, build mobile app
> for drivers, build first version of the routing algorithm plus complete all
> the legal and admin paperwork)._

So... they opened a delivery restaurant with its own app?

~~~
dvcc
Oh god, as I read through it I kind of just started laughing to myself. They
opened a chain restaurant -- surely VC-money worthy.

~~~
creshal
Surely a chain restaurant _with its own routing algorithm_ is worthy a
bazillion dollars?

~~~
dvcc
"We placed ants in a scale model of the entire city. Placed food at the
delivery points and recorded their steps. In the end it's the first swarming,
multi-node, organic-learning food delivery algorithm."

~~~
pgeorgi
Now you only have to figure out how to make the ants not take short-cuts (eg.
walk over houses)

~~~
dvcc
"We soon realized that ants took unexpected short-cuts. To solve this we
switched to a drone based delivery model, cutting out the middle-man. In our
second-generation organic-learning model we also switched to bees. We call
this algorithm, buzzfeed."

------
riebschlager
This is _just_ like the time I created a startup where a group of friends in
separate locations could select custom drinks and alcoholic beverages using
our app which would then be automatically delivered to a location equidistant
from each friend in the group.

But then we pivoted and just opened a bar.

------
peterbonney
I don't understand. It sounds like they ditched the "Uber for home-cooked
meals" model and started... a restaurant that offers delivery via app? That
doesn't really seem like "the first truly scalable food tech company"; it
seems like they are trying to compete with e.g. Seamless by vertically
integrating. Which sounds... less scalable probably?

But kudos to them for the clever marketing - they got me to read about them,
which I guess is the only point.

------
joezydeco
So the whole "what is my mother no longer doing for me?" thing has spread
beyond SF?

[https://twitter.com/azizshamim/status/595285234880491521](https://twitter.com/azizshamim/status/595285234880491521)

------
athenot
I'm starting to wonder if most "sharing economy" models wouldn't be better
served through some form of co-op. Basically the business equivalent of open-
source. Sure, that won't produce a golden egg goose but it might actually
serve the users better.

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antisthenes
I was hoping for an in-depth discussion of Global Climate change, and instead
this is a long-winded blog post about what appears to be a failed recipe app.

How disappointing.

~~~
creshal
Oh please, it's not a "failed recipe app", it's _Uber For® cooking!_

------
gf263
'Cooking is dying'

ugh.

------
coldcode
Once you get into it its a great article on finding out what really matters to
your customers. I also love the name Forky. The title is not really
meaningful.

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zeveb
It's weird: all of the images are blurry beyond recognition.

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kelukelugames
Please change the title to something else.

~~~
city41
I agree. The title isn't useful at all. Neither was the first paragraph, had
no idea what the article was about.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Neither are the next several. It takes awhile to get down to the meat of it:
"having your neighbor cook for you doesn't work for shit as a business, so
we're just going to open a restaurant."

------
danr4
CTRL + F

"revenue"

0 results

backspace x7

"margin"

0 results

backspace x6

"profit"

0 results

backspace x6

"cost"

0 results

give up on meaningful data x1

Good content marketing though.

~~~
creshal
Psst, ctrl+backspace is a thing.

~~~
whoByFire
Woah.

