
They Just Don’t Listen': SF Kimchi Maker Saw 'Food Tech' Practices Up Close - jelliclesfarm
https://www.kqed.org/news/11831806/they-just-dont-listen-sf-kimchi-maker-saw-food-tech-practices-up-close-in-her-kitchen
======
sumanthvepa
The article is a little misleading. I too operate without VC funding and
behave in a ways similar to the small business owner -- because I am one. But
to apply the philosophy of a small business to a startup would be a big
mistake. Startup founders and their VCs behave the way they do, because they
are optimising for different things than a small business owner like me. I am
optimising for survival, a startup founder is optimising for the expected size
of the outcome. The possibility of ruin in that expected outcome is taken into
account in the VCs calculation. As long as one is clear about what one is
optimising for, both strategies are fine. Problems only begin when you take VC
money and behave like a small business owner. Or behave like you have VC money
when you are, in fact, a small business owner.

~~~
1propionyl
> As long as one is clear about what one is optimising for, both strategies
> are fine.

I know this is HN orthodoxy, considering the audience and our beneficent
hosts.

But I think this assumption bears questioning. Is the startup model _really_
morally equivalent? Clearly we wouldn't say that _all_ cost functions a
business could optimize are all equivalent. So why should the traditional
small business and startup model be assumed to be equivalent?

And moreover, even if it is morally equivalent... is it really that good of a
strategy? By which I mean two things: 1) is it a fit strategy in of itself,
and 2) is it good for the entire business ecosystem?

As food for thought... why hasn't Silicon Valley adequately considered a
"slow-up" model that combines the traditional survival and sustainable growth
focuses with the advantages of massive cash influxes and rapid iteration
towards a viable product (even if that means pivoting)?

I think the answer is clear: venture capitalists want a return, and a large
one, before they die. Is a business model optimized for generating returns
before investors die really a healthy strategy to have so much capital
allocated towards? Especially when these businesses in particular (tech
startups) can often have such a large impact on culture and society.

~~~
keenmaster
I have a startup to sell you on. It's called Brydge. We have a radically non-
linear revenue model which resembles a perpendicular hockey stick. We
currently have no revenue, but revenues will quintuple each year until you
die, at which point we expect to make ten billion dollars per year. We are
looking for a 10 million dollar investment for a 30% stake. You are also
entitled to 100% of our revenues until you die. In expected value terms,
that's a great deal.

------
strken
Notice that the article never tells you what advice they didn't listen to, and
mentions a single mistake by a single company. The only general principle
that's useful (as opposed to the obligatory observations on age and race) is
hiring people with food industry experience.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Silicon valley startups ignore established industry expertise, burn cash in
silly ways, dont prioritise business sustainability and try to reinvent the
wheel with a strange mixture of ignorance and arrogance? No, never happened
before!

~~~
renewiltord
Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you invent the modern consumer electric car and
the modern commercial space program. The beauty of SV startups is just that -
high variance.

~~~
Apocryphon
The trick is to ignore survivorship bias every step of the way

~~~
renewiltord
Oh no, it's the opposite. Established companies could be established for no
good reason. ULA was in space, they're the experts, but they could be beaten.
The incumbent could be just a result of survivorship bias. _That 's_ what
presents an opportunity. If the incumbent is just very good at the product,
the only part you can disrupt is margin (or verticalize or something, but lets
set aside that) and you don't want to be in a price war unless you're uniquely
suited to it. So you don't fight those guys.

So you count on the market leader being disruptable, which is often because
they're just there as accidental survivors.

~~~
Apocryphon
What you write makes a lot of sense in terms of successful startup strategy.
It doesn’t detract from the vacuity of your original statement on “high
variance“. When you cherry-pick two data points- from the same founder, even-
while ignoring the high rate of failed startups, it makes for quite an empty
fallacious statement indeed. One might as well argue for the merits of big
government statism by singing the praises of the Manhattan Project and the
Apollo program, while contrasting them with the DMV.

~~~
renewiltord
Well, yes, you can and you'd be right. That's how existence proofs work. State
funded projects make great moonshots, yes, and you have some great examples.

It's a great argument for Big Government statists that governments are capable
of large scale technological progress out of the reach of common corporations.

~~~
Apocryphon
But no one was disputing the existence of successful, even wildly successful
startups. People are criticizing startups that behave ignorantly and
arrogantly. (And quite frankly, give the entire scene a bad name.) You are
attempting to play devil's advocate by pointing out that some flout
conventional wisdom and established practices and succeed. Very well, we can
all agree that those enterprises exist. The question is if they exist in any
appreciable number, which is very debatable- again, due to the simple
arithmetic of very low startup success rates.

You are celebrating lottery winners. The existence of that very few does not
justify bad behavior from (some of) the rest. Your proof is facile.

~~~
renewiltord
It isn't bad behaviour. It's just a failure. No harm in trying things that
don't work. It doesn't look anyone misrepresented themselves. They came in,
sucked, and got taken out by the market. The fact that they didn't listen
hardly matters. It's not bad behaviour to not listen to advice from your
landlord.

I'm not playing Devil's Advocate. I genuinely think it is good that people are
trying different things. They're exploring the state space and I enjoy that.

If they were actually misrepresenting themselves or their ability to pay, or
reneged on their debts without going out of business (which is a well-
understood way to renege), or something like that, sure. But it looks like
everything is on the level and the article is just saying that all of these
guys who tried it weren't good at it. That's not a crime or even morally
problematic.

~~~
Apocryphon
People aren't saying they're behaving criminally. If anything, their behavior
is both mockable and foolish- out-of-touch, operating in an SV bubble,
detached from the needs of real-world people would their businesses ostensibly
serve, and perhaps representative of the excess that dumb money empowers.
They're _gauche_.

(And yes, during times of mass unemployment and rising economic uncertainty,
moralizing does start to creep in; when mom and pop stores are dying by the
tens of thousands, VC-funded fail does seem like bad taste, at least. Fair's
got nothing to do with the creation of this perception; but optics are
optics.)

Is it wrong to have higher standards for this industry? Less sloppy business
practices, more empathy for the world at large? More curiosity and respect for
established wisdom? What's the point of learning from "fail fast, fail often"
if the failures are just going be the same mistakes over and over again,
caused by foolhardy founders and negligent investors? Infinite samsara wheels,
doomed by hubris.

------
TrackerFF
Nothing wrong with trying to disrupt some industry - but I think the way too
many startups handle it is, well, almost arrogant.

Traditionally, businesses grow very incrementally - in almost all aspects of
the business. From the product itself, to infrastructure, etc. It's all mostly
done on a need basis.

When demand ramps up, you expand. But at the very core, there's a
product/products which have been developed probably since before the company
itself. It's the secret sauce, if you want. Of course, later down the road,
some products unfortunately take the backseat in a business - but that's
another story.

With a lot of disruptive tech-fueled startups, it's a bit different - you
start with some idea or desire of disrupting something, or identifying
inefficiencies in traditional systems, through use and/or observation, or
through surveying people.

So too often, you get people / entrepreneurs with limited domain knowledge,
that try to learn and solve/improve some complex business or field.

Again - there's nothing wrong with trying to improve something, but throwing
cash at something you may not know too well, can be a quick way to just
wasting money.

A lot of energy and resources are going towards trying to engineer some system
which is ready to scale, IF demand explodes. It's the software engineering
equivalent of writing "enterprise" software from the go, pouring cash on
ridiculous servers, and hiring a team of expensive sales engineers - even
though you barely have a MVP. You're still in the early stages where you need
to direct most of your focus on creating a _great_ product.

------
ALittleLight
I've recently been watching a lot of the Y-Combinator YouTube videos. One idea
that comes up a lot is that you should listen to the problems that users have
but not their solutions. It's an idea along the line of "If I'd asked what
they wanted, they would've said 'A faster horse'." In other words, you would
take away "Faster transportation" and discard "Faster horse".

I can see how, from the perspective of this article, people who talked to you
and listened to what you were saying and then never implemented or tried your
suggestions would seem like negligent fools who never listened. The reality
might just be that they are trying to do something very different.

I get the sense that this article is scorning the VC backed food companies but
I don't know why. They are spending their time and money working on hard and
valuable problems. Scorning them is easy, since they'll probably fail, but it
also strikes me cynical and soulless. Better, in my view, to wish them luck
and to realize that a VC backed food tech start up probably will have
different hiring patterns and employees than a small food business.

~~~
donw
Hyunjoo isn't a user.

She is a professional, with years of experience in the space that various
startups are trying to "disrupt".

That's years of hard-won, hands-on experience that would benefit _anybody_
trying to enter the market.

Which the average San Francisco startup -- both the founder and employees --
totally ignore, because (a) she's over thirty-five years of age; and (b) she
doesn't have a degree from Stanford/Berkeley/Harvard.

We see this a lot in Japan when SV startups open shop here.

~~~
ALittleLight
There are a variety of food tech startups, some of them would see her as a
(potential) user.

"User" maybe isn't the best word, but she's definitely the kind of person who
has problems that food tech startups would care about solving. If people are
ignoring her, they shouldn't be. But neither should they (according to my
interpretation of Y-Combinator advice) be following her solutions. If Hyunjoo
knew how to solve these problems, they wouldn't be unsolved problems and there
would be no startup in solving them.

My point was that if people are listening to your problems and not solutions,
it may feel like they're ignoring you, even if they aren't.

~~~
djur
What problems are you talking about that she doesn't know how to solve? Many
of these startups seem to be the lack of a solution in search of a problem.

~~~
ALittleLight
I don't know enough about food tech to say what their problems are. I think,
generally, the problem is that food service doesn't scale that well. Food
service scales linearly for employees and space and cost. If you could figure
out how to scale it better you could feed many more people for less money and
solve a huge problem for the world.

~~~
donw
> I think, generally, the problem is that food service doesn't scale that
> well.

Maybe?

First and foremost: my knowledge of the industry is limited to a passing
interest. I've investigated opening a restaurant, have worked in precisely one
professional kitchen, and worked in front-of-house as well.

That said, it depends on what you mean by "food service" and "scale".

Fresh ingredients, prepared with great care, served by a professional staff...
yeah, that doesn't scale. It takes years to learn to work with "whatever is
available in-season", and finding good people is hard in any industry --
waiters at high-end restaurants do not make minimum wage, I assure you.

But the price is too high for most people, other than as perhaps a special
occasion. The French Laundry isn't about to open up in rural Alaska.

Reasonably nutritious food that is both fast and cheap? We have that. Your
choice between canned or frozen.

American processed food tends to go nuts on the additives, but that isn't a
requirement, and I'd say the Europeans overall do a much better job on this
front.

You get a lot less variety, but more quality.

Likely this is an artifact of our history -- preservatives were a godsend
before the logistics revolution of WWII made its way into civilian life.
American food scientists also went vitamin-crazy early in the 20th century,
which combined with the introduction of convenience meals (TV dinners) and
fast food, transformed the American culinary landscape into enriched breads,
artificially-colored drinks, and "low-fat" snacks (which are _horribly_
unhealthy).

China has a similar problem, funnily enough.

Communism is all about stamping out the slightest differences between people,
so during the cultural revolution, preparing and eating your own food was
viewed as "counter-revolutionary", and thus banned. Everybody ate in communal
kitchens, and never learned to cook with their parents and grandparents.

Killed millennia of culinary history, and is partially why there's so much
processed food and so many restaurants in China today.

Anyhow, there are restaurant chains here in Japan that literally serve up
nothing but reheated frozen food -- Saizeriya is a good example. It's
basically the Japanese answer to Olive Garden (which I believe does the same
thing!)

So, you've got options from fresh and gourmet, all the way down to Chef
Boyardee served on a posh plate.

What doesn't scale?

~~~
ALittleLight
Prepared food at restaurants doesn't scale. If you want to serve X customers
it takes Y employees and Z space, or N _cost_. If you want to serve 2X
customers it takes 2N cost, and if you want to serve KX customers it takes KN
cost. This is what I mean by not scaling.

If deliveries worked better, maybe you could reduce the space you needed. If
robots worked better then maybe you could reduce the number of employees. If
there was some other solution, perhaps you could do better in all sorts of
ways.

I don't know much about food tech, but I assume this is the kind of problem
that food tech startups are trying to solve. Either way, food tech startups
are trying to solve a problem and do something that Albrecht is not. Albrecht
is, presumably, not trying to build food automation or work out a new way to
deliveries, but is rather selling Kimchi. I'm not writing that to diminish her
work, just to point out that she is in a different field than the food tech
companies.

Albrecht may have problems that food tech companies would like to solve (e.g.
"It's a burden to have to have so much kitchen space when I have relatively
low demand") but she doesn't have solutions that are applicable to the food
tech companies, because if she had those solutions then she wouldn't have the
problems.

------
MattGaiser
> Before the pandemic, she says the company was super late paying her for the
> products she sold them.

> “It was not a lot of money, but it made me really upset,” Albrecht says. “I
> don’t know why they run the business like this.”

This is a well established albeit scummy practice and very common. They do it
basically as a way to borrowing from you for free.

My family used to do a lot of business with grocery stores. Except for
Walmart, none of them paid on time. Plenty made you chase the money
constantly.

~~~
mathgladiator
There is an entire software company dedicated towards optimizing around this.

Like, if you invoice net-90, then they will wait, and there is software that
lets you compete with others to minimize the discount to get money now versus
later. It's a crazy world.

~~~
owyn
Really? Can you name the company? I had some "is this a good idea for a start
up" conversations with someone like 5 years ago who had a similar idea but
didn't pursue it and I'd love to be able to point to a company that was
actually doing it.

~~~
mathgladiator
[https://c2fo.com/](https://c2fo.com/)

------
zdragnar
What ever happened to the "do things that don't scale" saying? Every time I
see a food tech startup, flush with automation tech, I cannot help but wonder
who has the money to throw away on such obviously flawed plans.

~~~
MattGaiser
> such obviously flawed plans.

People are willing to question the "obviously flawed" part. Lots of logistics
people said that that Amazon was "obviously flawed" because you can't move
goods independently to the consumer cheaper than you can move them in a truck
to a store.

Turns out, you can.

~~~
escardin
But that was always the case? At least as late as 2001, they had weekly milk
delivery in Moncton, New Brunswick. It cost the same as milk in a store. You
put your order in an envelope with some cash for next week. It wasn't just
milk, you could get most non-frozen dairy that way.

Is it at all the same as Amazon? No. But it shows that you can be profitable
delivering low value items right to peoples doorstep.

~~~
MattGaiser
It certainly was not always the case, but I think people assumed that it would
be the case going forward (and given that grocery delivery has not recovered,
it probably still is the case in grocery).

Walmart was the established model for "best practices" in selling general
goods for a long time. Now, the Walmart model is showing its weaknesses, which
people assumed did not exist.

------
dnprock
I think some investors are naive about the food cultures. Here's some advice
for you. Food is personal. It's extremely hard to change the way people eat.
Most of you are busy changing the world. You like the convenience of tapping a
button and get what you want in a few minutes. You'd think that everyone would
like to enjoy the same convenience.

Food is personal. Name a favorite dish. You'd not know who invented it. Nobody
knows how we got Chicken Tikka Masala. Food is decentralized. Attempts to
centralize food cultures will fail. Conscious people are careful about what
they eat. They'll end up cooking their own food. They're suspicious of the big
food companies.

Don't think about simplifying food, cutting down time. If you go down that
path, you'd end up with another junk food company. Think about how to get
people to eat healthier. That's the only thing I care about. I think many
people will eventually realize this.

~~~
greeniron
>you'd end up with another junk food company

i'm not sure if i can agree with you on this. if i can create a successful
junk food brand like mcdonalds, i'd do it in a second.

------
creddit
> Many of the people she knows trying to make a living selling food are
> immigrants, women and people of color — far different than the food tech
> would-be entrepreneurs. “They are young, white,” she says, “the kind of
> people you see in a J. Crew catalog.”

> There is also a big difference in who they bring in to work at their
> companies. Albrecht hires local workers to make her kimchi, many of whom
> have worked preparing and handling food for years. They look very different
> from the workers at the food tech companies.

> “All these people they hire are also from Silicon Valley companies who have
> no experience in a food manufacturing company,” Albrecht says. “Often these
> positions are for logistics, operations, marketing, all those people. Those
> are the people they hire.”

Amazing what is an acceptable thing to be upset about these days.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
I don't see the article being "upset" about anything? If anything Albrecht
seems to mostly find the startups comical, at least until they stop paying her
bills.

------
beervirus
The point is not to sell food. The point is to separate credulous VCs from
their money.

~~~
quickthrower2
Selling selling food

------
woah
If I ever want a landlord who is going to trash me in the press while I am
renting, I know where to look.

~~~
slaman
Or you could see it as the often-overlooked perspective of an immigrant with a
successful business in a traditional industry who is witnessing and exposing
the absurdity of the valley capital bubble.

------
vondur
Seems like disrupting the food business is fraught with risk. Most restaurants
work in pretty small margins. I guess using machines to eliminate labor is one
way. One easy way to increase profits is to sell alcohol. Much better profits
and if done right, easy to stop waste.

~~~
analog31
I'm a musician, so I spend a lot of time in restaurants. ;-) I was chatting
with the chef / owner of a fairly successful restaurant, and he told me:
"Every chef dreams of making their living selling food, but quickly learns
that their income comes from the bar."

------
rdlecler1
There seems to be an agenda here. But juat because a few companies failed (and
in venture it’s 65% - 90%) not all fail. That’s the venture capital business
model and it’s given us Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Instacart, Impossible
Foods, and probably a dozen goods and services we use every day. You don’t
build these kinds of businesses as a lifestyle business.

~~~
Apocryphon
The majority of those companies you listed were not VC funded, or at least
they were not the same sort of hyper-growth-chasing unprofitable unicorns that
are the modern startup poster children.

------
keenmaster
"A tenant with a meal kit company wanted to automate filling a container with
a few ounces of sauce, so Albrecht says they bought a giant machine to squeeze
sauce into cups. It came in on a big pallet, and it was a huge operation to
assemble. Albrecht says they were really excited about this machine.

But when they finally got it hooked up, it didn’t work as expected. She can’t
help laughing while she tells the story. “When the sauce comes out of this
machine and lands into the little saucer cup it doesn’t land 'pretty' enough.
So they just stopped using it. They just left it there.” The giant machine sat
hulking on a pallet, unused, for months."

You can't make this stuff up. Silicon Valley season 8 material right there.

~~~
jjeaff
It's such an ignorant, yet arrogant way to run a business, especially
considering many of these startup founders were likely pretty young with
little to no industry experience.

Having an experienced business owner running an actual, profitable business in
your midst should be treated as a gold mine of information.

I have actually seen an attitude of "don't listen to or hire industry veterans
because they are stuck in the old way of doing things and if they knew any
better, they would have already disrupted the industry."

Few if any highly successful "disruptive" companies completely reinvented
their segment.

Uber wasn't the first taxi company, it wasn't even the first ride sharing
company. Heck, they weren't even the first app based taxi service. Airbnb was
preceded by VRBO by about 15 or 20 years.

~~~
momokoko
It’s feels like you are missing the scale.

The people with current industry experience have techniques and knowledge
about running a profitable and sustainable business. That doesn’t get you
hyper growth. That gets you a solid business.

You get this kind of growth from accidentally finding the magic formula that
creates massive growth. You actually want someone that doesn’t know what they
are doing because they are more likely to trip over the answer that most
people were smart enough to avoid.

You want people that will make mistakes. Successful startups are as much happy
accidents as they are talented people performing hard work.

~~~
II2II
When I read you're comment, I am not getting many positive vibes about those
startups.

Contrast the language. With traditional businesses you have positive terms
like profitable, sustainable, and solid. With the startups you evoke terms
like hyper growth, magic formula, and (from other people's posts in a similar
vein) disruptive. It makes the traditional businesses sound like they are
directed towards long term objectives as well as societal needs like stable
employment and viable products. It also makes the startups sound self-serving.
These are people who take a gamble for a disproportionate return. They are
primarily interested in the short term, so they end up being parasitic. They
aren't providing society with things like stable jobs or products that will
have a lasting impact. Claiming that a business is disruptive does not really
fix that, since a business can only be disruptive if the gamble pays off.

Perhaps society should be looking towards more traditional approaches to
entrepreneurship if we are to have a chance to fix our woes. Yes, I understand
that it had its issues. On the other hand, these gambles on hyper growth are
consuming a significant amount of investment dollars for outcomes that are of
dubious merit.

Edit: made the second half of the second paragraph less of a grammatical mess.

~~~
Apocryphon
It makes them sound like the business equivalent of mad scientists, or at
least alchemists and water-witchers.

------
spaetzleesser
I would prefer if Silicon Valley went back to creating new technology instead
of forcing themselves into established markets where their main advantage is
that they can burn a lot of money and underprice ("disrupt") the competition.

------
cm2012
It's very important to make fun of people who are trying to make something
work and making mistakes. It's a lot easier and more comfortable than trying
to do something myself. My intellectual curiousity is truly satisfied.

------
tqi
Interesting to contrast the tone of this article with this one where the
landlord is also giving advice to a tenant:
[https://sf.eater.com/2020/7/15/21325582/bernal-star-
moonstar...](https://sf.eater.com/2020/7/15/21325582/bernal-star-moonstar-
buffet-trader-joes-robot-chefs)

------
cardamomo
Required (fiction) reading for anyone interested in this space: "Sourdough: A
Novel" by Robin Sloan. It's fantastic!

------
jfb
> They just don't listen

 _Quelle surprise_.

------
raindropm
To quote one of my favorite banter from Skyfall(2012) between Bond and Q.

 _> Q : Age is no guarantee of efficiency.

> Bond : And youth is no guarantee of innovation._

At the end of the day, we all can learn from each other... Different
perspective brings different insight.

------
xbmcuser
In the past stock market existed to provide capital for business. Now the
stock market is the business for many startups they are not listing to get
capital rather to make profit for it's stake holders.

------
Scene_Cast2
As a complete aside, I really love their kimchi, it's probably the best store-
bought kimchi I've had.

------
sabujp
APRN reported EPS of 0.08 (estimated was -0.45 according to tradingview), at
least they are positive.

------
Apocryphon
Monetizing the engineer's disease

[https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-
Enginee...](https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Engineers-
Disease)

