
Is Juul the Startup World’s Greatest Long Con? - skilled
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/1/10/18167364/juul-big-tobacco-tech-startup-long-cons
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mimixco
Juul seems less like a con and more like naked opportunism. The OP doesn't
mention that the founders are the same guys who started PAX, the marijuana
vape company. They split off Juul for fear of reprisals from the pot
community.

It's not inherently wrong to get people to switch to something less harmful
than cigarettes, even if that thing is, itself, addictive.

Getting purchased by Philip Morris? Now that company is full of liars and
cheats. Just today I saw a giant video ad where they said they wanted to "end
smoking worldwide." Yeah, right. Buying into Juul seems like a huge profit
opportunity for them. If kids (and adults) start Juuling instead of smoking,
then some of their future market will be taken by that product.

As an adult who uses Juul myself and quit smoking with it, I think the same
kids are going to use Juul that would have smoked. Research appears to confirm
that Juul is less harmful than smoking because it doesn't contain the
thousands of other chemicals that cigarettes do. We're never going to
eliminate harmful products from the market entirely (prohibition, anyone?), so
this would be an improvement.

As for the others, they were cons from the get-go with the possible exception
of MoviePass. That just seems like the invention of someone who is bad at
math.

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consumer451
This seems mostly accurate:

> Juul is skipping a bit ahead in the Silicon Valley startup timeline, which
> generally follows a three-step track: (1) Don’t be evil; (2) be evil
> sometimes, but only when it’s in service of a greater societal good; (3)
> actually, being evil is fine.

