There are really two parts to this. The first part is that if you live in the Bay Area, you hear about startups being successful doing new things all the time, and you probably have met at least a couple people who have worked on their own startup. So you know that it’s possible to work on a startup. Especially if you’ve met a few entrepreneurs, you realize that they are pretty average people, similar to yourself. Their is nothing special about them except that they’ve done something you haven’t done yet.
The second part is that many people don’t realize that almost any conceivable service can be negotiated from someone. If you’ve only ever worked in a gigantic organization (like, a retail store, or a university or the like), you don’t realize the mentality of other people who run businesses. Small business owners and vendors can be very flexible, if the service they usually provide is close to the service that you need. If you actually work at a small business or a startup near to the ultimate owner or executive, you’ll see oddball requests come in all the time, and you’ll see the owner try their best to work with it, even if it’s not exactly what they do, because any customer is money. I don’t know what MealSquares in particular did, but I happen to know that if you want to distribute food products, they have to be made in a facility that is inspected by health inspectors. Since they started out small, they probably found a small shared commercial kitchen and paid to use it (for example La Cocina which I found by doing a google search for “commercial kitchen” and it was the first result). But even if shared commercial kitchens weren’t available, like if they lived in a smaller town outside of startupland, they could have found a caterer or restaurant that would have let them use their kitchen after hours.
Relatedly, if you work in a startup hub and know startup entrepreneurs (which I believe the founders of MealSquares did, since they had prior experience at startups), you’ll find that they are often very helpful to new entrepreneurs. They want to see you succeed, so they will provide free advice on business aspects. This can often help with the “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem. The rest is just research on business rules, reaching customers (the actual hard part), and everything else.
Yup, also this. We have had a lot of awesome advisers with expertise in baking, food science, manufacturing processes, and general business consulting etc. Starting a business is not the Randian notion of having it spring whole cloth from your mighty mind. Ok, that might be a slight straw man, but you get the idea.
Thanks, so, to sum it up, the world is moving from ownership-based capitalism where you must own a shoe factory in order to manufacture shoes to everything is a service.
There is just one thing I don’t fully understand. How comes a fraud did not start it earlier nor do they get outcompeted by a fraud?
Because I would expect that scenario. Businessmen, who understand the market, not smart science geek stuff, should notice the demand earlier. But not knowing how to satisfy it, they would just make up something, like market any random fruit bread as nutritionally complete.
There are really two parts to this. The first part is that if you live in the Bay Area, you hear about startups being successful doing new things all the time, and you probably have met at least a couple people who have worked on their own startup. So you know that it’s possible to work on a startup. Especially if you’ve met a few entrepreneurs, you realize that they are pretty average people, similar to yourself. Their is nothing special about them except that they’ve done something you haven’t done yet.
The second part is that many people don’t realize that almost any conceivable service can be negotiated from someone. If you’ve only ever worked in a gigantic organization (like, a retail store, or a university or the like), you don’t realize the mentality of other people who run businesses. Small business owners and vendors can be very flexible, if the service they usually provide is close to the service that you need. If you actually work at a small business or a startup near to the ultimate owner or executive, you’ll see oddball requests come in all the time, and you’ll see the owner try their best to work with it, even if it’s not exactly what they do, because any customer is money. I don’t know what MealSquares in particular did, but I happen to know that if you want to distribute food products, they have to be made in a facility that is inspected by health inspectors. Since they started out small, they probably found a small shared commercial kitchen and paid to use it (for example La Cocina which I found by doing a google search for “commercial kitchen” and it was the first result). But even if shared commercial kitchens weren’t available, like if they lived in a smaller town outside of startupland, they could have found a caterer or restaurant that would have let them use their kitchen after hours.
Relatedly, if you work in a startup hub and know startup entrepreneurs (which I believe the founders of MealSquares did, since they had prior experience at startups), you’ll find that they are often very helpful to new entrepreneurs. They want to see you succeed, so they will provide free advice on business aspects. This can often help with the “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem. The rest is just research on business rules, reaching customers (the actual hard part), and everything else.
Yup, also this. We have had a lot of awesome advisers with expertise in baking, food science, manufacturing processes, and general business consulting etc. Starting a business is not the Randian notion of having it spring whole cloth from your mighty mind. Ok, that might be a slight straw man, but you get the idea.
Thanks, so, to sum it up, the world is moving from ownership-based capitalism where you must own a shoe factory in order to manufacture shoes to everything is a service.
There is just one thing I don’t fully understand. How comes a fraud did not start it earlier nor do they get outcompeted by a fraud?
Because I would expect that scenario. Businessmen, who understand the market, not smart science geek stuff, should notice the demand earlier. But not knowing how to satisfy it, they would just make up something, like market any random fruit bread as nutritionally complete.
It’s actually pretty complicated—the relevant field is called theory of the firm.