It's about being able to build autonomous restaurants. Combine that with autonomous deliveries and you have the potential for food to be delivered to people without any people involved.
Given we have an ageing population which may involve lots of people unable to leave the house this could be a trillion dollar market.
that's a very expensive vision (though I agree that it can be meaningful!), and getting there requires a lot of capital. even though it might not be about pizza in the future, it definitely is right now, and a $2B+ valuation is very rich there, esp compared to Dominos at $10B which is also very tech and automation focused, and delivering to more than 3 communities in the Peninsula/East Bay.
achieving capital intensive goals either involves having strong cash flow to reinvest into your R&D (which is what Amazon did) or having continued cash infusements (which is the Softbank strategy). WeWork is a great example of what happens when the money runs out.
the Softbank-specific angle here is that they promised 7% yearly payouts to the Saudis. the yearly dividend means that they need to extract liquid cash value out of their investments each year. surely you would agree that Zume and other similar investments are long-term speculations, and in the short term are not likely to pay much of a dividend or return through IPO either. however, Softbank is incentivized to push their investments to return value in the short term. so I'm personally very skeptical that their short-term commitments can allow them to be good stewards of companies with very long-term ambitions.
It's about being able to build autonomous restaurants. Combine that with autonomous deliveries and you have the potential for food to be delivered to people without any people involved.
Given we have an ageing population which may involve lots of people unable to leave the house this could be a trillion dollar market.