[RapidFire]

"Invest in the team" gets you Juicero.

Great ambition; they raised a bunch of money.

Great production; watch a tear down of the Juicero product itself, it is a mechanical work of art.

Great potential; a SaaS for a fruit drink? Lots of people love fruit drinks! They can buy our packets of delicious pre-made juice, people drinking juice is a huge Billion Dollar Market™!

Stupid Idea! You can just squeeze the juice out of the bag by hand, no fancy device needed. It is less convenient than pouring from a bottle! Does it really taste better than the delicious organic juice you can buy at any grocery store in every city for a lower price?

Lets put one hundred and twenty million dollars behind it and find out. Hahahahahahahahaha big swing and miss! Survey said? No.

You can of course have a great team with the smartest best credentialed people working on the idea motivated by tons of money. If the idea is bad they still fail, maybe they can pivot, but probably not.

[deeviant]

> "Invest in the team" gets you Juicero.

It can get you Juicero, or it could get you Android. That's the whole thing with investing, isn't it? It's rather uncertain.

[wearywanderer]

The Juicero was very overbuilt, I know because I watched the AvE video, but isn't that a sign of amateur engineering? I'm thinking of the old saying that anybody can make a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.

[RapidFire]

Hah! It's totality overbuilt for a product that squeezes a bag of Juice! That being said the idea did work for Coffee: e.g Keurig; just not juice.

>it takes an engineer to make one that barely stands.

Engineers do not build bridges that barely stand. They build bridges that they reason will stand for an amount of time in the conditions they predict the bridge will be subject to versus the cost required to build said bridge. They build realizing that no bridge will stand forever but it must stand for a specified amount of time.

They build to "Correct",

Not "Perfect"

[ALittleLight]

YCombinator doesn't put in that much money though. I'm sure they don't intentionally fund scams or juiceros, but if they do, that's not the end of the world. It's a bigger deal to miss the dumb thing that turns out to be good then to accidentally fund a few dumb things.

[RapidFire]

Totally agree not trying to be critical of YC. Situations like Juicero, Theranos, this topic, et al scams, are interesting to observe.