[BoorishBears]

Then you have Peloton... passion project of John Foley (who was president of e-commerce at Barnes and Nobles) that was practically driven into the ground by the same exact mentality.

Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.

Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.

Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.

And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.

[tm-guimaraes]

Couldn't they simply try to be profitable without scaling (and its issues) to the masses? Or it's VC pressure? (Honest question, I don't know much about peloton in general)

[BoorishBears]

The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer)

And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.

The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.