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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

How come VCs are not learning from examples like this? Perhaps get engineering consultants take a look at the tech, provide their independent assessment of the tech and guide them to not make these mistakes again?

Hindsight is always 20/20 except when you also have foresight which is maybe 20/40? Surely, Juicero with foresight was a bad idea.

Or ostensibly, these things are not that straightforward as they seem to be?

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People act like Juicero was claiming they had some crazy proprietary way of squeezing bags, and when it turned out you could squeeze them by hand the game was up, but that's just not true. Nespresso hasn't collapsed because some plucky journalist ripped open the little capsules and stuck them in a Cafetière. We all know nespresso is just coffee in little pods.

Juicero was selling a lifestyle product to people who wanted super premium juices. It was for the sort of person who buys stuff from Gwyneth Paltrow, has a siphon coffee machine and gets teenagers blood injected into their face to stop aging. While that's not the vast majority of us, it doesn't mean there isn't a market for it.

Nespresso does not come with an insanely steep price, you can't squeeze the little capsules by hand :) and it has actual use cases:

* I would never drink the stuff some of my colleagues like, and vice versa, so we all buy our preferred capsules and are all happy.

* I have 3 variations depending on time of day or how I feel, and my favorite is (to my own surprise) a really cheap supermarket brand with compostable capsules which is not actually even from Nespresso

* I don't have to deal with the dirt and messes with loading and emptying the machine.

* Even my most clueless colleagues and guests can put a capsule in, push a button and obtain coffee. I assure you some of them couldn't operate anything much more complex than that.

* Capsules are sealed so they retain taste for longer. I don't drink enough to go through a bag of raw coffee before it loses its taste.

I think Nespresso makes the best espresso shot, even better than a coffee shop. Nespresso is exactly the same everytime.

Also their pods are manufactured in Switzerland with extreme care for quality and precision.

I should elaborate more. I see past the “oh, I can squeeze it with my hands, too”. I was referring to the marketing aspects of “lifestyle” product which when properly analyzed sounds like a bad idea. Nespresso is successful because it has actual technology to make excellent coffee given how easy it is to use. If my constraint is 20 seconds of time, please find me an alternative to Nespresso that makes excellent coffee. They provide real value even though it seems similar to Juicero. I implore people to look up Nespresso’s patent. It is no Keurig when it comes to the quality of the shot. I would say it even beats coffee from professional machines but that’s debatable and aficionados of coffee will correct me.

Juicero did no such thing. It had nothing to offer. It didn’t make better juice given the time constraint. It couldn’t market itself. And VCs couldn’t see this.

I believe the Juicero machines used to cost at least 5x more than your average Nespresso, not to mention they were overengineered to 11

Coffee machines: has a heating element and a high-pressure pump. No DRM except for that one (which backfired quickly)

Juicero machine: mechanical press (useless in the end) and some DRM BS (also useless)

Because the VCs get paid win or lose? There's literally no downside, there's massive amounts of money looking for returns and as has been proven time and again, even a long terrible track record is no deterrent to getting money out of public pension funds that also have no real downside to making terrible decisions.

This isn't really accurate. VCs would much rather get paid 20+% carry than 2% management fees (and raising a follow-on fund would be quite difficult if you failed to make returns and publicly blew most of your fund on a boondoggle like Magic Leap).

At some point reputation is on the line I would guess. The whole credit system and all.

In any given fund, true. VCs re always raising the next fund and need to show results.

I think there is (or was at least) a combination "dumb money" and a general oversupply of VCs, which means that they can't be too aggressive in vetting deals. Note that for example Theranos did get turned down by a number of VCs, but they got lots of money in the end anyways.

Success of the product isn’t necessarily the point.

The volume and velocity of money certainly would have fattened the wallets of more than a few consultants, lawyers, accountants, and their hangers-on.

Karl Guttag has tried to debunk their technology since their inception. Really interesting blog: https://www.kguttag.com/

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