your article needs to be passed to engineers & I guess everyone before graduating college.
in all the satire - what our industry forgot is - how did people build/fund companies before Venture Capital ?
What I think is a bit of a missed opportunity is for the product to fail with "the pizza|cake|pastry is half-baked" and so customers still have to do the rest of the job anyway.
The catch: domain experts don't know what they don't know about shipping. The fix — vibecoders build it, dev team hardens it for production.
Why did the engineer "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens" not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but the engineer's salary wasn't great anyway; the real goal was to build "the oven of his dreams". To do that, he very much needed to understand the algorithmic complexity involved.
What I assume happened is the engineer wasn't sure whether the idea could work, and the only way to find out was to try. Well, he tried, and he found out. Oh well.
Isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes. There was nothing wrong with the nine founders who failed. They were just unlucky, and they can try again.
I think what went wrong in the story is very simple. The company didn't "fail fast".
I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
Oh, that was another problem! The story says:
>> In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP.
No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP! If your product's core functionality—baking stuff, in this case—only works one third of the time, then your product is not viable! It is maybe a proof of concept, but certainly not a product.†
So the company never should have released an MVP, they should have kept working on their reliability problems. Which is when the engineer should have realized "alright, this isn't going to work," and the whole company needs to pivot or close up shop.
Alternately, if they ship a real MVP that can produce perfect cakes with reasonable reliability, and the customers don't like it, that would also be time to change plans.
What happened in the story is they shipped a product that obviously doesn't work, customers dislike the fact that it doesn't work, and the obvious conclusion is "well, they didn't like it because it doesn't work yet," which is true but also obvious. You didn't learn anything.
This doesn't really answer your question and I don't think a definitive answer exists (and I've never worked in this space). But, obviously, this company should have stopped sooner than they did.
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† The only exception I can see is if you can come up with a potential customer for which "an oven that bakes correctly one third of the time" would still meet their needs. Under the scenario in the story, I don't think this exists. For, say, an AI coding agent that can run automated tests and throw away bad results, a one third success rate may still be useful in some scenarios.
I think this speaks to the other major weakness of most founders: that they are optimists to a fault. The "MVP" in the story was a colossal failure. It wasn't "good enough." It was a disaster, and they should have just stopped there. But founders wouldn't be founders if they were able to know failure when they see it.
If the founder had started by talking with people in the problem space, he could have discovered what problems were actually worth solving before investing any money and effort into a product.
Everything after that happened were downstream effects of creating something without a defensible reason why and for whom.
So I can't see the reason for the sarcasm. Different things.
The baker is happy and proud with what she could contribute to the worldwide bakers community and has made enough money that she and her family never need to worry again. There is just one problem: By now, she is getting old and none of her kids are interested in bakery or oven tech. She's also getting a steadily growing amount of offers to sell the rights to the brand.
Eventually, she caves and sells the brand and designs to BigOven. They promote her brand front and center and initially also use her design. But over time, BigOven replaces more and more parts with cheaper equivalents while keeping the overall look the same - until eventually, they replace the entire product with a stock design.
The bakers take a while to catch on (during which time BigOven makes a ton of additional money from the brand value) but eventually, the quality decline becomes impossible to ignore. Frustrated posts about corporate greed and enshittification make the rounds on the Italian forums.
"They don't make em like they used to" someone writes...