You'd probably expect a car company with the motto "Engineering future cars" to have at least one mechanical engineer on their payroll. Expecting a company whose tagline is "Engineering future foods" to have at least one person with a background in nutrition isn't unreasonable.
Ship it and then iterate works when your product is software, not so much when it's marketed as the only food the human body needs to ingest for long periods of time. If node.js breaks then maybe some websites go down. If Soylent breaks then people could die (though hopefully they'd stop taking it before that point).
I don't really care about who car companies employ; I do care about the performance of the car I buy. If the car is unproven I don't buy it. If the car is proven to be defective or unsafe I don't buy it.
Soylent is not a car. The first buy is bordering on an impulse buy. If it doesn't work for someone then they're likely to stop using it. If you're skeptical about it then don't buy it... wait for the reviews, wait for the early adopters to give some feedback.
Marketing is mostly bullshit... Soylent is mostly marketing right now. If the marketing bothers you then you're probably not an early adopter so just hang back and tell the early adopters how stupid they were in a year.
So you're saying it's the early adopters who hold the responsibility for ensuring the product is safe? They should possibly risk their lives so they can give reviews to future potential customers so that they can make an informed decision on the safety of the product?
Since Soylent falls under the food category we don't get the benefit of the FDA testing it's safety for us, unlike cars which have the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set standards for safety testing. So really the only safety information you can glean is the track record/capabilities of those making Soylent, and without a nutritional scientist on board, that seems like a dubious idea.
If you're interested in Soylent then buy some. Try it for a meal or three. Read a few reviews of other people who have tried it. If it works for you maybe try it a few more meals... take care of yourself. If you're concerned about the safety of the product then don't buy it.
Bottom line, as a consumer, manage your own risk vs. reward. This is a product you can buy cheaply and experiment with to find out if it's right for your needs.
No, he is saying the early adopters can take on that responsibility if they wish. There's a slight but important difference in connotation.
I ordered a week's worth last month. I didn't do it to "determine the safety of the product." I did it because the idea intrigues me and I'm willing to give it a try. It's made of well-known ingredients, so what's the absolute worst that can happen?
Soylent has been consumed safely and is sourced from known safe ingredients. Early adopters validate the use cases for a product. They are willing to take risks to receive some benefit.
Good point. We can argue all day about whether startups like Airbnb should be regulated, but it seems pretty clear to me that the government has a public health interest in regulating a pile of powder and its associated health claims.
Working remotely (as absolutely amazing as it is) is only barely getting traction in some fields at this point. I generally agree with you and the ability to work remotely is incredibly important to me as far as picking a position goes but unfortunately many employers aren't as thrilled about it as I am. To varying degrees, depending on the field you're discussing, there's still the notion that you have to put in your 8 hours in the office.
Almost made this exact post... I was looking for a Photoshop clone for Mac and stumbled on Pixelmator years ago, it's definitely not as full-featured as PS but it's a fraction of the cost and it does what I need it to do 98% of the time. For $30 it's a steal, especially if they're upgrading it like this.
The word boss has a pretty specific connotation and your clients and customers aren't that. Yes, if you work for yourself you're responsible for delivering work to your customers and they have some control over you due to that but it's incredibly different from the relationship between a salaried employee and his singular supervisor.
You can disappoint a customer, but you can't afford to disappoint all of them. You can disappoint your boss but you can't disappoint him or her all the time.
A single customer isn't necessarily equivalent to your boss in a job, but together they are.
Yeah this seems pretty worthless without separating responses by location. Living in the city you're going to walk a ton without even thinking about it, and most suburbs/rural areas are set up to make walking anywhere an 18-24 year-old would want to go difficult, if not impossible.
Is it really under the radar though? If you're aiming for TechCrunch front page then being in SF is probably a much better bet, but beyond that hype bubble you can still do very well. There are certainly talented people all over the country and of course you're going to save money on rent, salaries, and basically everything else if you go outside of San Francisco.
Not having ever founded a company I could be extremely wrong here but my take is that SF could be detrimental to certain startups.. If you have $x saved up to support you while you start a company it's going to last you much longer in basically any other city in the country other than perhaps Manhattan. At that point you basically have to decide which is going to be more of a factor in your success, extra time with which to build your product or physical proximity to an entrepreneurial community? Of course there's no one right answer, but I suspect that for many web-based startups the extra time and savings would be more important than the surrounding environment.
I use MATLAB .. I guess I'll settle for the Royal Navy, then. My dream to be Jack Sparrow and have an excuse to be constantly drunk and awesome has just been shattered.
