At least re: online pharmacy, that's patently false. Coming from someone who currently runs a legitimate online pharmacy, there is a 9-12 month accreditation process (VIPPS) that adwords, etc requires before letting you advertise.
That's presumably because Google doesn't want to be fined another $500 million for having their AdWords sales reps give their pharmacy customers advice on how to avoid Google's pharmacy compliance rules.
That would depend on whether Google is ever actually expected to PAY $500 million and whether they earned more than $500 million by breaking the law to begin with. If they made $501 million off of it, all the government has done is guarantee that is the new standard for business conduct. And usually companies that get hit with $500 million fines get that reduced to $100k or so on appeal.
The problem here is that you view these as two different things, not that the story keeps changing. Great design begins by spending time with your customers and truly understand their wants / needs. It's not about pretty pictures.
It's a BS marketing spin that keeps changing alright.
Neither design played a huge role, nor "meeting their customers face to face". The world is filled with failed startups with great design.
The simple explanation is: they simply offered a product people needed for it's value + some luck.
But I guess the product having a use value (as opposed to nice design or soapy stories about "connecting" with their customers) does not cut it as an offering anymore.
Yup - the packaging component has proliferated in a handful of countries, the US (obviously) not being one of them. In fact we imported a piece of quality control machinery from the Netherlands where this packaging is much more commonplace.
Threejay, we met via Skype at one of the advisory sessions you had during TechStars (I was with one of the VC firms). Great job executing! Let me know if you need referrals to pharmacists or doctors for any reason (or pharm/med schools).
PillPack is simplifying the process of managing medications for the 30M+ Americans that take 5 or more prescriptions a day. We have a full service pharmacy in NH (with robots) and a beautiful office in Davis Square (no robots, yet).
We are currently a small team (~10), and looking to grow both engineering (frontend, full stack, ios) and marketing. We are backed by top tier VC's and are one of the few consumer startups in the area that take design seriously (we've been living in IDEO for the last 4 months and just moved into our own office last week).
The special thing about "solving problems" is you usually create many more problems in the process. That's the definition of a startup: a company, when solving one problem, creates five new problems in the process due to imperfect foresight because everything hasn't been done before. Hence, hiring, growth, jobs, expansion, ....
Startups could be called "things that didn't exist before that are creating more problems to solve than existed before."
This. I still have all the buttons a non-idrive 3 series has has, and typically turn off the screen when I don't need the additional features. But it is really nice to have navigation, bmw assist, and all the additional features that come along with iDrive when I want them. I have a hard time understanding the downside.
