Juicero is a startup that sells a $400 machine that squeezes packets of diced fruit and vegetables to produce fresh juice.
A person might assume that a product so simple and boring, yet weirdly expensive, couldn’t possibly attract the entire internet’s derision. A person would be wrong.
It’s best to begin this story in March of last year, when the New York Times published a profile of the company’s founder Doug Evans, a former Army paratrooper who had already started and sold the successful Organic Avenue line of cold-pressed juices and healthy snacks. Evans was not a Silicon Valley veteran, but he spoke like one, rhapsodizing his product with quasi-religious grandiosity. “Not all juice is equal,” he told The Times. “How do you measure life force? How do you measure chi?”
Evans beguiled investors with the promise of a miniaturized industrial-strength juicer that could one day serve as kitchen candy in millions of households looking for a quick way to liquefy fruits and veggies. Lo and behold, the storytelling worked. Juicero raised $120 million from venture-capital firms, including Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and food companies such as Campbell Soup. But there was an opposite reaction as well: The Times profile, its quixotic subject, and the dollar amount engendered a kind of coiled schadenfreude among many readers—poised and eager to strike.
Their moment came this week, after some Juicero investors who received the product noticed something strange. The pouches didn’t require a $400 piece of equipment to yield juice. They required something less proprietary—fingers. Two Bloomberg reporters, Ellen Huet and Olivia Zaleski, performed their own test. They found that squeezing Juicero’s pouches in their hands for 90 seconds yielded as much juice from the bags as the industrial strength machine, which actually took 30 seconds longer to produce a similar amount of liquid. It appeared that Juicero’s vaunted product, which had so beguiled Silicon Valley, was basically a simple press—functionally the equal of a waffle iron, except one that can’t make waffles.
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Here's the juice
Here's the juice
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: Here's the juice
I THOUGHT YOU WERE REFERRING TO THIS LOOSER.
Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.
yrs,
rubato
Re: Here's the juice
He's getting out soon! October, I think?
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
~ Carl Sagan