I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:

> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.

That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.

Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.

(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)

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nikanj 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better

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stickfigure an hour ago | parent [-]

This situation does exist though; otherwise startups and new products would never succeed. Big companies have blind spots.

Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.

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iamjackg an hour ago | parent [-]

How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb).

I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.

	▲	BoxFour 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product Doesn't this still line up with the original point though? The incumbents had the exact same opportunity to capitalize. Blockbuster could've leaned into streaming hard before Netflix. I do think that's become a bit harder recently, though, so the original point is slightly less relevant (though obviously still exists, see for example OpenAI vis-a-vis DeepMind). Big companies are much faster on chasing trends, even if they end up amounting to not much. See crypto, for example. I do think part of that reason is because the current wave of companies capitalized where incumbents faltered, so they're desperate not to make the same mistake.
	▲	stickfigure 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Google was definitely "exact same product, but better". It was a search box. However, I think Anova would be a better direct counterpoint. They started in sous vide, replacing existing products that did the same thing but better. But now they are literally trying to replace ovens. That effort started after the Electrolux acquisition in 2017, but they do seem to be pretty successful. A friend of mine really likes their steam oven, and if I had more space in the kitchen, I would be tempted.