Just a quick counterargument from a regular Soylent consumer: I drink a coffiest for breakfast every morning and drink two liquid Soylents on days when I don't have time for a nice lunch or dinner. It's convenient, healthy and tastes good. I've never had any intestinal troubles. I use it as a meal replacement, not a complete food replacement.
It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that has caused people problems. But HN folks should know that doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way. Food is obviously a much more sensitive and important application than most mobile apps.
But I expect Soylent to figure out what went wrong, correct it, and keep iterating and improving.
Or a surgeon. "Sorry, but surgery is hard and we all make mistakes along the way!"
The statement is actually true... but you need to hold yourself to a higher standard when your product can have an impact on people's health. Of course, stopping the product while investigating the cause sounds like they are taking it seriously, so hopefully it will all work out in the end.
But I'm not worried either way - meal replacement shakes have been around a long time, and despite the marketing, Soylent isn't that different than its competitors. So hit GNC on the way home and get whatever works for ya.
But we have made surgery mistakes along the way. We have made food mistakes along the way. And drug mistakes, and flight mistakes, and war mistakes.
It hurts to get better. But it should also hurt the companies making the mistakes themselves, and for companies that make things like food and drugs there should be balanced regulations. Iteration should happen on small scales, but licenses and inspections should be enforced as you grow.
Comparing this with surgery is not fair, I think. Here (with a food like soylent) the gains are low and the risks are high. With surgery, the risks are high but so are the gains. Before you go into surgery you're given a list of 10 ways you might die if something goes wrong. Oftentimes, though, the alternative is certain death (in the very near future).
Edit: I was replying to "But we have made surgery mistakes along the way". On a second reading, I notice that you did not actually mean to imply "it was necessary there so it's necessary here".
You should go talk to some surgeons during residency. There are systems in place to mitigate the possibility of mistakes, but they do happen during the learning process for new surgeons.
I used to follow these quite closely. In my experience in Silicon Valley, there was a decent correlation between how good the food was and how badly they perform in those inspections :)
Not because health codes are a hard problem to solve, it's because the proprietors are lazy pieces of shit who make up their margin by storing their bleach next to their raw chicken.
well, sorry to say this but healthcare operates in a way that puts individuals at risk for the benefit of moving medicine forward. For example, surgeons tend to be at at their prime in their early to mid 40s. Getting operated on by a typical 35 year old is flat out dangerous, statistically speaking, but we allow it because to get better, people have to practice their craft.
I don't drink the coffee version, but I've otherwise had the exact same experience. It's so nice to have times when I can skip the whole "figuring out food" thing and grab a soylent. I keep a case or so of the pre-mixed liquid bottles around at all times now. At my various clients I generally leave one in the fridge. It's the meal I can eat during a meeting, and feel even less guilty about my Sunday night double cheeseburger.
when you make a mistake at a web tech startup, the worst thing that happens is some people don't get to look at a web page they wanted to look at, or maybe somebody got an email they shouldn't have.
when you make a mistake at a food production startup people get sick or die. this is a different domain and applying the same logic that you would apply to web tech is a horrible idea.
It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that has caused people problems. But HN folks should know that doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way. Food is obviously a much more sensitive and important application than most mobile apps.
But I expect Soylent to figure out what went wrong, correct it, and keep iterating and improving.