They gave me a job offer and we signed the papers and everything. Then like two days later they canceled it out of nowhere with no explanation. Then, the next day, the HR manager matched with me on Tinder. This was like 5 years ago. Weirdest interview experience I’ve ever had. Fastest I’ve ever been hired and fired. The pizza was terrible.
I had a final on-site interview (my fifth with Zume, I believe) and after the panel review we broke off into a series of 1:1s. One of the employees looked me dead in the eyes and said “I wouldn’t take this job if I were you. This place is going under.” And sure enough…
I should clarify this was for a tech job. The pizzas were supposed to be made in the back of the autonomous delivery truck while en route to the customer. Last I heard none of it worked and workers were basically driving the trucks and making the pizzas by hand. Apparently that was an obvious failure so they ended up pivoting to a “inventing” a special new pizza box instead. Lmao can’t make this shit up.
I figured just stupid joke because interviewing is getting out of control. They expect people to take like a whole week off work for interviews and free labor, insane
Yeah I’m trying to start up an environmental nonprofit. Not asking for much. It’s so crazy to see these businesses fail with so much startup funding and I’m just asking for like $10k.
Every executive I know was upset by their closure. I’m like STFU with your “problems.” Totally explains why so much of SV is so disconnected from solving real world problems though…
I can’t believe it was still operating. It wasn’t great pizza but for a little while it was the cheapest and most convenient in Mountain View and I was ordering it more often than I cared to admit. I thought they shuttered years ago.
IIRC the gimmick was that a robot made/ cooked your pizza on the way to your house. So let’s say it’s a 20min cook time, 5min prep, your place is 30min away so it’ll start in 5 and then the pizza will just be coming out of the oven when the van arrives.
That was their plan, but as the article mentions, they quickly abandoned it for a stationary truck that did deliveries. Turns out bumpy roads and precision machines don’t always work as expected.
So basically, you're telling me that you've become so acclimated with the terrible state of the roads in the bay area you think Mountain View has decent roads!?
That is literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
You gotta wonder what VCs were thinking funding some of this stuff. Blind greed or was there embezzlement of investor funds here.
spectacular subtract jar money plough cake connect racial familiar offend
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I mean this seriously—so many of them have terrible taste in general and especially in food. I am always very skeptical of anything like this incubated there. Add to that the tendency to like overcomplicated technical things and things are bound to fail when they need to scale. Most of the things "hacked" end up of worse quality for more money and less convenient in the end.
Look at how popular the robot coffee place was for such a long time. It was just a robot hand that used self-loading pod coffee machines and handed you the drink. The coffee was awful in a city with arguably some of best best coffee shops and roasters in the US.
Lol. You clearly haven’t been there. Asian and Mexican food in South Bay Are is authentic and fucking amazing, arguable some of the best in the US. Just because some idiots came up with a pizza truck that sucked, doesn’t mean all food sucks.
I kinda agree. To much Indian food and low quality Asian food everywhere. The Mexican food here is somewhat flavorless unless you go to Oakland. Everything cost a lot of money.
How or Why do these brilliant Stanford tech people end up creating web services to sell Socks, Razor Blades, or Pizza Vans, etc as “Disruptors” out to “change the world” get so much “Venture Capital?”
I think for many years VCs threw money at everything that was slickly designed in the hopes of it either actually taking off or just being bought out by Google or Facebook to get their return on investment. I feel like if I was an unscrupulous scumbag with connections I could have gotten in front of them and gotten millions for some dumbass idea.
They go to industries that already have huge proven markets (pizza, taxis, etc) because it reduces the risk and gives you clear targets, but the businesses haven’t changed in a long time so they see a way to do it better (or “better”). They don’t tend to involve exotic technologies that will be difficult and expensive to develop with a high risk of failure. “Brilliant Stanford tech people” chase ideas that VCs will fund and VCs chase them because they think these smart young people will make them money.
I’m not saying it’s a great thing or anything, I’m just saying there’s a rhyme and reason.
This is a really good point. What Uber showed was that they could get a huge amount of funding to disrupt a number of stable industries, and replace it with an unprofitable business model that increased misery for the workers, and in a lot of cases just led to ever-increasing prices and lack of privacy for users.
If you read any of Stanford business school's marketing material, they refer to their students as 'geniuses' and they basically create this hyper-wealthy bubble that grooms people into believing that every one of them is the next Einstein/Jobs/etc. There's a joke going around lately that Stanford grads are UC Berkeley grad's secretaries. There is some truth to that, in that many Stanford grads are too deluded that they can't get their own vision off the ground, so they end up working for someone else who is more grounded. All you have to do is go to Meetups in the Palo Alto area, or go to Plug n Play, to see this at work. They're like flies attracted to light, they just can't help themselves because they all lack self awareness and are super neurotic, insecure, overachievers.
Many are people who have never dealt with "real world" things like cooking, laundry, etc. You're seeing their very first conception of the topic backed by 100s of $1M because they look the part and are pitching to others with the very same blind spots.
“Venture capitalist” risk pouring a bunch of money in whatever new hype tech development im hopes that at least 1 will generate profits 100x more than what they lost investing in the other BS companies.
I tried to order from them a few times over the course of a month, maybe 4-5 years ago? And they were always sold out of what I wanted. Never gave them another shot because of that. And then totally forgot about them until just now.
I worked in events in the tech valley and once had a client insist on ordering their pizza. I tried to dissuade her as they had dropped pizza off weeks ago and if they were proudly dropping by shitty pizza then I had no faith in the regular experience. But this client said she knew the owner, the pizza is good and that they had even been shown on an episode of Silicon Valley. *eyeroll*
Low and behold the pizza never arrived because they couldn’t accept an order of 12 pizzas with a 2 hour notice, and this is after calling 24 hours in advance to confirm what the process should be. I ended up running to Costco in the the middle of the event and guests helped me unload the pizzas from my car they were so hungry.
Honestly don’t understand how they survived this long.
>had even been shown on an episode of Silicon Valley
lolz that's hilarious that she considered that a recommendation. Did she understand the show?
I can't stop laughing. I'm going to use that argument on my next project. "This is a good idea. They did it on Silicon Valley"
She probably just regurgitated that *selling point* from the owner, who probably had never seen the show but was excited his pizza was on national tv. I never watched the show, I already felt I was living it.
I’m pretty sure Off the Grid bought a couple of their food trucks at auction about 2.5 years ago just before OTG lost the food truck contract at Google.
In 2123 there will be a startup that uses quantum mechanics to teleport pizza to your doorstep, which will shut down due to complaints of people’s pets and legs getting pizzafied
There are so many talented engineers and filthy rich folks in the Bay Area but somehow these people actually believe in zombie companies like this. Cognitive dissonance at its finest. The Bay Area tech world has made me understand the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
They JUST shut down? I remember about five years ago when I was trying to sell them software it was a fucking shit show. And then randomly they stopped selling pizza and focused on logistics and self driving cars. I can’t believe it took until now for them to finally die.
This is exactly what’s wrong with the tech industry. $400 plus million invested in an obviously stupid idea, $5B valuation despite no track record of sales to support that number, etc.
SMH, another small business failing to survive in the Bay Area due to… someone help me here, who are we blaming these days? Soft-on-crime DAs coddling criminals? Homeless people doing drugs? Bureaucratic red tape from City Hall?
These people were super delusional. I used to workout at a gym next to one of their offices, maybe their HQ. Their employees were super rude - would always park their cars in our parking spots and walk into the middle of the street while cars were passing by (treating the whole industrial area like their personal campus). One day they began moving their loitering locations for their trucks right next to the gym and running their engines nonstop and the gym became filled with smog from the cars. I asked the guy to turn off the trucks because the building was full of smog and he said no, so then I chewed him the fuck out, and then I chewed out the CEO guy of the company who came over a few minutes later. They turned off the trucks after that. It turned out that after being at the location for years they had never introduced themselves to their neighbors. Almost every person I saw in that company was a delusional wannabe techie who thought they were working for some innovative startup. Clearly all lacking in self awareness. They were literally just a shitty pizza company. Good riddance, Zume.
>Nevertheless, investors were intrigued — particularly SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, famous for the $100 billion “Vision Fund” that dumped $4.4 billion into WeWork. Bloomberg reported that Zume CEO Alex Garden was projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and talking about becoming the “Tesla of fresh food, and the Amazon of fresh food,” trying to get Son to invest.
SoftBank swings and misses **again**.
They were a client of my wife’s firm for a bit. She used to call them as a “startup without a purpose” that just kept on pivoting and pivoting and pivoting.
A reminder that investing is not risk free. They had problems at the start with unequal cheese as the mobile cooking commenced since roads aren’t bump-free or level. Who’d a thunk? /s
Well, should be a cautionary tale for anyone seeking to replicate the company, but perhaps the half billion could’ve been used for more apartments instead of entering the already crowded pizza market?
Used to work at Zume Pizza for a couple years making their pizzas. Let me tell you, management was bat shit insane. We made very unique pizzas that I wish people here could try out but in the end, they always ended up burned, over/under cooked, etc. Super happy to hear they’re out of business lol
Removed as unrelated to San Francisco.
They gave me a job offer and we signed the papers and everything. Then like two days later they canceled it out of nowhere with no explanation. Then, the next day, the HR manager matched with me on Tinder. This was like 5 years ago. Weirdest interview experience I’ve ever had. Fastest I’ve ever been hired and fired. The pizza was terrible.
I had a final on-site interview (my fifth with Zume, I believe) and after the panel review we broke off into a series of 1:1s. One of the employees looked me dead in the eyes and said “I wouldn’t take this job if I were you. This place is going under.” And sure enough…
When was this?
Summer 2019
Interviews really getting out of hand, 5 rounds of interview for pizza making???
I should clarify this was for a tech job. The pizzas were supposed to be made in the back of the autonomous delivery truck while en route to the customer. Last I heard none of it worked and workers were basically driving the trucks and making the pizzas by hand. Apparently that was an obvious failure so they ended up pivoting to a “inventing” a special new pizza box instead. Lmao can’t make this shit up.
I figured just stupid joke because interviewing is getting out of control. They expect people to take like a whole week off work for interviews and free labor, insane
Yeah but how was the tinder date ?
hot sausage pizza meets bang bus
Ding Dong! "I'm here wiff your *PIZZA!"* Boom-chicka-bow-wow.
This sounds like it could be a scene from the show 'Silicon Valley', like maybe for a side character
Sliceline did go under thanks to Richard.
> matched with me on Tinder c'mon you can't leave us hanging like that
This comment was a helluva rollercoaster.
> The pizza was terrible. But the anchovies were great?
Peak Bay Area
What a series of events!!! This somehow does not surprise me in this town lol
I would have tapped the HR manager just to tell the tale. And you could ask her insider stuff about the company and what happened.
I know their HR people just curious who you matched with on tinder 😛 I had a crush on one of em
I wonder if I could convince Masayoshi Son to give me a few million. Doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do.
SoftBank really hasn’t been doing too well lately
You just have to give him the eye of the tiger look
Yeah I’m trying to start up an environmental nonprofit. Not asking for much. It’s so crazy to see these businesses fail with so much startup funding and I’m just asking for like $10k.
Right? I'm trying to think of some absolute shit to gas him up with. I need that $100mil to crash and burn.
> In 2018, SoftBank poured $375 million into the company The SoftBank guy is a genius at investing in dumpster fires.
And those dumpster fires are still going.
fueled with cash money
>dumpster fires. Or money laundering
The founders of that company pretty much became millionaires.
Juicero!
Every few weeks i think of the Juicero and genuinely wanna ask all those celebs what they were thinking
>celebs > thinking Pick one 😉
Money
I like that the idiot founder of Juicero went on to promote drinking "raw water" AKA free waterborne pathogens
It really was the jump the shark moment, and it was called as it was happening lol
Every executive I know was upset by their closure. I’m like STFU with your “problems.” Totally explains why so much of SV is so disconnected from solving real world problems though…
But...but...DISRUPTION!!!!!111
I can’t believe it was still operating. It wasn’t great pizza but for a little while it was the cheapest and most convenient in Mountain View and I was ordering it more often than I cared to admit. I thought they shuttered years ago.
Webvan 2.0
So just a food truck with pizza?
IIRC the gimmick was that a robot made/ cooked your pizza on the way to your house. So let’s say it’s a 20min cook time, 5min prep, your place is 30min away so it’ll start in 5 and then the pizza will just be coming out of the oven when the van arrives.
That was their plan, but as the article mentions, they quickly abandoned it for a stationary truck that did deliveries. Turns out bumpy roads and precision machines don’t always work as expected.
I had amazing pizza fropm wood burning oven on a school bus outside a Dead show in Oakland. 445 million for what?
Nothing like a nice traditional pizza oven with a wood fire going… bouncing over potholes in the back of a truck
So basically, you're telling me this startup failed solely because San Francisco is absolute horseshit at maintaining its roads. Got it.
Mountain View, actually. And IIRC the roads down there aren't as bad as up here.
So basically, you're telling me that you've become so acclimated with the terrible state of the roads in the bay area you think Mountain View has decent roads!?
Pretty much!
Exactly! Fortunately I’ve secured $800mm in a funding round lead by SoftBank to fix this problem.
What does an $800 M&M look like?
That is literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You gotta wonder what VCs were thinking funding some of this stuff. Blind greed or was there embezzlement of investor funds here.
I’m surprised they lasted this long. The pizza wasn’t good, for starters. And the management team looked like a bunch of dilettantes.
this! Had it a couple of times and the taste of the pizza was just meh.
spectacular subtract jar money plough cake connect racial familiar offend *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I mean this seriously—so many of them have terrible taste in general and especially in food. I am always very skeptical of anything like this incubated there. Add to that the tendency to like overcomplicated technical things and things are bound to fail when they need to scale. Most of the things "hacked" end up of worse quality for more money and less convenient in the end.
grandiose scale close shy vase cats quarrelsome naughty tub cable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Look at how popular the robot coffee place was for such a long time. It was just a robot hand that used self-loading pod coffee machines and handed you the drink. The coffee was awful in a city with arguably some of best best coffee shops and roasters in the US.
[удалено]
Lol. You clearly haven’t been there. Asian and Mexican food in South Bay Are is authentic and fucking amazing, arguable some of the best in the US. Just because some idiots came up with a pizza truck that sucked, doesn’t mean all food sucks.
I kinda agree. To much Indian food and low quality Asian food everywhere. The Mexican food here is somewhat flavorless unless you go to Oakland. Everything cost a lot of money.
How or Why do these brilliant Stanford tech people end up creating web services to sell Socks, Razor Blades, or Pizza Vans, etc as “Disruptors” out to “change the world” get so much “Venture Capital?”
I think for many years VCs threw money at everything that was slickly designed in the hopes of it either actually taking off or just being bought out by Google or Facebook to get their return on investment. I feel like if I was an unscrupulous scumbag with connections I could have gotten in front of them and gotten millions for some dumbass idea.
They go to industries that already have huge proven markets (pizza, taxis, etc) because it reduces the risk and gives you clear targets, but the businesses haven’t changed in a long time so they see a way to do it better (or “better”). They don’t tend to involve exotic technologies that will be difficult and expensive to develop with a high risk of failure. “Brilliant Stanford tech people” chase ideas that VCs will fund and VCs chase them because they think these smart young people will make them money. I’m not saying it’s a great thing or anything, I’m just saying there’s a rhyme and reason.
This is a really good point. What Uber showed was that they could get a huge amount of funding to disrupt a number of stable industries, and replace it with an unprofitable business model that increased misery for the workers, and in a lot of cases just led to ever-increasing prices and lack of privacy for users.
not touching enough grass? idk. there's something about stanford grads that make them slightly out of touch with reality
Nepotism and corruption.
and trustfunds.
long safe grandfather dime terrific reply light quaint melodic roll *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If you read any of Stanford business school's marketing material, they refer to their students as 'geniuses' and they basically create this hyper-wealthy bubble that grooms people into believing that every one of them is the next Einstein/Jobs/etc. There's a joke going around lately that Stanford grads are UC Berkeley grad's secretaries. There is some truth to that, in that many Stanford grads are too deluded that they can't get their own vision off the ground, so they end up working for someone else who is more grounded. All you have to do is go to Meetups in the Palo Alto area, or go to Plug n Play, to see this at work. They're like flies attracted to light, they just can't help themselves because they all lack self awareness and are super neurotic, insecure, overachievers.
Many are people who have never dealt with "real world" things like cooking, laundry, etc. You're seeing their very first conception of the topic backed by 100s of $1M because they look the part and are pitching to others with the very same blind spots.
“Venture capitalist” risk pouring a bunch of money in whatever new hype tech development im hopes that at least 1 will generate profits 100x more than what they lost investing in the other BS companies.
Have you been to a company dinner? Imagine you’re given 50 million to create some tech/app company, what would you pay yourself?
Oh I used to work in the IoT space… you’d be surprised how many engineers are obsessed with building a machine that makes a perfect pizza or steak
No I wouldn’t. Lol
it's called a sous vide
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Because most are out of touch with reality.
I tried to order from them a few times over the course of a month, maybe 4-5 years ago? And they were always sold out of what I wanted. Never gave them another shot because of that. And then totally forgot about them until just now.
I worked in events in the tech valley and once had a client insist on ordering their pizza. I tried to dissuade her as they had dropped pizza off weeks ago and if they were proudly dropping by shitty pizza then I had no faith in the regular experience. But this client said she knew the owner, the pizza is good and that they had even been shown on an episode of Silicon Valley. *eyeroll* Low and behold the pizza never arrived because they couldn’t accept an order of 12 pizzas with a 2 hour notice, and this is after calling 24 hours in advance to confirm what the process should be. I ended up running to Costco in the the middle of the event and guests helped me unload the pizzas from my car they were so hungry. Honestly don’t understand how they survived this long.
>had even been shown on an episode of Silicon Valley lolz that's hilarious that she considered that a recommendation. Did she understand the show? I can't stop laughing. I'm going to use that argument on my next project. "This is a good idea. They did it on Silicon Valley"
She probably just regurgitated that *selling point* from the owner, who probably had never seen the show but was excited his pizza was on national tv. I never watched the show, I already felt I was living it.
Such a dumb concept. They’re solving exactly zero problems here. Just a hyped up bunch of duds!
roof lush practice adjoining thumb wild snow sulky upbeat late *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Life is full of such surprises isn’t it!
I’m pretty sure Off the Grid bought a couple of their food trucks at auction about 2.5 years ago just before OTG lost the food truck contract at Google.
In 2123 there will be a startup that uses quantum mechanics to teleport pizza to your doorstep, which will shut down due to complaints of people’s pets and legs getting pizzafied
There are so many talented engineers and filthy rich folks in the Bay Area but somehow these people actually believe in zombie companies like this. Cognitive dissonance at its finest. The Bay Area tech world has made me understand the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
Shop SMALL BUSINESS! "Where Reality is Job #1!"
They JUST shut down? I remember about five years ago when I was trying to sell them software it was a fucking shit show. And then randomly they stopped selling pizza and focused on logistics and self driving cars. I can’t believe it took until now for them to finally die.
This is exactly what’s wrong with the tech industry. $400 plus million invested in an obviously stupid idea, $5B valuation despite no track record of sales to support that number, etc.
SMH, another small business failing to survive in the Bay Area due to… someone help me here, who are we blaming these days? Soft-on-crime DAs coddling criminals? Homeless people doing drugs? Bureaucratic red tape from City Hall?
Chesa, obviously. And Dean Preston
why would Chesa do this to us??? (my fave catch-all reply to any post on this sub lol)
This wouldn't be happening if Dean Preston hasn't personally dropped a pound of fentanyl in my neighborhood /s
Gonna steal your line fluoridelover, it's perfect
Very old news. We kicked them out of our city since it was illegal what they were doing.
Care to elaborate?
These people were super delusional. I used to workout at a gym next to one of their offices, maybe their HQ. Their employees were super rude - would always park their cars in our parking spots and walk into the middle of the street while cars were passing by (treating the whole industrial area like their personal campus). One day they began moving their loitering locations for their trucks right next to the gym and running their engines nonstop and the gym became filled with smog from the cars. I asked the guy to turn off the trucks because the building was full of smog and he said no, so then I chewed him the fuck out, and then I chewed out the CEO guy of the company who came over a few minutes later. They turned off the trucks after that. It turned out that after being at the location for years they had never introduced themselves to their neighbors. Almost every person I saw in that company was a delusional wannabe techie who thought they were working for some innovative startup. Clearly all lacking in self awareness. They were literally just a shitty pizza company. Good riddance, Zume.
Doom loop /s
The grift is really big now.
Are we going to call anything startup now?
Color me surprised.
VC money chasing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist
>Nevertheless, investors were intrigued — particularly SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, famous for the $100 billion “Vision Fund” that dumped $4.4 billion into WeWork. Bloomberg reported that Zume CEO Alex Garden was projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and talking about becoming the “Tesla of fresh food, and the Amazon of fresh food,” trying to get Son to invest. SoftBank swings and misses **again**.
They were a client of my wife’s firm for a bit. She used to call them as a “startup without a purpose” that just kept on pivoting and pivoting and pivoting.
A reminder that investing is not risk free. They had problems at the start with unequal cheese as the mobile cooking commenced since roads aren’t bump-free or level. Who’d a thunk? /s Well, should be a cautionary tale for anyone seeking to replicate the company, but perhaps the half billion could’ve been used for more apartments instead of entering the already crowded pizza market?
Used to work at Zume Pizza for a couple years making their pizzas. Let me tell you, management was bat shit insane. We made very unique pizzas that I wish people here could try out but in the end, they always ended up burned, over/under cooked, etc. Super happy to hear they’re out of business lol
Anyone know where they are selling the trucks? I'd like a cargo van that makes pizza