Subject: SpoonRocket postmortem

Hi investors,

It is with a heavy heart that I have to say sorry. Sorry for letting you all down, sorry for losing your money, and sorry for not being able to turn this into something great we had all hoped for. 

I wish I could pinpoint to the one thing that we did wrong, but the truth is that we just did too many darn things wrong. In a business where the margin of error is paper thin, we simply did not execute with enough finesse and precision to make it work. It wasn't that we didn't try hard enough or hustle enough or work hard enough, we probably tried too much and kept making mistakes over and over again. All of our mistakes resulted in a lack of focus on the thing that got SpoonRocket its initial traction in the first place ($0-$2M ARR in 3 months), and that was to provide an awesome meal delivered to your door fast, good, and cheap. Our product was just not cheap enough, just not fast enough, and just not good enough. Lots of people liked our product, some even loved it and are sad to see it go, but it just wasn't at the point where most everyone loved it...not even close. 

By the end of it all, we had tested so many different things that SpoonRocket's product offering became a mosh pit of mediocrity and nothing in particular was remarkable. And then, we had gotten into this rat race where we kept adding new and random items to the menu because for every item we added, we saw an incremental increase in conversion. In fact, it got so bad that the idea of selling skateboards on the app was being tossed around at one point. It was like the heroin we couldn't quit because it added a little bit more sales, but overall took away our focus from doing things that mattered to make the product and experience itself better. We became too distracted with searching for the next local maximum rather than optimizing for the global maximum.

The product suffered as a result; our food was not as consistent as it should be, our delivery experience was not as smooth and refined as it needed to be, the packaging was not as clean and beautiful as it should have been. The list really goes on, and beyond just the product. If we had focused on nailing a product that was really good, really fast, and really cheap, we may have had a fighting chance instead of the fate we're suffering now. We really messed up and got addicted to throwing crap on the wall to see what sticks; now all we're left with is a wall full of crap. I still believe the idea of a quality meal at an affordable price delivered in 15 minutes is still possible and has huge potential to be a profitable business, we just weren't good enough to deliver it ourselves. The food business is such a specific type of business that we really should have done a better job seeking out mentors earlier in the food production/operations space.

Different moments from the past 3 years keep playing back in my head, and I would think, "yeah if we had only done it differently then, things would be different now." But of course, hindsight is always 20/20. We may have been the first to deliver hot meals as fast as we did, but as I've always said, the history books only record the winners. We are not the winners this time around. Anyhow, thank you for your support all along and wishing we could have done a million things differently, I'm sad the story had to end this way. That said, please reach out if there's anything I can clarify or help with.

Regretfully yours,

​Anson Tsui

Since working at the extremely operationally intensive start-up SpoonRocket, I'm beginning to realize one thing over and over: Ops people could really use some technical chops.

In a company where proprietary software is an integral part of everything our employees engage with on-the-regular, it just makes the tech team's lives a heck-of-a lot easier if every one had at least a superficial understanding of how technology works. We find ourselves having to constantly interpret what it is the Ops team wants for the tools that will help them with their job, guessing and spec'ing a prototype that will hopefully fulfill their needs, then getting it approved by the Ops team, to later find out that it's either not what they wanted or of any use to them.

I think the problem here is 2 fold. 

First, Ops people are so caught up with the day-to-day operations that they haven't really had the chance to take a step back and think bigger picture about what it is in terms of software that would actually help them. So they'll tell you they need a tool to solve this immediate problem they're dealing with, we build and build and build only to discover that the root of the problem was actually something else. 

The second problem here is that they are lacking a fundamental understanding of code and the engineering process that sometimes they'll request of us features that they think are simple to build for us (when quite the contrary), but doesn't really end up helping themselves much, or neglecting to request features that they think are too complicated and time-consuming but in actuality really easy to build and can materially solve some of their most urgent problems.

And I admit, a lot of this comes down to communication. In the past couple months, I've come to learn that communication is the basis of any effective organization. Margaret J. Wheatly talks about the 3 conditions of efficient self-organizing organizations: identity, information, and relationships. In any effective organization, you must first have the identity. This is the vision of the company, what it is that brings everyone together. The 2nd is information: this is all the facts and data that surround the identity. Without the identity, you will just have collected a bunch of random information without much basis or focus. Then you have the relationships. This is a very key piece here because relationships within an organization dictates the flow of this information. In an organization where information does not flow freely, a CEO could know everything possible about her business and if no one else has access to it, then only one person would be able to harness the value of this information and put it to good use. 

As Eric Schmidt details in his book, How Google Works, always default to open. For every bit of information that is legal to share with others, share it. It will only make the company function effectively. And in order for information to flow as freely and unrestricted as possible, there needs to be some mutual understanding of the material at hand. It's like when you and your best friend just get each other, you guys can almost communicate without even saying a single word.

This said, I really do believe that having at least a basic understanding of software will be as critical (if not more critical) in the next several decades as knowing arithmetic, Excel, or English even.

I have no doubt that the foreseeable future is a place where non-technical people (unfortunately) become the hamburger flippers of tomorrow.

The law of entropy, in simple 5 year old terms, is the idea that things in the world only become more and more disordered as time passes. For example, your room will not clean itself, and in fact, will only get messier and messier until you intentionally decide to exert the effort to clean it. The egg yolk is another example, once popped, it cannot un-pop itself without massive amounts of effort (if even possible). 

I'm beginning to see the same sort of principle in business. A business does not build itself. You cannot expect order to organically rise out of disorder as time passes. It takes huge amounts of concerted effort by many people to put the processes and systems in place to properly set up the infrastructure needed to run and grow a business.

This leads me to my next point: it is of monumental importance to bring people onto your team who are able to contribute to making order out of the chaos that is your startup. There are people (many of them) in leadership positions who almost just sit around and expect the business to scale itself, processes to develop themselves, and crises to resolve themselves. They're the dreadful bosses who just run around barking at everyone, expecting problems to fix themselves without ever really trying to fix things themselves. The danger is that it is common for these people to be very good at looking like they're producing, without really adding much value themselves.

Now, it's unclear to me whether these leaders are unwilling or unable to perform the tasks needed to move the company forward, though my sense is that the latter is the case. The irony is that these "leaders" seem to think everything is just dandy and no real change needs to happen. That is why I believe that it could be the case that they are unable to take the business to the next level; it's because they just don't have any freaking idea. They don't even see how things could be better, the status quo is all they know.

If that is the case, then I don't think these people should be put into leadership positions. Real leaders, as Steve Jobs once said (and I'm going to paraphrase), lead with ideas. In order to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with your business, you need to first know where to push it to. Blindly pushing may only end up taking you in circles and you begin to wonder why you even tried so hard to go nowhere, or worse, going backwards. Maybe that's why they don't push it anymore, because they just end up at the same place anyway.

I think the lesson here is that everyone really should take a deep look into themselves and maximize the gifts that they were given. No point in getting in other people's ways when they can do it better, and plus, you wouldn't want to miss out on what you could be really really good at anyway.

A business won't build itself so please please please don't get in the way of those who can and are willing.

So, we did it. We are on track to setting the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest virtual dinner party ever.

Well done, guys.

This event has been absolutely incredible. What started out as an idea totally unrelated, snowballed and evolved into the world's biggest virtual dinner party ever. And the amazing thing was that, not one person could have pulled this off. It took an army of extremely talented and passionate SpoonRocketeers to pull off what we did. It just goes to show that creativity and passion goes a long way; if people weren't so dedicated and aligned to toward a single goal, we would never have been able to achieve what we achieved.

The crazy thing was that it wasn't just one person's idea. It was an idea that had kept evolving, and really up until only a week ago had we settled on setting the record for the world's biggest virtual dinner party ever. Our teams then really latched on and ran with it.

It's worth noting how important a healthy company culture is too; it's like the glue that brings everyone together to form this new kind of synergy so powerful that the sum of the individual parts would simply not compare. If everyone just embraced an open and encouraging culture that cultivates creativity, ideas really start compounding and before you know it, it's magic.

And that's the beauty of having a fantastic team to work with. You give them an inch, they give you a mile. It's incredible how much you can accomplish with the right people and mindset.

SpoonRocketeers, we're off to doing something remarkable. We really are. Thank you.

Even though we had stress tested the system several times beforehand, we still way underestimated demand.

Good thing our kick ass tech team was able to bring our servers back from the grave in about an hour and a half. And when we were back up, the Tech team passed our Ops team the baton and they took off with it like the superstars that they are.

We're making the necessary changes for tomorrow and should be ready to rock and roll tomorrow, but obviously wouldn't want to jinx it now.

It was an extremely stressful and emotional couple of hours for us but we were able to stick together as a team and pull through to victory.

I was most impressed with the way our team mobilized and reacted to the fiasco, I'm very proud of them.

It goes to show that as a team, we can achieve anything. We are only as strong as we are united.

Tonight has truly been a blessing and an extremely valuable learning experience for us.

Go team SpoonRocket.

So the mobile space is very interesting to me, so interesting in fact, that I see it as Internet 2.0. 

For the first time ever, in the history of mankind, every human being is connected everywhere, all the time. There can be so much more interaction that could occur around us that is not currently happening, we are literally just barely beginning to scratch the surface of what mobile can do. I think that in the next 10 years there will be as drastic a change in our lifestyles as in the past 10 years. People are going to look back 10 years from now thinking "I can't imagine how life was like before X" (X referring to mobile internet) just like how we look back 10 years and think "I can't imagine how life was like before the internet."

The real power of mobile lies in its inherent ability to integrate physical location in real-time. Most of the really popular apps unfortunately don't currently employ what mobile does best. Look at Instagram for example, it's not really real-time and location is merely an afterthought. Even apps like Snapchat and Whatsapp really only take advantage of real-time, which by itself is not much of an innovation seeing as how the internet has been real-time for quite some time now; it's the usage of location in concert with real-time that makes mobile really really interesting. 

If you really think about it, you can open up the Uber app, type in a location halfway across the world such as Hong Kong or Tokyo, and literally move metal instantly at the click of a button. Isn't that insane? Now think about the implications this has on us in the near future. What used to be impossible is now possible, the floodgates just opened with the advent of mobile technology, so be ready for the wild ride. I'm egggcited.