Thoughts after pitching to investors:
Take 1
"So you're a cafe."
"Yup."
"Is that it? Just one?"
"Well, if we had room to grow, I'd move into retail, because it's B2C and we have good foot traffic that has limited opportunities to spend money (because we target value pricing) so we'd invest more product development under the brand."
"But aren't people moving away from brick and mortar retail - into just using the space for meat testing, and then shipping actual product via mail?"
"Yes, so we'd be building the brand by displaying products in-store, with some fulfilment if necessary, and sure, we can ship more stuff over other funnels after we build a brand. But we have the brick and mortar already, so we might as well continue here first."
"Would you expand to more outlets?"
"That's not a priority - it doesn't drive up the brand value as quickly as we'd need it to move, unless we have more products shipped per store."
"Is your core focus to expand the retail network?"
"No, the core focus is vertical integration of value chains. For example, we buy and consume detergent. We need to start selling detergent. And in the longer run, since we consume management services, we need to start selling those too."
"You're not a foodie, and you run a cafe. Now it's a sundry shop pretending to be a cafe, that wants to scale by turning into an outsourcing operation. Tell me a more coherent story."
"Are you sure you want to hear it?"
"Hit me."
Take 2
"Let me go back a few years, to tell you where I come from. I figured out the data-structure for quantifying human experience when I was in college. It persuaded me that human people are trivial. Skipping forward a few projects to the cafe... within your lifetime and mine, we're going to be talking and working daily with synthetic people who are indistinguishable from organic people. For the last fifteen years, I've never had to struggle with the question of whether it would happen, only the question of when it would happen, and if I would watch it happen or be a bit proactive and make it happen sooner rather than later. (I think it'll happen regardless of my interference.)
In this future, I expect that automation will ... consume every imaginable function that humans play today - and I mean this without ... hyperbole. Automation will displace not just drivers, or food service staff, but early childhood educators, doctors, sex workers, friends, performance artists, spiritual guides like the clergy, cultural guides like screenwriters, government officials, etc.. The artisanal millennial industries are a laugh - the last bastion of a desperately cornered beast, angstily scrambling for comparative advantage. Their current livelihoods are all going to die. It was obvious to me before millennials became a thing, so if I'm heavily sighing it's because it's happening all so predictably, and it's painful to watch all these kids who think that they've brilliantly discovered a meaningful way to spend their lives.
If you're interested in human development, the real question is what do you think that organic meat should be doing in this future where all human interactions are automatable? Should the focus be on survival, or on innovation (for fuck's sake, given there'll be literally too little left to do anyway)? I don't have an answer for you. But I think we need to help people be prepared, even those who don't believe that it will happen. So back to this business project..."
Take 3
3.1.
Given the outlook above, THE LONG GAME for any organism or company that wishes to survive is first to understand how any of this is going to work. Therefore the business has to focus on achieving automation milestones ahead of (the general population's bulge in) the curve. We have to be a services company, and the service we provide has to be the productisation of any given (currently) human services, via automation.
3.2.
This is a big universe, and we have to start THE MIDDLE GAME somewhere. Therefore we focused on a really simple position at the bottom of the pyramid: hospitality services... specifically food services... specifically long-tail artisanal food services. This is why we explain ourselves as a management services company for this segment. If you look at the entire industry of independent food and beverage retailers and separate all their activities into two baskets, (A) things everyone is doing the same and (B) things everyone is doing different, you'll find a lot of redundancy in (A) and so that should be the first basket to automate. After you've dealt with that, you can reexamine (B), and probably you find that, whether you like it or not, many of the trendy products in the market are horribly generic... depending on the same upstream suppliers, sometimes even OEMs, rebranding with quirky stickers and stories, and pushed to out, c'est la vie. There is so little value added by the so-called artisan per se. The move into this market is alla Rocket Internet - we want to become a clone shop that identifies any trendy product, digs up the supply chain for it, sticks it under a centralised management services umbrella for efficiency of scale, then pushes out the exact same product at a lower cost. If you need an anchor to see what the end is here, just consider this hypothesis: Michelin restaurant menus are cloneable. I don't even have to argue about this, because it's been done before. The question now is not about how to clone one menu - it's about how to get good at cloning and global distribution. We'll mop the floor with the bodies of grassroot businesses - it's not nice, but someone's got to do it.
3.3.
This is a really broad and expensive target to be arm-waving about... we only had as much capital as the guy next door, and I thought it was fundamental for the project to focus on understanding how the economy is working in vivo and so, we started this business as a cafe. This is THE SHORT GAME. What else were we supposed to do? Teach hipsters that the future is jobless? What for? That wouldn't get us there.
Recap
So how's that for a cohesive story? Did you brain it? Probably not. If you did, I'm happy. But this is usually why I don't speak my mind - people stop listening pretty quickly. If you liked the story, please buy my company. I'm getting tired of being stuck in the short term. Not interested? No worries... I'm going back to work on it until it either falls over, or transcends. Hope you enjoy your job too. I can't say I really enjoy mine, but I do find it kills time. It's a life. YOLO.
[In hindsight, RI is a bad analogy. The given example seems more like Zara for fine foods. But I don't think I'm really committed to either analogy - the general direction is illustrated with either or both.]
[Forgot to point out that the culture wars of the future will regard the organic-synthetic class divide; amply anticipated in science fiction, but a far cry from the ongoing organic-organic class divides that still dominate current discourse.]
Tidied up the thoughts:
