This is an older story. The narrative that it failed because it was too good is false. It was a private equity leveraged buyout that doomed it. The company got saddled with like 8x debt with a lot of that money going to dividends for the PE firm.
The product and the brand were strong enough that they’ve been sold to a different firm in the bankruptcy. If they are competently managed they should be fine.
What i still don’t quite understand with these kind of buyouts is who lends them the money and who gets saddled with the debt? Surely banks know the drill and wouldn’t want to borrow and hold debt for a company destined to fail in such a way.
Do banks get repaid before that happens and the only people being owed are small contractors and employees? Does the bank repackage the debt and sell it to someone else? Or are the interest payments high enough to just factor in losing part of the money borrowed with high certainty?
The lede is buried at the end.
The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address.
Private equity destroying another productive company.
Yep. I’ve had mine for 6 years and it’s still incredible. Luckily compatible sealing rings are still available from 3rd party vendors. Makes great Greek Yogurt, Chicken Soup, and Steel Cut Oats. And of course , it can make so much more.
It sucks that when you make something this good, you’re destined to put yourself out of business, meanwhile planned obsolescence works…
The product didn’t fail, American business culture failed.
they should have worked this into the title:
"A company needs to grow.
In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leached from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business."
I don’t understand this. What is wrong with a stable company that maintains its size?
The thing wrong with a stable company is that it doesn’t afford those at the top uncontrollable, disproportionate influence and profit.
American business culture disdains stable companies that maintain their size.
American business culture advocates for and promotes unlimited expansion and profit increase above all else, which is obviously unsustainable and distracts from creating good products or social benefit If you put a moment of thought into it, and benefits the one or few at the top while exploiting everybody else.
When that venture inevitably fails, the winners at the top get to exploit their ill-gotten profit to influence culture at large, radicalize the exploited and propagate the exploitative system.
The winners are shuffled around, and continue making obscene profit from each successive top position at the expense of their society, simultaneously creating and breaking laws to further their selfish, unsustainable gain.
My instant pot is amazing. Everyone i know has one. How did they fail??
FTFA:
A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday,
It’s also in a bunch of comments already
I have a theory that shitty products fundamentaly out-compete good products today because its way cheaper to market your product as good than to actually develop it well. I call it the craptocracy
I want to see craptocracy trend so hard that it makes it into spellcheckers.
Because it is made redundant by literally everything else that is already in your kitchen. You can’t name one thing this appliance does that a pressure cooker, stove/oven and crock pot don’t already do.
It also doesn’t replace any of those other devices so unless you’re a college dorm resident it’s just another massive thing on your counter for basically no value or reason
Just because you didn’t see value in the product doesn’t mean others don’t. It saved space for me because I don’t need a slow cooker, rice cooker, pressure cooker, yogurt maker etc. They’re all gone and replaced with a one stop shop of “if it’s wet it goes in the IP”.
It simplified processes and made them amazingly repeatable too. Stocks are a breeze: set, forget, comeback when it beeps. I don’t nurse temperatures, times and don’t stress things boiling over, boiling dry, getting too hot or not hot enough.
Sterilisation for brewing: come back when it beeps. Yogurt making: come back when it beeps. Dough fermenting: come back when it beeps. Soup: come back when it beeps. My fiancée wouldnt touch pressure cooking because she’s anxious it will explode, now she comes back when it beeps.
It doesn’t do anything as well as any dedicated device true enough, but it’s good enough to not buy those things and just use the IP. I’d have to eat a lot of rice to get a rice cooker as well as an IP.
When everyone already has one, no one needs to buy it anymore
Someone needs to create a business that bails out/buys excellent quality products and produces them in a small enough scale that only new owners will need.
Consider it an excellent achievement for a product to make it here. Only the best buy it for life products.
Someone needs to destroy private equity.
And the concept of infinite growth.
Financially, if your company is not expanding an increasing amount quarter on quarter on quarter, it’s considered to be failing.
And yet, nothing can grow forever. At some point, all things must come to an end. It’s an unrealistic pipe dream.
Say that the Instant Pot is so good that everyone has ten of them. Where would they grow from there?
I saw plenty of opportunities for enshitification and designed obsolescence.
There was an APP! So of course the natural order of things is to move more and more functionality from the physical control panel to the app. Then periodically let the app die by obsolescence. Force people to buy new phones to keep up, but then one day the new app no longer talks to old pressure cookers. Make the next version connect to the cloud for programs, and share with the IP maker everything you do. Sell that data to Amazon and Google who want to know what food you’re buying.
Then make the programs subscription based, so users have to pay a monthly fee to operate their cooker. Justify it by adding more and more programs. If someone does not pay their subscription, shut them down. Make the IP the biggest brick in the house.
I was actually disturbed that there was a Google Playstore app. Sure, it was optional, but I did not like the fact that my purchase in part financed the creation of an exclusive closed-source app exclusively available to Google and Apple patrons. It should have been an f-droid app.
