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.
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.
The founders knew what they were doing. This was their way of cashing out some of the company while continuing to run it. All of the private equity tricks are designed to avoid paying taxes in the process.
My instant pot is amazing. Everyone i know has one. How did they fail??
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
When everyone already has one, no one needs to buy it anymore
The George Foreman machine is still my “peak design”. And yet nobody owns one after everyone burned out on it from oversaturation.
They still sell panini press grills. It’s generally a bachelor pad thing though.
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?
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.
I’m glad you have all that in your kitchen.
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."
The biggest failure here is the number of people who obviously didn’t read the article. Why comment if you don’t know what you’re actually commenting about? Is this the writing equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice?
Edit: I can’t believe my latest most controversial take is “maybe don’t discuss what an article says unless you read it first”. Just can’t make this shit up.
Pay wall after 3 paragraphs
I can recommend the Sage/breville “fast and slow go 6L” cooker if you cannot or don’t want to get the instant pot. I have had mine for 2 years now and its solid build and i have used it a lot. Makes excellent youghurt and risotto among others.
The thing is, these are just a pressure vessel with a timer and a heating element. They are all good unless they are very poorly made.
Theyre all good until they are bombs, then they’re pretty good bombs
So are water heaters and we use those pretty confidently.
Pressure cookers get a bad reputation for safety from the times when they were basically a metal box with a tiny hole in it, but modern cookers have a lot of additional redundancies. Particularly modern ones with timers. It’d take a lot of work to get one of those to go catastrophically. It’s more likely to get killed by lighting than by pressure cooker, at least in the US, and as far as I can tell from available stats, and most of the pressure cooker injuries the stats list are from people who got a contact or steam burn, not by explosions.
It’s also interesting that people are often afraid of exploding pressure cookers when they think of them as pressure cookers, but you don’t get as much anxiety from rice cookers (AKA pressure cooker - but small).
Every dedicated rice cooker I’ve seen has a permanently open vent. They aren’t pressurized.
Also, every rice cooker I’ve used has had a lid held down by gravity alone. It wouldn’t build pressure even if the vent were blocked.
