Well, I do like grilled cheese, and I'm happy to have five more opening in the SF Bay Area (please be Berkeley, please be Berkeley) but... really? Sequoia Capital funds grilled cheese restaurants nowadays?
I mean, apart from anything else it's going to make 'em look especially silly if it fails. I can see the annual report now. "This year we made $50 billion from five IPOs in the computer-aided drug discovery, computational nanotech, and metamaterials sectors. We also wrote off $10 million we invested in a grilled cheese chain."
"We also paid a trifling sum of money for an option on participation in whatever the next thing the Flip creator does after he gets the grilled cheese thing out of his system."
It's certainly possible that the deployment of five restaurants are just so that the developers have 100% control over the proving ground for their new software. It certainly sounds like this is a technology company to me anyway.
More realistically, "We made $2 billion from five IPOs in the computer-aided drug discovery, computational nanotech, and metamaterials sectors. We have 20 modestly profitable companies (including a grilled cheese chain), and we wrote off investments in over a hundred other companies."
Yep. You would need a) an iPhone app that you would use to place your order (it would send updated coordinates as you move around, and provide a perimeter within which you would have to stay) b) an army of quadcopters so that a subset of them could be charging while the others were making deliveries c) the quadcopters would have to be equipped with parachutes in case they malfunctioned so they wouldn't kill someone on the way down. d) The quadcopters would have to keep a persistent connection with the central server through wireless networks to keep in sync with your latest position and to send back their coordinates for you to see on your phone. e) there would have to be a mechanism in place to prevent mid-air collisions (buildings you could pre-encode, birds and other quadcopters you couldn`t) for bonus points, you generalize the whole thing and make it like an airbnb where people can exchange arbitrary goods and you just broker the deal and execute the deliveries for a fee that would be dynamically calculated based on distance and weight. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
This could also be an awesome way to disrupt the courier business in cities.
e.g. sender logs a job online (& provides payment details), sender prints a barcode sticker, sender drops off package with the building doorman/concierge and/or walks to designated quadcopter landing zone adjacent building, outgoing package scanned and loaded onto quad-copter, quad-copter delivers package to recipient's landing zone, quad-copter/system sends notification to recipient to advise that package has been delivered, recipient goes to quad-copter landing zone to collect package, recipient scans barcode or provides electronic signature to acknowledge receipt.
Terms & Conditions: Anyone who implements this idea (or minor variation) must give hook and I a $1 royalty each for every job logged ;)
This is an interesting idea and some of the other commenters did a good job of fleshing it out a little, but IIRC it is illegal to operate a UAV in the US unless you can take manual control at any time and so long as the UAV is always within the "operator's" eyesight.
It's actually even more difficult than that. I participated in a UAV project in Idaho, and we had to secure airspace for the UAV, prove that if radio comms went down, the UAV would immediately go into a death spiral (to prevent it continuing on to a populated area), have a fully licensed pilot to guide it when not in automated mode, and who knows how many other requirements.
At this point, the FAA is _very_ serious about UAV safety, IMHO with good reason. Even with our extremely safe controls, we had one UAV crash due to launcher failure, and another get stuck up in the air a long distance away due to a sudden thunderstorm that rolled into our area.
When someone wants to eat, they pay immediately by mobile in a quick and easy way (hopefully), and hence lock themselves into not being able to change their minds, or going somewhere else, or not going anywhere but home.
I don't mean to be dense... but why would I want to order food on my phone? I'm reminded of Paul Graham's office hours video on TC. He asked one of the founders if his product solved the biggest problem in his life. I don't think there's a single person on Earth whose biggest problem in life is, "I have to tell the cashier what I want to eat before I can get fast food."
Phrasing it as "solving the biggest problem" is a little ... grandiose, though. How can you even quantify such a thing? Why should I swing for that fence when the problem is likely "bigger" for me because I am abnormally impaired at dealing with it?
I think there's an ad-hoc, informally specified set of standards for when a problem is "big enough" that people will pay to have it solved. What you're looking for is something within that range where you can out-executing the competition. Searching for "the biggest problem" oversatisfies the first half of that proposition at the expense of the second.
All that said, I find little inconvenience in the current fast food ordering process. Often there is a language barrier, but a combination of numbered meals and ambivalence towards picking off what I don't want solves that issue.
Possibly the restaurants could find value in making the experience "good enough" to keep me from going down the street and paying more at $fancy_restaurant where ordering is (relatively) hassle-free? I'm not convinced that can be done via phone in the lowest-common-denominator fashion of fast food.
I don't think The Melt is doing this right, but it could be useful. Let's say you ordered it from an app that sends the restaurant your GPS coordinates at the time of the order. It then continues to send your coordinates as you travel to the restaurant.
On their end their software computes an estimated arrival time allowing them to precisely time cooking to be fresh and ready for you to eat when you arrive.
That makes a lot more sense. I still don't think I'd use it ("fast food isn't fast enough" is not a complaint I've ever made), but at least I can understand why someone would.
"fast food isn't fast enough" is not a complaint I've ever made
Really? I just went down to Cheeseboard Pizza to get a slice, but the line was too long, so I went somewhere else. If I could have ordered and paid while I walked and then just picked it up when I got there, that would have been sweet.
Just get their phone number and call ahead for takeout — it's pretty common here in Seattle even for places that don't deliver or even have a counter to order at.
There are some terrific sit-down restaurants that have tons of excess kitchen capacity.
Heh, that'd never work at Cheeseboard. They make great pizza, actually, but:
a) They only make one type of pizza per day,
b) You stand in a line which always goes out the door in order to order it
c) Same line for eat-in or take-away.
They have a constant stream of pizzas coming out of the ovens and getting cut up. When you're standing in line all you're waiting for is for the guy at the front to find out how many slices everyone wants and to take their money.
I think you're right in a traditional fast food sense (McDs, Wendy's, etc...), but there are a lot of sorta fast food restaurants around now. I'm thinking a Chipotle, Noodles, Panera type of business their customers could make use of ordering from a phone.
I have the mobile number of the nice waiter I know in a café down the road for me, when I want to order baguette(s) I give him a call and he kindly starts making them so that when I turn up I pay and collect, rather than waiting 5-10 minutes there.
I would LOVE to see a Starbucks mobile app allowing me to do the same thing, so when I get to the store I could pick up my drink and walk out. In fact it would amaze me if Starbucks don't offer this in the next 18 months, given their recent steps into mobile applications (though, annoyingly for me, they test everything in the US first, so more like 3+ years until it will come to the UK).
I've used the chipolte iphone app to order food. It lets me skip the line, not go through payment bs, not have the worker be grumpy when I ask for something special (especially chipolte workers, they tend to have an attitude) or have to wait for it to be prepared. I basically arrive say my name and my food is handed to me.
I make a pretty mean sandwich, with oven-fresh bread, mozzarella, tomatoes, and prosciutto, with a bit of salt and pepper for seasoning. Anyone care to fund me?
I'll name my shop "Panini Veri" (non quelle schifezze spacciate per panini italiani!)
I meant the other, customer-centric ideas expressed, but it's true.
In fact, Orlando FL has quite a few food vans that occasionally all park in the same area for a mini food fair and attract a lot of people. They've become quite popular in the last year or 2. (I'm sure it happens other places, but Orlando is what I know.)
Depends. Do you have a cofounder? Are you aged between 20 and 25? Are you a technical founder who actually understands how to make a grilled cheese on your own, or are you just expecting to hire a grilled cheese expert?
edit: Actually I think the ideal would be two technical founders with complementary skills. One knows how to make a grilled cheese, and the other one knows how to drive.
Any idea how much he paid for http://melt.com ? Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot of high-profile domain name purchases lately? (though I say that, only color and melt come to mind immediately although I'm sure there are some others... I know Pizza.com sold for $2.5m, which is ridiculous considering what they are doing with that name)
I don't understand the downvotes I'm getting. I really did enjoy the headline. It tells an awesome story in a tiny amount of space, and it makes me smile every time I read it.
It's even got a main character, an interesting plot, and a twist ending!
So when Sequoia is investing in a fast casual restaurant, can we say that the bubble is now officially in play? I understand wacky tech ideas no one understands, but a restaurant? Really?
I mean, apart from anything else it's going to make 'em look especially silly if it fails. I can see the annual report now. "This year we made $50 billion from five IPOs in the computer-aided drug discovery, computational nanotech, and metamaterials sectors. We also wrote off $10 million we invested in a grilled cheese chain."