I wanted to build the Keurig of juice. A pod system where you get fresh, cold-pressed juice at home with the push of a button. That was the vision. The execution got complicated.
The press has 8 tons of force. Eight tons. More than a Tesla Model S weighs. That engineering is real. That engineering cost $120 million.
Bloomberg squeezed the packs by hand and got the same juice without the machine. That video killed us. One video. $120 million in funding destroyed by two hands and a YouTube upload.
Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Campbell Soup all invested. These are the smartest investors in the world. And none of them thought to squeeze the bag by hand before writing a check.
We shut down 16 months after launch. The machine cost $400. The juice packs cost $7 each. And you could get the same result by squeezing them with your hands. I understand why people laughed.