Flip creator gets into the grilled cheese business, Sequoia invests

http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/01/the-melt-flip-sequoia/

by logicalmoron • 15 years ago

60 66 15 years ago

venturebeat.com

larrik2• 15 years ago

Best. Headline. Ever.

logicalmoron• 15 years ago

Friend at D9 says they are damn delicious, too

larrik2• 15 years ago

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!

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

All the restaurant-related startups and announcements lately are an almost-daily reminder for me that when you have a good idea, jump on it.

Ah well. I didn't have the contacts to pull it off, and it was only half an idea. :)

hugh310• 15 years ago

If you ask me, screw the grilled cheese restaurant. A grilled cheese van would be a licence to print money, second only to a cupcake van.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

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.)

cpeterso• 15 years ago

Will Y Combinator invest in my grilled cheese van? :)

awj2• 15 years ago

Make it seasonal.

Grilled cheese and tomato soup van in the fall/winter.

Cupcake and Icee van in the spring/summer.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

Move to Los Angeles, we got one.

http://twitter.com/grlldcheesetruk

ctdonath• 15 years ago

Reminiscent of Starbucks' "Mobile Pour" joke ... which isn't that far from viable in a high-dollar high-traffic area.

http://www.starbucks.com/blog/introducing-starbucks-mobile-p...

hugh310• 15 years ago

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."

ktsmith• 15 years ago

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.

patio11• 15 years ago

"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."

blacksmythe• 15 years ago

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."

pitdesi2• 15 years ago

No Berkeley in the first four: Downtown, Lower Market, Bay Bridge, Palo Alto... http://themelt.com/locations

davidw2• 15 years ago

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!)

hugh310• 15 years ago

Hmm, I think I'd need to try a sample before I invested...

davidw2• 15 years ago

All you have to do is drop by Padova. Wine, as per the other comment below, is included.

fkcek• 15 years ago

Serve with a good glass of wine and it wouldn't be a bad idea.

powertower• 15 years ago

It's an interesting angle here...

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.

hook3• 15 years ago

It would be even cooler if a quadcopter delivered your grilled cheese sandwich within minutes no matter where you were. Why doesn't that exist yet?

bh42222• 15 years ago

You know... that sounds doable.

Quadcopter are very fast and can go very far before they lose power. And a single sandwich is not a very heavy load.

If you are outdoors and can give it your GPS coordinates, a single restaurant/quadcopter port, could serve a very large area.

hugh310• 15 years ago

Given advances in ballistics I think a grilled cheese cannon would work just as well, and be cheaper.

hook3• 15 years ago

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.

niqolas• 15 years ago

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 ;)

coderdude• 15 years ago

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.

zhivota• 15 years ago

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.

DanielStraight2• 15 years ago

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."

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

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.

DanielStraight2• 15 years ago

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.

awj2• 15 years ago

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.

mahyarm• 15 years ago

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.

corin_• 15 years ago

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).

timtadh• 15 years ago

I know restaurant names are often re-used, but I wanted point out there is already an awesome gourmet grilled cheese restaurant called "Melt".[1]

see http://www.meltbarandgrilled.com

[1] I guess he called his "The Melt"

edit: first hit in Google for "The Melt" as well.

hugh310• 15 years ago

Fun exercise: find a Mongolian Barbecue that isn't called "Genghis Khan".

brk• 15 years ago

http://www.gomongo.com/

What do I win?

hnal943• 15 years ago

http://www.flattopgrill.com/ you're right - that was fun!

jhamburger• 15 years ago

There was also a contestant on America's Next Great Restaurant with this idea:

http://meltworks.com/

daimyoyo• 15 years ago

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?

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

Relax. They're not issuing stock yet.

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

I was thinking of starting a company that sells pet supplies to retail customers by way of a website. Think I'll be able to secure VC funding?

danielharan• 15 years ago

Too soon!

GBond• 15 years ago

Maybe if you incorporate a mascot, say... a sock puppet dog

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

If you've got a really good domain, yes.

dchest• 15 years ago

Only if it involves QR codes, NFC technology, and group buying.

rmc• 15 years ago

What's your social integration like?

pitdesi2• 15 years ago

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)

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

Well, Chuck E Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell who before that founded Atari, so it might just work!

ansy• 15 years ago

He could at least deliver to arbitrary locations like "Ronnie" the underground cheese griller in NYC.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/he_making_gouda...

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/21/am...

He was covered quite a bit last year for taking orders via text message and for being mildly subversive of the NYC health department.

Mrich30• 15 years ago

The article on one side and the serious comments on the other side have me really torn, please help me - this is satire right? Right???

signa11• 15 years ago

there is no tech bubble.

pwim• 15 years ago

I wonder if he was inspired by NYC's Underground Grilled Cheese: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713815

Flip creator gets into the grilled cheese business, Sequoia invests

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