Timing over idea

I had a funny thought this morning as I read about the labor shortages and realized that Zume Pizza may not have been that crazy of an idea, it just may have been too early for our taste.

One thing I’ve come to realize quite a bit as an investor is that timing is just as, if not, more important than picking the right ideas.

A simple example. I can tell you today that self-driving cars will become a thing in the future. When and how long until it takes to become a standard in our lives is a much harder prediction.

We saw Pets.com become one of the poster children of the dotcom bust as the company went bankrupt in the same year it went public and raises $82.5m in it’s IPO. Yet today, we see Chewy which is the modern day version of Pets.com on the public market. The stock hasn’t been doing too hot, but it’s far from going bankrupt like Pets.com.

So going back to Zume Pizza. The company became a bit of a poster child of the SoftBank “capital-as-a-moat” era. There was a lot of media backlash and the company unfortunately became a bit of a joke in the tech world. Yes back in 2019 and 2020, it seemed really bizarre that a company that made robot pizza cars was receiving so much money from VCs. The business model seemed broken and they were burning cash.

Fast forward to 2022 and we are at a severe shortage of labor. Restaurants, yet alone fast food restaurants, cannot hire enough to properly operate. Perhaps the idea behind robot pizza trucks was the right idea afterall, but the company just missed timing by a mere 2-3 years. I don’t know if the company would be thriving in today’s world… they had other challenges of course but if the company was around today, maybe they would have been praised as a fix to the labor shortage rather than a joke in the tech world.

Maybe in 5-10 years, we’ll see the next Zume Pizza go public at a massive valuation.