The Runway

And Cargo Cults

Frog and Toad founded a new social baking startup. It was like Uber, but for cookies, and it was well-funded so they had a long runway.

“Our startup will get bigger and bigger,” said Frog. “It will get so big that we’ll be called a ‘unicorn’ when they write about us in the New York Times.”

“Toad,” said Frog, “I will build the cookie marketing team and develop our delicious product. You will hire engineers and build the software that lets people buy our cookies.”

Toad hired some engineers, and decided that they’d pursue a mobile-first strategy.

They launched their new native iOS app but no one could find it in the app store and the money began to run low.

Toad heard laughter. Some people on Hacker News were talking about their startup. “No one will use their phone to buy cookies,” said people on HN, “you may as well give up.”

Toad ran back to Frog. “Frog,” said Toad, “this startup will never take off.”

“We must raise more money and try again,” said Frog. “Rebuild your app using micro-services and publish a Cookie API, and then maybe people will buy our cookies.”

So Toad hired more engineers, and they re-designed the backend as micro-services deployed on AWS with dynamic bidding strategies for spot instances. They re-branded their company and launched a native Android version of their app, but no one bought their cookies and they started to run out of money again.

“What a joke,” said the Hacker News commenters. “This company will never get off the ground.”

Toad ran back to Frog. “Micro-services are a joke,” he said. “This startup will never get off the ground.”

“We have to raise money a third time,” said Frog. “Make sure your engineering team is employing Agile Methodologies this time, perhaps that will help our company to succeed.”

So Frog raised more money and Toad designated himself as Cookie Owner for their new agile engineering team. He demanded that the team use values from the Fibonacci sequence to estimate tasks sizes mined from the Trello backlog in weekly planning meetings. Toad automated the construction of task burn-down charts which were published to a Domo dashboard and every month conducted a three-hour post-mortem for the entire team.

They re-launched with a web-only interface, but no-one bought their cookies.

“That startup is junk,” said the HN commenters. “Shut it down and go home.”

Toad ran back to Frog. “This startup isn’t working,” he said. “I think we should shut it down and go back to our day jobs.”

“Toad,” said Frog, “we need to raise more money for one more try. This time, we’re going to sell access to our baking equipment and kitchen space on an hourly basis. I want you to jump up and down on Twitter and shout BAKING-PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE SHARING ECONOMY.”

So Toad ran to Twitter, and he shouted, “COMMODITY BAKING EQUIPMENT, COOKIES-AS-A-SERVICE, BAKING SHARING LIKE UBER BUT FOR OVENS.”

Programmers all around the world who had always wanted to be artisanal bakers and purveyors of fine cookies emerged from the woodwork and began bidding for oven time.

The startup took off, and its valuation climbed higher and higher.

“We did it!” cried Toad.

“Yes,” said Frog. “If a mobile-first strategy didn’t work, and micro-services didn’t work, and an agile engineering team didn’t work, I knew that a mobile-heavy micro-service-based agile team that was dedicated to delivering a Baking-Platform-as-a-Service in the Modern Sharing Economy just had to work.”

The Hacker News readers also tried to create Baking-as-a-Service startups, but they weren’t as successful as Frog and Toad’s platform. Frog and Toad watched their company’s valuation climb sky high. Frog wrote an article about it in the Harvard Business Review and Toad spent his time wearing funny hats and taking selfies at Burning Man.