Note for Progress Forum readers: I published this piece as part of my work coaching high impact startups at the nonprofit activate.org, and am cross-posting here because it is an intentional experiment in incorporating elements of progress studies into general-interest writing with a practical call to action. Feedback, discussion, and debate welcome.

When Juicero shut down on September 1, 2017, the news spread quickly through San Francisco’s Mission District, which was then ground zero for hardware startups in the city. Hacker News, Y Combinator’s Reddit equivalent for the startup community, picked up the story first thing that morning.

At that time I was CEO of a hydrogen storage startup based in a shared building down the street, where we had our workshop/lab on the concrete ground floor and a few desks in a former school gym upstairs. On my way to work that day, I passed three neighborhood coffee shops, each overflowing with chatter about one of the highest-profile mistakes in the history of our Bay Area startup ecosystem: Juicero had raised and spent $120 million in venture capital to build a $600 juicer that squeezed proprietary packets of cut fruit. And it turned out those packets could be juiced by hand.

Curious to learn the real story and empathetic to their young team, I bought a 12-pack, walked over to Juicero’s HQ, and rang the doorbell. The door had a small peephole camera which meant that whoever answered could see I’d brought beer. They immediately buzzed me up.

After talking with the Juicero engineers, I learned that the writing had been on the wall for a while. No one was crying. A few folks were happy to give me a tour of the lab and some prototypes. Those prototypes made me realize that Juicero’s ecosystem had dealt the company a nearly unwinnable hand.

Juicero’s customers had asked for a machine that could juice whole fruit unattended while requiring no cleanup, which led to a press-style juicer with a burly and expensive mechanism. Juicero’s investors had expected recurring revenue as a means to drive rapid growth, thus the single-use fruit packs. Juicero’s processed fruit suppliers had been unwilling to explore retooling to package coarse cuts so the packs were full of finely-cut fruit that could be juiced by hand.

As a result, the juicer, originally designed to juice whole apples, looked obscenely overengin...

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