Well, that title change certainly made this post useless. The original was "Soylent is now Rosa Labs", which is a very informative title. The new title of "Rosa Labs" is infinitely more likely to get passed over or misunderstood (as well as making the comments hard to understand without visiting the site).
Don't worry too much about it. FWIW Whenever I see an item on the front page with a contextless title my first thought is that an administrator has changed it.
Back on topic, I'm glad they changed the name. Soylent always seemed like a funny joke they outgrew faster than they anticipated!
According to their website, this is just the name of the parent company that makes Soylent.
"Rosa Labs strives to create innovative nutritional products. Our first product is Soylent."
Doesn't seem like they are ditching the Soylent name for that particular product (I wonder what else they are working on?). For the record, I still like the name quite a bit. I've never understood why a reference to a sci-fi book got under anyones skin (pun not intended).
The new title is better IMO. HN is partly entertainment, and I enjoyed the post much more since I looked at their site without first knowing what it would be about.
It's not so much just "adding" that person to their team so much.
In the medical community, there's very much the idea of keeping your credibility stable. You don't want to be the Chief Medical Officer of a product that has as much hype as Soylent, and then have it turn out to be fluff, or be horrendous for the human body.
Remember, Soylent isn't just being tested - they're already making pre-sales and shipping in early '14. While there's been a lot of talk and debate about the product, there's been a relatively small amount of actual medical studies on how their formula effects our body's chemistry. As a doctor there's also the risk of breaking your own ethics and being the "Dr. who endorses Soylent".
Soylent as a product is incredibly young. Promising, but young. While I'm sure there're a number of MDs working on contract with their team, I'm also sure it'll be a little while before there's a real reputable MD or firm that'll be slapping their name on the product.
From a technical viewpoint, it's kind of like banking your entire career and credibility on a young company that has a lot of technical debt.
I think your point is that this is marketed as a "nutritional" product and yet no member of the team has a credentialed background in nutritional science so the marketing claims may be dubious.
If that's what you mean I think "so what?". Don't buy it. The marketing claims, like so many marketing claims, may be wrong. If the product does not help people then people will stop buying it or it will be like any number of other bogus "nutritional" products that survive on marketing and placebo effect alone.
Being skeptical of a product based on the team that created is valid, but doesn't mean the product isn't valuable. The product should stand on its own. I think that is the nature of a start-up, you create something get it into the hands of customers and experiment. Soylent just happens to use food ingredients instead of node.js.
You'd probably expect a car company with the motto "Engineering future cars" to have at least one mechanical engineer on their payroll. Expecting a company whose tagline is "Engineering future foods" to have at least one person with a background in nutrition isn't unreasonable.
Ship it and then iterate works when your product is software, not so much when it's marketed as the only food the human body needs to ingest for long periods of time. If node.js breaks then maybe some websites go down. If Soylent breaks then people could die (though hopefully they'd stop taking it before that point).
I don't really care about who car companies employ; I do care about the performance of the car I buy. If the car is unproven I don't buy it. If the car is proven to be defective or unsafe I don't buy it.
Soylent is not a car. The first buy is bordering on an impulse buy. If it doesn't work for someone then they're likely to stop using it. If you're skeptical about it then don't buy it... wait for the reviews, wait for the early adopters to give some feedback.
Marketing is mostly bullshit... Soylent is mostly marketing right now. If the marketing bothers you then you're probably not an early adopter so just hang back and tell the early adopters how stupid they were in a year.
So you're saying it's the early adopters who hold the responsibility for ensuring the product is safe? They should possibly risk their lives so they can give reviews to future potential customers so that they can make an informed decision on the safety of the product?
Since Soylent falls under the food category we don't get the benefit of the FDA testing it's safety for us, unlike cars which have the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set standards for safety testing. So really the only safety information you can glean is the track record/capabilities of those making Soylent, and without a nutritional scientist on board, that seems like a dubious idea.
If you're interested in Soylent then buy some. Try it for a meal or three. Read a few reviews of other people who have tried it. If it works for you maybe try it a few more meals... take care of yourself. If you're concerned about the safety of the product then don't buy it.
Bottom line, as a consumer, manage your own risk vs. reward. This is a product you can buy cheaply and experiment with to find out if it's right for your needs.
No, he is saying the early adopters can take on that responsibility if they wish. There's a slight but important difference in connotation.
I ordered a week's worth last month. I didn't do it to "determine the safety of the product." I did it because the idea intrigues me and I'm willing to give it a try. It's made of well-known ingredients, so what's the absolute worst that can happen?
Soylent has been consumed safely and is sourced from known safe ingredients. Early adopters validate the use cases for a product. They are willing to take risks to receive some benefit.
Good point. We can argue all day about whether startups like Airbnb should be regulated, but it seems pretty clear to me that the government has a public health interest in regulating a pile of powder and its associated health claims.
His first recipe missed out a number of micronutrients that while not necessarily fatal in the mid to short term, wouldn't be that much fun to go without. IIRC, Creatine, Tyrosine, Beta-Alanine, and a number of others.
Does anyone else find it disingenuous that their homepage has the words "Welcome to Rosa Labs" backed by a stock photo of what must be a much larger lab? I doubt their "labs" look anything like that.
Good point. Startups can get away with using stock photography to show the use cases for their product, but it does seem a little questionable to have stock photos for a science-based company like this to use stock photos of a space that probably isn't theirs, and a 'guy-looking-into-microscope' that probably doesn't work there.
I didn't like the photos either. Specially the second one which shows someone in lab coat looking into a microscope. It gives the sense that the product is being tested extensively by professionals, while the reality is much different.
If the team thinks they can make a food product without nutritionists or doctors, they should just a picture of themselves on the front page.
We have been doing business as Rosa Labs from the beginning, but wanted to wait a few months before publicizing anything other than the Soylent identity. Soylent Corporation would admittedly have been a pretty great name, but Rosa Labs will be a better platform for Soylent and any other projects we cook up.[1]
Solyent brings out the cynic in me for some reason -- Rosa Labs and accompanying boilerplate just sounds like an attempt at preemptively legitimizing Soylent as a staggeringly important food replacement; the list of investors are simply black swan hunters and not indicative of the importance of the product.
I could be wrong and Soylent may actually be an important product spurring innovation in the ever so important food industry.
I normally gravitate towards the middle of the road opinion after identifying polar opposites, but for some reason I just can't shake the cynicism about this. It'll be interesting to watch what happens...
Could we temper the negativity around here about companies like Twitter, Yelp & Groupon and products like Soylent? It's pretty clear the audience here has some sort of aggregated inability to spot large successes. I guess I can understand a certain amount of skepticism but it sure would be cool to see more "glass half full" sentiment here.
The way I see it, marketing wise, that's an absolutely great thing. After all, some of the big claims for Soylent are very people-oriented indeed.
Soylent aims to be very cheap indeed.
The net effect, in the affluent countries, will be that we beat junkfood companies at their own game, by providing a fully nutritious diet for less than a dollar a day.
The net effect, in the third world, will be to significantly reduce famine, by turning full nutrition into a staple powder that can be distributed without waste or decomposition to millions of poor people.
So, "Soylent is people", to me, couldn't be a better strapline. It's right up there with "Just do it".
Especially after the admin name change, PLEASE move the soylent picture from last to first in the carousel. It took me a good 20 seconds to figure out what this was.
Here was my stream of consciousness: saw "welcome to Rosa Labs", jumped to the bottom and saw YCombinator, saw tweet about soylent, is this a soylent competitor? A non-related nutrition startup that keeps getting asked about soylent? A company independently reviewing soylent? Back to HN comments -> top post from freehunter about the admin name change -> oh! back to the website, read "Our first product is Soylent." in tiny text.
