Of all the amazing sentences and couplets and paragraphs in this wonderful Bloomberg story about the troubles of a juice and juice-press technology company called Juicero Inc., I think the following is my favorite:
[Juicero founder Doug Evans] said he spent about three years building a dozen prototypes before devising Juicero’s patent-pending press.
This sentence is like a million-carat diamond. It is like a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Print out this sentence and put it in the Louvre. Here is the device Doug Evans spent three years laboring to invent:
The device Evans spent three years laboring to invent is a $400 WiFi-enabled tabletop machine that squeezes juice ... out of a bag of Juicero-brand juice. It squeezes bags of juice. It is a juice press that squeezes the juice ... out of bags of juice. Bags ... with built-in spouts ... that are filled with juice. Juice that comes in bags.
What kind of juice are you drinking? Oh, it’s bagfruit juice. Fresh-squeezed!
Here is another good-ass sentence from what, for my money, is the best story ever written about Silicon Valley. It pairs very nicely with the previous one:
But after the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands.
Oh no! This must have been a terrible shock to these venture capitalists. Sir, we’ve received some disturbing news. I don’t know how this happened, but apparently some of our customers are slightly less stupid than the absolute stupidest they possibly could be.
I like this one, too (emphasis mine):
One of the investors said they were frustrated with how the company didn’t deliver on the original pitch and that their venture firm wouldn’t have met with Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware.
When we signed up to pump money into this juice company, it was because we thought drinking the juice would be a lot harder and more expensive. That was the selling point, because Silicon Valley is a stupid libertarian dystopia where investor-class vampires are the consumers and a regular person’s money is what they go shopping for. Easily opened bags of juice do not give these awful nightmare trash parasites a good bargain on the disposable income of credulous wellness-fad suckers; therefore easily opened bags of juice are a worse investment than bags of juice that are harder to open.
Listen. Many features of life in this, the Ham-Fisted Satire Of Late Capitalism Dimension, are stupid. Donald Trump got to be president by holding up the wallet his dad gave him and yelling “I fuck this wallet.” The police will beat the shit out of you for using your flight ticket. Miami Beach is literally dissolving. The only thing this dimension does well is show its ass. We might as well applaud it!
God bless Juicero. I’m going to get this story tattooed on my brain.