The Instant Pot problem

Not everything has to be the biggest thing

Photo credit: Epicurious

A few days before this publication launched, Instant Pot filed for bankruptcy. I think about this a lot. You know, Instant Pot: The uber-popular home pressure cooker so beloved it launched its own subgenre of American home recipes? Fantastic product. You could cook all kinds of stuff pretty quickly without thinking too hard about it, and it generally tasted pretty good, and so people (myself included) went out of their way to try to learn how to cook stuff with an Instant Pot. They became ubiquitous.  

Instant Pot didn't stop being a really good piece of kit. It didn't stop being popular. But the private equity company that bought it in 2019, Cornell Capital, had bigger ideas. It wasn't enough to sell a quality machine in solid quantities every year, carving out new customers, replacing old models, paying employees and then taking a profit. It needed to sell all kinds of Instant-branded gadgets to the American consumer. It needed to branch out. It needed to grow. And so Instant Pot was rolled into a larger operation expected and designed to get bigger, exponentially bigger, forever. 

This Silicon Valley startup grindset -- grow hockey-stick fast to prove your business is even worth pursuing -- doesn't make a ton of practical sense outside that very specific and insular private equity bubble. Yet it feels like you see this sort of story more and more. The mindset is more omnipresent than ever. It is not enough to just *be*. Everything has to be the biggest thing, or it might as well not exist at all.

Look around the college sports landscape. Look what the power conferences look like now. The last month of conference realignment -- in particular the (ongoing) death of a proud, century-old, culturally coherent west coast league -- was driven by nothing if not this same fundamental impulse. The schools who left the Pac-12 for the Big 12 did so after a meeting in which commissioner George Kliavkoff presented the details of a new Apple TV streaming deal, a deal which, by all accounts, wasn't very good. The Big 12's deal was better. Fair enough. But the differences weren't so wide -- $10 million, $5 million, whatever -- that it should have been such an obvious and destructive call for the departing schools to make.