It's a wonderful telling, and whether or not this was the author's intent, I think the Stanford model is much more likely to make the founders rich. But while the MIT team may or may not achieve commercial success, but at least they are tackling something worthwhile.
Costs for sustainably produced chemicals are higher, but
the founders maxed out their credit card buying a
wholesale shipment and were able to sell a premium retail
product at a small profit.
At heart, the Stanford company in the story is greenwashing and repackaging a product that's already available. I have trouble getting excited about getting more people to pay more for a product that's already available. Isn't this just a zero sum game?
It's not really a zero sum game because marketing costs money. If you can figure out how to do marketing for less money per new customer than the other guy then you have freed up money that would otherwise have been spent on marketing... Or, if that money wasn't currently being spent on marketing then the value of that product was not being passed on to the market and you are unlocking that unrealised value. Either way, innovating around marketing is quite valid.
> At heart, the Stanford company in the story is greenwashing and repackaging a product that's already available. I have trouble getting excited about getting more people to pay more for a product that's already available. Isn't this just a zero sum game?
It is, but it's worth noting two important aspects here:
1. Unlike most of the audience of Hackernews, most of the people to whom you pitch a product don't know what a zero-sum game is, and learning about it is well beyond their abstract reasoning abilities.
2. Even if they knew, they would simply continue to unconsciously hope they'll end up with one of the positive terms.
> "but at least they are tackling something worthwhile"
Impact should be measured after companies have existed for years, not based on what they first set out to accomplish (company goals inevitably change). The Stanford company built a marginally improved product, and became sustainable. Since marginally improved products aren't really defensible (without a strong brand name), they'll likely continue to iterate on their product and in the long run will improve the tech drastically. Whether the intention or not, essentially they make money and use profits to invest in long term R&D, while the MIT company takes investor money up front to invest in R&D.
I think both approaches are suitable for different circumstances (based on background of founders, current state of market, whether radical or incremental improvements are needed to solve the core problem, etc). I don't like how people call something more or less worthwhile to work on, because wide distribution for a marginally improved product is better for the world than poor distribution for a revolutionary technology that never leaves a research lab.
