Farm to pizza! | Image: Zume Pizza
Want to read a parable about the cult of the Silicon Valley founder and the Softbank investors caught in the wake of his gilded robes? Good, because Bloomberg Businessweek has the inside story detailing the implosion of Zume, that pizzas-made-by-robots-and-cooked-during-delivery startup. Zume’s co-founder and co-CEO Alex Garden attracted a $375 million investment from Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, the man who gave $3 billion in venture capital to Adam Neumann during his ill-fated tenure at WeWork.
Here’s how Bloomberg describes the first meeting of Garden and Son:
”Two years ago a truck covered with large photos of pizza pies nosed its way onto a long Bay Area driveway. It was ferrying Alex Garden, the chief executive officer of Zume Pizza…