In Fast Company, the definitive story of Zume, the trucks that made pizzas on route to your house.

There are so many stories like this, and I love them all. It’s the tech boom in a nutshell:

As Zume made hundreds of new hires, its only revenue came from its original pizza business. Zume Pizza was bringing in “something like $1 million per year, ridiculously low,” says this source. At the same time, it was losing up to $150 per pizza it delivered.

If the story is a little familiar, it’s because Matt Levine wrote on it back when WeWork was melting down (the first time). I remember crying laughing reading it:

You run a pizza delivery business. You craft a pitch calculated to convince Masayoshi Son that your pizza delivery business will change the world. You meet with Masayoshi Son. He convinces you that you will change the world. Now you are all believers, all in it together. He hands you piles of money. You go home and weep to your friends, “I am going to change the world.” The friends are like “wait what with the pizzas?” 

The FC article has a bit of a bummer of an ending if we’re hoping for some schadenfreude:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of Zume’s main characters are doing just fine. In 2019, Collins launched Planet Fwd, software to make it easier to launch climate-centric consumer businesses. She created her own brand of crackers made with regeneratively grown grains to prove the concept—a remarkably similar setup as Zume, though Collins has disavowed any parallel. She sold Moonshot Snacks to Patagonia Provisions in March 2023.

Garden joined Fortress Investment Group in March 2023 as a managing director. 

Still, if someone wants to publish a 300-page Inside Story of Zune, I’ll be the first to preorder it.