Back on topic, I'm glad they changed the name. Soylent always seemed like a funny joke they outgrew faster than they anticipated!
"Rosa Labs strives to create innovative nutritional products. Our first product is Soylent."
Doesn't seem like they are ditching the Soylent name for that particular product (I wonder what else they are working on?). For the record, I still like the name quite a bit. I've never understood why a reference to a sci-fi book got under anyones skin (pun not intended).
In the medical community, there's very much the idea of keeping your credibility stable. You don't want to be the Chief Medical Officer of a product that has as much hype as Soylent, and then have it turn out to be fluff, or be horrendous for the human body.
Remember, Soylent isn't just being tested - they're already making pre-sales and shipping in early '14. While there's been a lot of talk and debate about the product, there's been a relatively small amount of actual medical studies on how their formula effects our body's chemistry. As a doctor there's also the risk of breaking your own ethics and being the "Dr. who endorses Soylent".
Soylent as a product is incredibly young. Promising, but young. While I'm sure there're a number of MDs working on contract with their team, I'm also sure it'll be a little while before there's a real reputable MD or firm that'll be slapping their name on the product.
From a technical viewpoint, it's kind of like banking your entire career and credibility on a young company that has a lot of technical debt.
http://blog.soylent.me/post/65760097009/as-mentioned-in-the-...
If that's what you mean I think "so what?". Don't buy it. The marketing claims, like so many marketing claims, may be wrong. If the product does not help people then people will stop buying it or it will be like any number of other bogus "nutritional" products that survive on marketing and placebo effect alone.
Being skeptical of a product based on the team that created is valid, but doesn't mean the product isn't valuable. The product should stand on its own. I think that is the nature of a start-up, you create something get it into the hands of customers and experiment. Soylent just happens to use food ingredients instead of node.js.
Ship it and then iterate works when your product is software, not so much when it's marketed as the only food the human body needs to ingest for long periods of time. If node.js breaks then maybe some websites go down. If Soylent breaks then people could die (though hopefully they'd stop taking it before that point).
If the team thinks they can make a food product without nutritionists or doctors, they should just a picture of themselves on the front page.
We have been doing business as Rosa Labs from the beginning, but wanted to wait a few months before publicizing anything other than the Soylent identity. Soylent Corporation would admittedly have been a pretty great name, but Rosa Labs will be a better platform for Soylent and any other projects we cook up.[1]
[1] http://blog.soylent.me/post/65760097009/as-mentioned-in-the-...
They've turned away from an interesting name that describes and differentiates themselves into a bland and boring "Rosa Labs."
Hmmm. Soylent, vs Rosa Labs.
I damn well know which one I'd pick.
Picking a more professional name may make it easier to get funding and be taken seriously.
I could be wrong and Soylent may actually be an important product spurring innovation in the ever so important food industry.
I normally gravitate towards the middle of the road opinion after identifying polar opposites, but for some reason I just can't shake the cynicism about this. It'll be interesting to watch what happens...
Soylent aims to be very cheap indeed.
The net effect, in the affluent countries, will be that we beat junkfood companies at their own game, by providing a fully nutritious diet for less than a dollar a day.
The net effect, in the third world, will be to significantly reduce famine, by turning full nutrition into a staple powder that can be distributed without waste or decomposition to millions of poor people.
So, "Soylent is people", to me, couldn't be a better strapline. It's right up there with "Just do it".
Here was my stream of consciousness: saw "welcome to Rosa Labs", jumped to the bottom and saw YCombinator, saw tweet about soylent, is this a soylent competitor? A non-related nutrition startup that keeps getting asked about soylent? A company independently reviewing soylent? Back to HN comments -> top post from freehunter about the admin name change -> oh! back to the website, read "Our first product is Soylent." in tiny text.
Clearly not the case. :)
