In the beginning there was burnt risotto. In the blackened layer of rice at the bottom of the pot Alexis Wiasmitinow saw the underlying idea of his business model: EveryCook, a smart pot which doesn’t let anything burn – and which can even cook properly.
Alexis is in his thirties, half Swiss, half French. He lives with his wife and daughter at the edge of Winterthur near Zurich. From the small terrace he looks out over fields and meadows, on the horizon raspberries are growing. Entrepreneurially speaking, Alexis has good vision. He builds a thing for the Internet of Things; highly connected and communicative, his EveryCook allows those with little time or talent for cooking to be happy. He lets them participate in a global community of recipe collectors – cooking 2.0 thanks to machine-readable recipes called DigiMeals. They make EveryCook different from cooking machines that are already commercially available yet not really connected.
Protected areas of development
After the property manager grumbled, Alexis re-read his rent contract, but could find no clauses prohibiting innovative work in the basement. So he kept soldering. Another advantage of his R&D location in a completely ordinary Swiss multi-family apartment building is the air-raid shelter. When Alexis closes the heavy door behind him and is alone in a bunker sufficient for 57 Swiss to survive a number of days following a nuclear attack, no one can disturb him. And vice versa: even at night his neighbors cannot hear him milling, cutting and hammering.
Alexis occupies a second basement with his electronic workshop where he can fiddle about. Here he updates the EveryCook processors. The intuitive cooking robot can chop, boil, braise, fry, weigh, and give instructions as to when and how much of which ingredient is needed. Once enough of the desired ingredients have been poured in, EveryCook says, "stop." The robot sends a shopping list to the smartphone and soon EveryCook will also display the nutritional values per serving. You can also add the ingredients in the morning and turn EveryCook on via app on your way home. Then an enticing scent of flavours welcomes you upon your arrival home.
Buildership has fine tongues and tasted for proof: delicious, that Indian curry, just like homemade and freshly prepared. In fact, it was homemade and freshly prepared, but by a robot. All that is left for the consumer to do to do is buy and wash the ingredients, maybe peel or quarter them. EveryCook does all the rest.
Team factors
The team of Every Cook features another programmer, a sales manager, a CFO, and an intern. Samuel, the programmer, feeds Every Cook and web interface with PHP, JavaScript and C. Sales manager Max met Alexis at a speed-dating event for co-founders. (By the way, Alexis can recommend this only to people with patience: his conversion rate was 10 percent.) Max studied chemistry, but his heart beats for sales. CFO Thomas studied at the University of St. Gallen and brings in-depth financial knowledge to the company. Thomas also observes the market competition. Intern Arthur came all the way from France to learn from Alexis and even lives in the founder’s guest room. Cooking for all comes fast and easy thanks to a prototype of EveryCook in the kitchen. New ideas for technical updates and entrepreneurial decisions are the side dishes of every meal they share.
The founder and the money
Alexis has completed his engineering degree at the prestigious ETH Zurich and masters the triad of electronic hardware, mechanical and software programming. Entrepreneurial knowledge he gained in his first small start-up – an internet café in Basel. It was there that he met his wife Maria and his programming partner Samuel. But the high leasing rate at a central location in Basel devoured his savings too quickly. He had to close the café and accept a permanent position in an engineering firm. There, Alexis earned the means for materials needed to build prototypes in his spare time.
After four years of development, Alexis quit his permanent job and cashed in all pension plans prematurely. Thus he invests future into the present and vice versa: the pension plans pay his bills for a while so he can invest all his time, enthusiasm and ideas in to EveryCook. But all good things come to an end. So his next target is to raise venture capital. Alexis even wants to go for it in the United States. The internet café in Basel burned cash too quickly. Yet the EveryCook reduces the burn rate of risotto, rice, curry and the like to zero. And it’s a hot chip cooking robot!
[September 2014]