Why Did John Coogan Leave Soylent?

John Coogan left Soylent because the company was pretty mature, he was running e-commerce, and the business no longer needed a software team. He wanted other work while Soylent pivoted to retail, a make-or-break move for a direct-to-consumer brand that started online.

VCs crowded in because online growth was so strong, and many believed e-commerce was the future. E-commerce still grows slowly, so the brand eventually grows at the rate of e-commerce. E-commerce is maybe 10 or 20 percent of overall commerce, much of it TVs, books, and other goods that ship easily, while a lot of groceries are still not sold online. Soylent had penetrated the total TAM of online protein powder supplements and needed retail, so the founders brought in an executive team. They might have figured retail out themselves, but they were burnt out as the business moved farther from innovation and from what they were good at.

His co-founder, the high school friend he moved to Silicon Valley with, was quitting smoking and proposed a nicotine gum company. Nicorette was 50 years old, with a supply chain that had not been modernized for the Internet. Gum fits in an envelope. Soylent spent $10 a box to ship bottles. Lucy cost a dollar to ship, and the economics flipped. An open-source mindset at Soylent treated competition as fine, and companies copied them and did better. Huel executed methodically. Joylent, Zoylent, Moylent, and open-source competitors piled on.