The inside story of what went wrong at robotics startup Zume Pizza - Business Insider

Business Insider spoke with more than a dozen current and former Zume employees who provided firsthand accounts of the startup's erratic trajectory over its five-year history and Garden's at-times controversial role at the helm of the company. The game even caught the attention of the British progressive-rock group Yes, which collaborated with Garden's company and wrote the music for the game, according to a video about the project on YouTube.By the time he founded Zume in 2015, Garden had added high-level roles at Microsoft and Zynga to his résumé, and he was not shy about highlighting his industry credentials during meetings with early investors and employees, sources told Business Insider. Garden liked to tell employees that "Masa invested in me," implying that he personally was the driving force in securing the Series B and subsequent Series C investments, a former Zume employee told Business Insider.When the SoftBank deal closed in September 2017, Zume was valued at $218 million — a nice step up from Zume's first round of funding in 2016, which valued it at $50 million and included Kortschak Investments, AME Cloud Ventures, SignalFire, and Maveron.By the time of the SoftBank deal, Zume was starting to get some name recognition, even though few people had tasted the pizza. As investor capital flowed in, Zume quickly put it to work, hiring experts in robotics and engineering from universities and other buzzy startups.Business Insider toured Zume's production area in Mountain View in August 2018, before SoftBank's investment in the company. Behind the orchestrated photo ops, the real picture was not as pretty.A former employee told Business Insider that the robots on which Zume, and Garden by extension, had built the entire business were inherently flawed and could not clear food-safety inspections because they produced metal shavings, which could end up in finished pizzas. But the quality-assurance team was personally directed by Garden to keep all 11 trucks in service "until something major happened," one source said.Another former employee recounted a disastrous catering experience in which the team had to resort to cooking the pizzas in a toaster oven for over 100 people when the ovens in two trucks didn't work."It was all really reckless," one of the former employees said. Her departure coincided with the SoftBank investment, but several employees cited her departure as the sea change within Zume's internal culture."The whole tone of the business changed without her guiding and steadying influence," one former employee said.Multiple sources said Garden changed the business direction often and had a habit of talking over female employees and executives during meetings."It seemed like it was hardest for women to be successful under Alex. Though Zume's website indicates a nationwide test run of the packaging with Pizza Hut, Business Insider confirmed that the test was on hold after concerns were raised at the single location in Arizona that had used Zume packaging.Pizza Hut was not immediately available for comment.Employees are scrambling to make the manufacturing process function, sources said, as a contract between Zume and members of the Saudi government is pending.