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

By the time he founded Zume in 2015, Garden had added high-level roles at Microsoft and Zynga to his resume, and he was not shy about highlighting his industry credentials during meetings with early investors and employees, sources told Business Insider.

Garden met with Masa, as the Japanese billionaire is regularly referred to in Silicon Valley, in 2017 ahead of a planned Series B fundraise. 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.

But Garden was struggling financially, the Zume investor said, and was starting to look for other ways to boost his personal income. SignalFire stepped in and made Garden a venture partner with a salary of roughly $250,000, plus the usual deal carry incentives. It's not clear how many of those robots were in existence and how that figure has changed in the years since, but a Zume spokesperson told Business Insider in 2018 that its Mountain View production facility was capable of churning out about 370 pizzas an hour.

"Pieces of information would come in from a single source or customer and the overcorrection to that one data point was incredible," another former employee told Business Insider. "That was the case from the beginning, and when you add $375 million it's like pouring gasoline on the fire.

"It was all really reckless," one of the former employees said. This employee left Zume after voicing concerns with the machinery, specifically the metal shavings and malfunctioning blade, to Garden, and threatened to alert the FTC to misleading advertising since Zume was still marketing the pizzas as baked on the way. Every former employee that spoke to Business Insider spoke of an argument or disagreement with Garden that.

Multiple sources said Garden changed the business direction often, and had a habit of talking over women employees and executives during meetings. , and several employees that were affected said the promised severance has yet to materialize. One employee said they were given "Alex leave," an internal joke that employees could not show up to work for several months and still collect a paycheck until severance kicked in a few months down the road.

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