Secret codes, threats of court, betrayal. How one pair put together a fixer for ice cream machines at McDonald's, notorious for frequent breakdowns, and how the fast food giant froze their business.
Jeremy O'Sullivan insists that of all the mysteries and oddities of the McDonald's ice cream machine, the first thing to do is figure out its secret password.
As he explains, you need to click on the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine on the ice cream cone symbol, then press the snowflake and milk shake buttons so that the numbers 5 appear on the screen, then 2, then 3, then 1. After this sequence from as many as 16 clicks on the screen, a menu will magically appear. Only with this cheat code can you get access to the vital signs of the machine - everything from the viscosity settings for ingredients such as milk and sugar, to the temperature of the glycol in the heating element and the meaning of many cryptic error messages.
“None of the McDonald's or Taylor companies explain why there is a secret, hidden menu,” O'Sullivan wrote in one of his first cryptic messages I began to receive from him this year.
According to O'Sullivan, this menu is not found in any of the Taylor digital ice cream machine shoppers' instructions that are standard equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald's in the US and tens of thousands more around the world. And this opacity and unfriendliness to users is far from the only problem with these machines. They have earned a reputation for being absurdly unreliable and fragile. Due to the many controversial engineering decisions, they break so often in all McDonald's restaurants around the world that they even turned into a real meme on social networks. Search Twitter for " broken McDonald's ice cream machine " and you will find thousands of messages from angry people.
But after years of researching this complex machine and many options for its failure, O'Sullivan is most annoyed when a food machinery giant like Taylor sells McFlurry squeeze devices to McDonald's restaurant owners for $ 18,000 apiece, and at this does not reveal to them all her inner secrets. What's more, Taylor maintains a network of approved retailers that bill franchised restaurants with thousands of dollars in expensive service annually. For this money, the company's on-call technicians come to the diners and enter this secret password.
O'Sullivan argues that this secret menu betrays a business model that goes far beyond the mere notion of the right to repair. According to him, this is just milkshake extortion [in English sounds prettier: milkshake shakedown / approx. per.]. The scheme is simple: sell a complex and capricious car to the diners. Don't let them understand why it breaks down all the time. Take some of their service profits for yourself. “It is extremely profitable to deliberately blind the user so that they cannot make any fundamental changes to the equipment they own,” says O'Sullivan. And above it all is McDonald's, insisting on loyalty to a longtime supplier. You object to the monarchy from McDonald's about the equipment - and the corporation will take away the franchise from you....
So a couple of years ago, after their own weird and painful torture with these devices from Taylor, 34-year-old O'Sullivan and his partner, 33-year-old Melissa Nelson, began selling a device the size of a small book called Kytch. Install it in your ice cream machine, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and it hacks into your hostile device, giving you access to all its forbidden secrets. Kytch works like a wiretap, intercepting all communications between components and sending them to a computer with a friendlier interface than Taylor's. The device not only shows all the internal data of the machine, but also writes them to a log, and even offers ways to fix problems - all through the web interface.
Nelson and O'Sullivan
As a result, as soon as McDonald's and Taylor learned about the first successes of Kytch, the Cold War, which has been going on for two years, was unleashed, now turning into a hot one. At some point, the creators of Kytch even decided that Taylor had hired private detectives to get their hands on their devices. Taylor recently unveiled its own competing product offering machine monitoring over the Internet. McDonald's went as far as sending out emails to franchises warning that Kytch devices were accessing Taylor's "confidential information" and could even "seriously injure people."
O'Sullivan and a partner, after observing McDonald's and Taylor's attempts to destroy their business in the five months that have passed since sending those same emails, launched a counteroffensive. The couple behind Kytch said they plan to sue those McDonald's franchises they suspect are colluding with Taylor in handing over Kytch devices to the company for reverse engineering. And this is already a violation of the contract with Kytch. Taylor denies having acquired the devices, but does not deny that it wants to get one of them, or that the company's distributor eventually made it to one of the devices. The lawsuit is likely to be just the first salvo in the upcoming dirty legal battle against Taylor with McDonald's.
However, in his first letters to me, O'Sullivan did not say anything about this escalation of the conflict. Instead, he modestly suggested that I pull one of the strings he said would lead to a major conspiracy. “I think you can tell the whole story to the world simply by asking a simple and reasonable question: why is there this hidden menu?”
* * *
The standard Taylor ice cream machine in the McDonald's kitchen resembles an "Italian sports car," as a franchise owner tweeted as McD Truth told me .
When hundreds of the most sophisticated components of the Taylor C602 work in unison, its performance is a paragon of efficiency and power. It, like other ice cream machines, accepts liquid ingredients through a funnel, and then freezes in a rotating barrel, and cuts thin layers of frozen mixture from the surface of a cold metal container with special blades. She constantly mixes the ingredients to obtain the smallest crystals, and then pushes through a nozzle into a waiting waffle cone or cup.
The peculiarity of this apparatus is that it has two funnels and two barrels, each of which works independently with its own specific settings. As a result, the machine can dispense milkshakes and soft ice cream at the same time. Unlike many machines, it uses a pump instead of gravity to speed up the passage of McFlurries and other desserts. McD Truth describes that at peak times, the machine can produce up to 10 ice cream cones per minute - something that other machines can't do.
Notorious for their capricious nature and fragility, Taylor machines are used by almost all major fast food chains, including more than 13,000 McDonald's in the United States, as well as tens of thousands of these establishments around the world.
While other ice cream machines need to be disassembled and cleaned daily, throwing away any leftover food, Taylor uses a daily “heat treatment”. Leftover food is heated to 66 ° C, kept in this form for 30 minutes, and then frozen again overnight. The result is a modern miracle of hygiene and economy.
However, in keeping with the analogy with the Italian sports car, these units are also capricious, fragile and overly complex. “They work great when everything is 100% perfect,” writes McD Truth. "And if something is not perfect, the car breaks down." Under a franchise agreement, McDonald's allows the eateries to use another, this time a real Italian Carpigiani ice cream machine from Bologna. McD Truth writes that this car is much better designed, but given that parts from Italy can take a week for it, it is bought by much less restaurants.
All precision machine components must be disassembled and decontaminated every two weeks. Some of its parts must be thoroughly lubricated. Its components include at least two dozen plastic and rubber O-rings of various sizes. Forget at least one and the pump will fail or the liquid ingredients will leak. A diner technician told me that he had disassembled and assembled the Taylor ice cream machine over a hundred times, and after assembling the first time, they worked hardly ten times. “They are very, very, very moody,” he says.
All these components need to be removed, cleaned and lubricated - and so every two weeks.
The automatic nightly pasteurization process, instead of making life easier for the owners, has become their biggest burden. Leave too many or too few ingredients in the funnels, accidentally turn off the machine at the wrong time, make any of the hundreds of trivial mistakes, or run into an unforeseen accident - and the machine stops pasteurizing for four hours, displaying an incomprehensible general error. It only means that the machine will not work until it has completely repeated the entire four-hour heating and cooling cycle, which often occurs during the peak hours of ice cream sales.
On this you can immediately lose hundreds of dollars. Especially, as O'Sullivan says, during "shamrock season," when McDonald's offers green mint cocktails to celebrate St. Patrick, increasing cocktail sales tenfold. "Shamrock season is fucking serious," O'Sullivan emphasizes.
And Taylor sells such technically demanding machines to factories where they will be watched over by a bored teenager whose fast food career is limited to a few weeks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in many McDonald's restaurants, these machines sit idle as often as they work. According to statistics from McBroken.com, which automatically tries to place orders for ice cream online at every McDonald's in the US every 20-30 minutes, at any time in the last 2 months from 5 to 16% of eateries in the US could not sell ice cream. On a typical bad day - like when I posted this article - it meant there was no ice cream in one of five McDonald's in Los Angeles, Washington DC. and Philadelphia, one in four in San Francisco, and one in ten in New York.
Sample of statistics of non-working ice cream machines in McDonald's USA at an arbitrary point in time
Many companies have fought against granting rights to their own customers to repair the equipment they purchased. You can recall John Deere's attempts to deny farmers access to tractor software, and Apple's efforts to restrict who can repair iPhones. However, few companies have equipment that needs to be repaired as often as compared to the ice cream machine at McDonald's. When WIRED contacted McDonald's for comment, McDonald's did not even bother advocating the disorderly behavior of these machines. “We understand the frustration of customers who came to McDonald's for frozen treats and found a broken cocktail machine. We are striving to improve this situation, ”wrote a company representative.
On social media, the McDonald's ice cream machine has already become a symbol of all the frustrations with modern technology, capitalism and human conditions. When three women in Florida attacked a McDonald's employee in 2017 after learning that the ice cream machine was broken, a large proportion of Twitter commentators sided with the attackers. Even McDonald's itself tweeted on its official Twitter account last year in August that "we have an inner joke about the ice cream machine, but we're worried it might not work."
One evening in March, I tried to count the number of people tweeting a variation of the joke that they would spend the $ 1,400 they received from the government in compensation from the pandemic to fix an ice cream machine at a local McDonald's. After the 200th tweet, I got lost.
* * *
Ten years ago, McDonald's problems with ice cream had not yet become the object of criticism on social networks. So when O'Sullivan and Nelson first decided to put their careers on the line for frozen sweets in 2011, they had to experience the intricacies of the soft ice cream industry.
They met at Bucknell University and started dating in the late 2000s, and then began their careers in accounting - Nelson at Deloitte, and O'Sullivan at Ernst & Young. Both found this business unbearably boring. A few years later, they started throwing ideas for their own business, and settled on the passion for frozen yogurt , which gradually covered the country with Pinkberry and Red Mango stores.
The business was essentially built around a bunch of ice cream machines - mostly machines from Taylor that didn't have a pasteurization step that would kill the yogurt crop. Even so, yoghurt sellers paid for hundreds of square meters of real estate and salaries to crowds of employees, which accounted for most of their monthly expenses. The frozen yogurt industry was in urgent need of rework through automation.
Therefore, Nelson and O'Sullivan, then working in Washington D.C. began developing a machine called the Frobot. It was a bulky closet flanking a Taylor frozen yogurt machine, with its own TV-sized touchscreen and credit card terminal. In other words, they decided to squeeze the frozen yogurt store into one stand-alone device. They hoped to start putting Frobots in public places, turning them on and letting the machines squeeze out their profits. They could not solve the problem with sprinkling. However, it, according to O'Sullivan, still gave almost no profit.
It took them three years to build the first Frobot prototype. They bought a Taylor's car from the Craigslist flea market and hired engineers. After their first unremarkable test in a West Virginia medical school cafe, Nelson and O'Sullivan staged Frobot in a Washington D.C. coworking space. The large white wardrobe has shown moderate success. The couple decided to try their luck, they quit and moved to San Francisco to start up close, and placed the next generation Frobot in a community club near the Palace of Fine Arts, where, they say, the machine started making $ 500 a day.
But now, having released Frobot into the big world, the inventors are faced with a problem. They wanted their car to be fully autonomous, converting dairy treats into cash with minimal intervention. US National Health Fund regulations required periodic product temperature checks to ensure that the machine does not sell spoiled and re-frozen yogurt filled with the wrong microorganisms. The temperature data was stored inside Taylor's car, and the couple had no access to it. However, they were interested in the fact that the technician whom they called to service the car could call up the numbers they needed by entering the secret code 5231, not mentioned in the owner's instructions.
Around that time, O'Sullivan contacted a contact at the Hax hardware startup accelerator in Shenzhen, who invited him to work on Frobot at the Hax workshop. They were promised an investment of $ 100,000 and advisory consultants, among whom was Andrew Huang, nicknamed "Bunny," the legendary iron guru who first hacked the Xbox 20 years ago. O'Sullivan and Nelson saw the proposal as a chance to overcome the difficulty of monitoring temperature. Will Huang and his colleagues be able to help them pull data out of the car and send it in real time to a remote interface?
O'Sullivan and one of the Frobot contract engineers moved to Shenzhen at the end of 2016. They started working in a Hax warehouse located above one of the city's famous electronic markets, and tried to figure out the Taylor ice cream machine in order to understand the machine's internal communications and learn how to intercept data. Huang recalls that O'Sullivan was more of an entrepreneur in spirit than a technologist, but was impressed by how detailed the future of the Frobot machines was. “It was clear from the beginning that they had a vision,” says Huang.
Huang also recalls how he drew O'Sullivan's attention to the fact that the machine from Taylor used to create the Frobot, like many units in the food industry, uses ancient technologies that have not essentially changed for 50 years. Moore's law, not even Web 2.0, Huang recalls. “Everyone eats this food, but the car came out of the dark ages.”
And yet, O'Sullivan and his engineer actively moved forward, and by the end of their stay in China, four months later, they built a device that would later turn into Kytch - a hack that helps Frobot meet US sanitary requirements.
O'Sullivan and Nelson note that they did all of this thanks to the knowledge they gained from Taylor, and sometimes their active involvement. One of the company's executives was at a party in Washington to celebrate the launch of a prototype of their car. The company later asked them to supply 10 ice cream machines to adapt them. The company even sent one of its cars to Shenzhen for them. Frobot was not competing with Taylor - it was a promising new source of sales, or even a new auto market.
At some point while in Shenzhen, O'Sullivan wrote to his contact at Taylor asking for advice on a technical issue. The company executive told him that if they "want to connect to control the machine or intercept packets of data, they will have to do it without Taylor's help because of the company's internal security policy."
Perhaps this answer cannot be called friendly, but O'Sullivan understood it this way: we do not help you break into our machines, but we know what you are doing and we do not stop you. That is, as he says, they gave a couple of carte blanche.
* * *
In 2017, Frobot began to gain traction. Tesla has installed two of these machines in its cafe. Home to the San Francisco Forty Niners football team, Levi's has installed six for itself, and the owners of the football team have invested in Nelson and O'Sullivan's company. In the meantime, Taylor's attitude towards Frobot remained friendly enough to invite a couple to present the machines at trade shows.
Nelson and O'Sullivan say that at all these shows and the first Frobot field trials, they began to get feedback from Taylor customers, which matched Huang's warnings about the engineering quality of these machines. Despite the dominant position of these units in fast food, it is very difficult to maintain them in working order.
Cryptic failures and error messages began to appear in eight Frobot machines located in the San Francisco Bay Area, haunting other Taylor customers. They received reports from machines that the temperature of the yoghurt mix was too low. Or too high. Or too much viscosity. Soon, they were constantly driving to Levi's stadium to help the confused staff fix these mistakes and rebuild the Taylor machines inside their vending machines.
Fully automatic Frobot for the sale of frozen yoghurts, based on the Taylor ice cream machine
Gradually, they came to the fact that they began to install Nest surveillance cameras inside the Frobot housings, in order to understand what was wrong there. On one occasion, they saw a mixture of ingredients inside a Frobot in a Tesla factory bubble and leak out of the car, pouring liquid yogurt over the entire cabinet. Seven hours later, they watched as the cafeteria worker in Tesla calmly opened the closet, and, without doing anything with the sticky mass, quietly installs a plastic spatula, which he had forgotten to put before while cleaning the car.
It soon became clear that their business had become the opposite of automation - no one in the stadium or at Tesla could set up or maintain Frobot without the constant personal help of the company's founders. And the problem was with the Taylor car inside the Frobot. “These cars just suck,” O'Sullivan recalls his thoughts at the time.
Soon, O'Sullivan and Nelson realized that they needed to change something. And by that time, they were already unwittingly working on a prototype for another product that offered a solution to exactly the problem that was killing their own business.
After that, over a year, they honed their little computer component, Frobot, which monitors the data flowing inside the Taylor ice cream machine, and created a system that allowed them to look inside the machine and manipulate all the variables. They ended up with a software interface for diagnosing and solving many machine problems in a small case that housed a Raspberry Pi single board computer.
In the spring of 2019, they relaunched their company, now under the name Kytch. The name signified the size of their ambition, and their zeal to create an entire smart kitchen that went far beyond an ice cream machine.
When Kytch began operations in April of that year, Nelson toured the Bay for restaurants that used a Taylor car, advertised services to franchise owners on LinkedIn, and offered six months of free trial before signing up for $ 10 / month. After finding their first few customers at Burger Kings and Super Duper Burgers, entrepreneurs are finally starting to enter their target market. These were the owners of the McDonald's franchises, who not only owned the largest collection of Taylor units, but also used the most complex and often broken digital version of the company's products.
In the fall of 2019, as they began to penetrate the quirky inner world of McDonald's, O'Sullivan and Nelson were shocked to learn that most diner owners never had access to a service menu showing variables such as the temperature of the funnels or the glycol used in the whimsical process. pasteurization. They haven't even heard of this menu. “And at that moment we had enlightenment,” says Nelson. "Why are such important things hidden behind a menu that most people don't even know existed?"
Meanwhile, many McDonald's owners paid Taylor distributors hundreds of dollars a month in service fees, often for services such as changing simple settings hidden behind these menus. Then the entrepreneurs added Kytch Assist to their Kytch, which automatically recognized some of the machine's common problems and tweaked those hidden variables, preventing trouble before it happened.
One owner, who asked to remain anonymous, told the news outlet that the ice cream machine at one of his restaurants broke down almost every week due to a mysterious failure during the pasteurization cycle. He periodically watched closely the assembly of the car, but it was all to no avail.
After installing Kytch, it became clear almost immediately that one overzealous employee was pouring too much mixture into one of the machine's inlets. Today this owner wakes up at 5:30, picks up the phone, and makes sure that all his cars have gone through this unreliable heat treatment. One car technician told me that even though Kytch has nearly doubled the cost of its set-top box and added $ 250 to activate it over the past two years, it still saves the franchise owner "at least a thousand dollars a month."
McD Truth secretly reports that Kytch rarely succeeds in preventing ice cream machines from breaking down anyway. But without these attachments, restaurant workers still in 9 out of 10 cases did not even inform the owners about problems with this unit. Now, at least, the latter receive a warning by email along with a diagnosis of the problem. “And this is already a luxury,” writes McD Truth. "Kytch is a great device."
Kytch Raspberry Pi based device designed to fit inside a Taylor ice cream machine
When the word of mouth of the McDonald's franchises began spreading the word about Kytch, the company's sales began to double every quarter. O'Sullivan and Nelson hired a sales manager to become their third full-time employee. By the fall of 2020, more than 500 such devices have already penetrated the insides of Taylor ice cream machines located around the world. Based on free trial statistics, the company predicted that they would sell 500 more by the end of the year. However, the ice cream empire they had ventured to go against was preparing to strike back.
* * *
Two days after Kytch launched in April 2019, O'Sullivan and Nelson noticed that a familiar director at Taylor had placed an order with them. After writing him a letter, they politely asked why Taylor was interested in their product and what she was going to do with it. Having received no answer, they canceled the order and returned the money to the director.
A couple of months later, they noticed another strange order, this time from Brinks Gilson, a representative of a third-party law firm that Taylor worked with. Having learned his name, they canceled this order as well. In the months that followed, suspicious orders continued. And if most franchise owners ordered Kytch for their restaurants, these suspicious customers asked for the devices to be delivered to their home address.
Comparing these addresses with publicly available databases, Nelson and O'Sullivan found on LinkedIn a person whose profile was listed as Marksmen, a private detective company dealing with intellectual property issues. They began to suspect that Taylor had hired private detectives who were using fake names in an attempt to get their hands on a device that hacked into their cars.
Around the same time, Taylor sent a No-Continue Order to entrepreneurs, requiring them to stop using the Taylor brand at trade shows. This is how the company's friendship with Frobot ended.
In the months that followed, as sales of Kytch picked up steam, the strange orders stopped coming in and there was no clear sign of hostility from Taylor. Nelson and O'Sullivan were delighted to receive a letter in February 2020 from Tyler Gamble, head of equipment at the National Supply Chain Management Board, a group at McDonald's franchise management.
Gamble got "a lot of rumors" about Kytch, he wrote in his letter, and wanted to try the device in 10 of his own restaurants. O'Sullivan recalls that when talking on the phone, Gamble was friendly and interested in Kytch, but at the same time he warned that the opportunity to bypass Taylor's secret menu is a risky thing that can infuriate the company. Yet Nelson and O'Sullivan were mesmerized by the possibility that Gamble was using his enormous influence over other franchises to advertise their own product. They gave him four test devices.
In October of that year, at the annual conference of the National Association of Franchise Owners, Gamble pledged to address customer ice cream issues in a speech. “On the milkshake machine, I want to assure you guys that I won't consider my job as a head of equipment successful unless we find a way to stop McDonald's from being a target of ridicule,” he said, showing honest smile. "We will not stop until we fix the situation."
Then he basically talked about Kytch for a full minute and advertised their machine. “I had the opportunity to try out their devices in my restaurants for several months,” Gamble told the crowd. “To tell you the truth, this equipment is not approved by McDonald's, and the suppliers are not yet fully in agreement with its use. But my job is to educate you about the equipment and how it is affecting the industry, and I truly believe that this device can reduce the complexity of restaurant management, make life easier for your team and increase cash flow. ”
O'Sullivan and Nelson, who watched the speech online from their stand at the show, were delighted. They paid little heed to the remarks "not approved by McDonald's" and "vendors are not yet in full agreement." They seemed to be able to sell Kytch to virtually every McDonald's in America.
After the fast food giants froze the company's business, the Kytch co-founders are ready to give them a legal rebuff.
And then, on November 2, thunder struck. The shocked Kytch salesman forwarded a letter to Nelson and O'Sullivan, apparently sent by McDonald's to all franchise owners. It first warned that the Kytch installation was in breach of the Taylor's warranty - a familiar threat posed by corporations fighting against customer repair rights. It then stated that Kytch "allows access to the equipment controller and sensitive data" (that is, data owned by Taylor and McDonald's, not the restaurant owners), "poses a potentially large security risk for the team or technicians trying to clean or fix the car." and that it "could cause serious injury." The last warning in the letter read: 'McDonald's strongly recommends that you remove the Kytch device from all machines and stop using it. "
The next day, McDonald's sent another message to all franchisees, announcing the release of the new Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity - essentially duplicating many of Kytch's features. The letter repeated the warning against using Kytch.
In the months that followed, restaurant owners canceled hundreds of subscriptions, trial periods, and promises to install Kytch, and the company's sales plans went down the drain. It became impossible to find new clients. Their only salesperson, shocked by what was happening, quit.
When WIRED contacted McDonald's and Taylor, the companies repeated the warning that Kytch posed a danger to workers and technicians. “Maintenance and handling of Taylor's special soft ice cream and cocktail equipment can be challenging,” writes a Taylor spokesperson. “All checks built into the equipment controller are designed to protect the operator and technician interacting with the machine.”
As for Taylor's internet-connected device similar to Kytch, the company simply said that "Taylor did not mimic a device from Kytch and had no such desire." The company says it has been developing such a device for many years, alongside another Internet kitchen device, Open Kitchen, sold by another division of Taylor's parent company, Middleby.
None of the franchise owners who spoke to the editors had ever heard of the Open Kitchen device or seen the Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity machine in action. McDonald's says only a few dozen restaurants have been testing the device since October.
All owners agreed that the idea of harming people with the Kytch device is far-fetched, if not impossible. Kytch commands usually do not affect the operation of the moving parts of the machine, and the Taylor's instructions for use say that when servicing and disassembling the machine, it must first be disconnected from the mains.
McD Truth claims that the McDonald's emails that killed Kytch stem from Taylor's goal of creating a Kytch-like system of his own, as well as McDonald's long-term partnership with Taylor. After all, the latter makes not only ice cream machines, but also grills on which the company's main product, burgers, is fried. It is also possible that McDonald's feared the Kytch device's ability to collect proprietary data on ice cream sales.
Another franchise owner called the blast from McDonald's "suspicious" and "very awkward." He said he hadn't seen anything like it in 25 years of owning a diner.
* * *
After McDonald's and Taylor bombed their startup, Nelson and O'Sullivan began to suspect that the two companies had somehow got their hands on the Kytch device so that if not copy, then try it out. However, Kytch demanded that customers sign a contract prohibiting them from giving their device to anyone else. Who passed it on?
The couple began their investigation. They recalled that Tyler Gamble had told them six months ago that one of his Kytch-equipped Taylor cars had a compressor blown. When they met with Gamble at the conference, he mentioned that the car was still being repaired - which seemed strange to them. It doesn't take six months to fix a compressor.
After the collapse of their business, O'Sullivan and Nelson began to look into authorizations on the Kytch website, and saw that one of the accounts associated with the Gamble car that was sent for repair was deleted a couple of months after the fatal email from McDonald's in November. ... The deleted username was Matt Wilson. Was Wilson one of Gamble's employees? They started tracking his location based on the IP addresses of the networks he logged in from and found IPs from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana.
None of these locations coincided with the location of Tyler Gamble's restaurants. But they all coincided with the location of the businesses owned by TFG, the distributor of Taylor ice cream machines.
Nelson and O'Sullivan were on friendly terms with the directors of TFG when they worked on Frobot. They began to rummage through their old contacts, and found a business card of Blaine Martin, one of the owners of TFG, who gave it to them at the exhibition. And they were amazed to realize that his phone was used to create the Matt Wilson account.
Apparently, their device was acquired by distributor Taylor. And they began to suspect that there was no broken compressor, and the device was handed over to him by their friend Tyler Gamble.
They now claim that Gamble both praised Kytch from the stage at a conference in October and helped Taylor destroy their startup in a cold-blooded betrayal.
* * *
They now hope that revenge is a dish to be served through long and complicated legal proceedings. The lawsuit they are planning is based on claims that Gamble, and likely other Kytch users, violated their contracts with the company by allowing Taylor to study the devices, thus currying favor with McDonald's and their corporate allies.
However, the Kytch co-founders do not hide that their legal threats will not stop there. They're going to go all the way to the very end, all the way to the entire McDonald's chain. “We are confident that we will find out everything we need to fully get even with all those responsible,” predicts O'Sullivan.
Taylor counters that he "does not own or had a Kytch device" and that he "knows nothing about anyone logging into the company's website." However, notes that "our distributor in Tennessee reported that their technician removed the Kytch device to service our device." The TFG distributor did not respond to requests for comment in any way, and Tyler Gamble did not respond to our questions. However, in response to our letter, he described himself as "a prime supporter of Kytch" and claimed to have supported the startup publicly and privately. "It is strange that they are going to sue the man who spoke for them and their client," Gamble wrote, "but the truth will come out."
Regardless of how the legal dispute unfolds, former tech advisor and startup investor Huang argues that McDonald's and Taylor's attempts to crush the tiny startup are a form of recognition of its importance. “When big players come to you and start punching their chest, they kind of recognize you as a threat to the alpha male,” says Huang, whose Hax accelerator still has a small stake in the company. “This shows that there is demand for Kytch and that this device could have disrupted the current state of affairs. However, if the big guys can't do it, or want to steal the idea, sometimes it's easier for them to just hide the body. "
As for Nelson and O'Sullivan, they have no illusion that their lawsuit will protect Kytch from McDonald's and Taylor's attempts to destroy the startup. In one of his last conversations, O'Sullivan admitted that he considers this article to be something of an obituary for his company, after it was successfully destroyed by the fast food giants.
Sometimes he seems to admit that the death battles that his startup is waging are tied to such platitudes as fast food ice cream. "We want the world to know about this because it all revolves around ice cream!" - said O'Sullivan at some point with despair.
However, he sometimes describes Kytch's story as David and Goliath fighting for the right to repair, or even more: as a courageous attempt to fix a not very critical, but very common part of the world's infrastructure. And this attempt failed not because of the lack of equipment, but because of the people who control it - and for some of them it would be better if it remained broken.
"There is an ice cream machine," O'Sullivan says grimly, "and there is a machine behind that machine." And they have not yet managed to find a secret code to crack the latter.