On “On Mast Brothers”
Sometimes, someone is wrong on the Internet and, in my self-appointed role as Twitter Batman, I seek justice by countering one wrong link or tweet with several (I would say) right ones. This time, about halfway through my tweetstorm I was like, “dude — this is totally what Medium is for.”
It began, as so many of these things do, with a stupid post by someone involved in SF/SV startup culture:
This is the Medium post in question by Dave Morin, “On Mast Brothers” (via Justin Williams and Buzz Andersen):
It’s reductive to paint all of startup culture with this brush, but there is this pattern, where startup people — consumed by the kind of borderline (or not-so-borderline) irrational optimism one needs to spend 20 hour days building and running companies in a hyper-competitive consumer tech market — start to dismiss all critical statements as suspect, even ones that aren’t about them. In this framework, Quartz’s reporting about Mast Brothers’ sketchy storytelling around their product is just more haterade from cynical people who like setting good reputations on fire so they can sell ads on pictures of the blaze.
Morin’s subtitle — boy, you wouldn’t think such a thin post needed a subtitle, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — says it all: “attempted takedown.” There’s such a thing as biased reporting, but the most damning things in it are the contradictions in the Masts’ own statements about where the chocolate comes from. Deena Shanker even does Mast and their customers the good deed of pointing out (via statements from Mast competitors) that, just maybe, Mast Brothers has helped create a market for premium chocolate by making it fashionable and accessible, just as Starbucks did for coffee 20 years ago.
There is something impressive about the personal identification and (emotional) investment an entrepreneur like Morin shows in a post like this — he really identifies strongly with fellow entrepreneurs’ successes and struggles, and will drop a few hundred words to defend them against the forces of haterdom.
At the same time, Morin seems to conflate criticism of a particular entrepreneur and their business practices with an attack on entrepreneurship itself. That’s not what Shanker wrote. No one is saying entrepreneurs are evil liars; America still loves grit and hustle the way we always do. No one is saying — as Morin implies Shanker and the critics are saying — that taking a year to experiment and iterate until your product is refined is inherently (or at all) wrong or sketchy. (The article even says that first, iterative year was one of the times when Mast was relatively upfront about their sourcing.)
What they are saying is that Mast chocolate is marketed as something it’s not. Mast says they are a “bean-to-bar” chocolate maker, a phrase that means a particular thing in that industry. It’s strongly suggested, if not proven, that Mast is — at best — not being as transparent about the origins of those beans as their peers in the high end, artisanal chocolate market, where more transparency is table stakes. At worst, they’re possibly re-melting other makers’ chocolate, and lying about being bean-to-bar at all. The truth is probably both: at various times, Mast has definitely (by their own admission) used Valrhona chocolate, and they definitely obfuscate where their beans come from on their product packaging.
So what? Whether this is a fatal indictment of Mast Brothers, or just an ugly but brief glimpse at their earliest sausage-making, depends on whether they are even in the artisan chocolate business they say they’re in. And I would argue that they are not. They are, rather, a lifestyle brand that’s simply appropriated the language and trappings of artisan chocolate.
Merchants of joy
To separate the culinary/product criticism from the rest of it: Mast is not obliged to make nerdy chocolate that critics like. Having thought on this, I’ve concluded that, just as Beats headphones favor a really sweetened, bass-heavy frequency response that purists hate and people love, and just as the taste of Starbucks’ coffee is burnt and ruined to a trained palate, but rich and coffee-like to lots of people, Mast Brothers chocolate (some, anyway) is aiming for what people will like. As a coffee purist and former AV nerd, I’m in a position to spot both Beats and Starbucks’ shortcomings; I’m an avid user of both companies’ products. If Mast tastes like a candy bar, rather than like real, super-dark, single-origin chocolate, that’s a valid product decision, as is the decision to wrap a giant, tasty candy bar in fine paper. What could feel more grown-up — more like you’ve made it — than to spend $10 of your own money on a tasty treat that looks and feels so sophisticated?
The charge that Mast is all marketing, no substance, seems similar to what people have always said about Apple, and plays into sad, conventional narratives about substance over style, and how it’s wrong to feel good about your own choices unless there’s something rational to back them up, as if “it brings me joy” isn’t a good enough reason to spend a (let’s face it) trivial amount of one’s own money, as if joy in fact opposes and erodes rationality, and as such, cannot be trusted.
What I’m saying is: as single origin chocolate makers, the Masts are probably liars, at least a little bit. They should probably just stop saying they are bean-to-bar, and put their minds toward finding a term for what they do that’s just as luxury-sounding but not a lie. But I also think they will probably survive this, because they are successful merchants of joy to grown-ups with disposable income.
My wife just reminded me of a key point in Shanker’s article for Quartz: Mast Brothers has tried to do legitimately bean-to-bar chocolate — and the results were terrible. Where a “normal” Mast bar is “bad” for being too much like lower-end, crappier chocolate, these “artisan” Mast bars — which, take note, were not marketed any differently from the other Mast bars, because that would be admitting that they weren’t bean-to-bar — were just bad. When Mast tries to be what they say they are, a claim that very few of their customers are all that interested in examining closely, they ship a bad product. This suggests to me that the solution is not that they should try to legitimize their bean-to-bar business, but rather, they should just own this luxury/fashion chocolate segment they’ve helped to create.
What would be interesting is if Mast’s stockists and retail partners were also taken in by the bean to bar thing, or if some of them decide tactically to cut their losses and stop selling Mast bars rather than be seen supporting phonies. I tend to doubt that, because while the “bean-to-bar” thing may be bullshit, Mast still makes their chocolate in Brooklyn (it’s made by real people who probably are also wearing the same shoes as you!), and, again, buying it — probably as an add-on item while shopping at J. Crew, or getting a coffee at Stumptown — feels like a (guilty) pleasure. Everything I just said sounds ridiculous when I type it out like that, but I’m serious — what seems silly can also be a successful product, and Mast bars are absolutely both.
Note I stopped short of calling it a great product. Jeni’s Ice Cream — which retails for $12/pint in a world where $5 for Ben & Jerry’s feels like a splurge to many people — is a great product. Apple makes great products, such as the $30 SD card adapter I just bought for my phone, or the $80 wireless mouse I have two of. These are great products because, in addition to bringing me joy, they have integrity. Jeni’s Ice Cream is all that Jeni’s says it is: made with grass-fed milk, in small batches, with fresh ingredients, by a Certified B Corp with tons of transparency and candor. Apple famously lacks transparency and candor, but they make up for it with quality—Apple hardware is always either the most robust you can buy, the best user experience around, or both.
If, say, Askinosie — who, btw, have collaborated with brands like Jeni’s and Intelligentsia Coffee to make some really wonderful (and expensive) chocolate bars — decided to make a play for Mast’s fancy-Hershey-bar niche, that could be an interesting battle, though it may require trade-offs Askinosie is unwilling to make. That’s fine too. They seem to be doing well despite not having their bars on the checkout counters at Anthropologie.
It probably works to Mast’s advantage that most of their fellow artisan chocolate makers (Dandelion, Askinosie, Theo, TCHO, Vosges, to name just a few off the top of my head) are such insufferable nerds about origins and quality (like Askinosie), or else have gone totally the other direction and sought to partner with even bigger players like Whole Foods. (You can buy Vosges or Wild Ophelia bars at Target now.) The particular market niche Mast occupies — expensive but accessible, crowd-pleasing, boutiquey but not exclusive — is a good fit with many of the places where their bars are sold, like J Crew, and so far they have that space all to themselves.
Haters gonna hate hate hate, fakers gonna fake fake fake
Business is tough. I would think that for someone who burned through millions of dollars in invested capital trying to bust into social networking of all things, Dave Morin ought to have a thicker skin — or at least less tendency to project his own struggles onto other people.
When I was in SF on business last month, my walk from our Airbnb to my office always took me past Dear Mom on 16th, where they have this mural:
This is a very startup-y quote, one Morin (and fellow hater-haters like Marc Andreessen or Sam Altman) would do well to remember. Haters are gonna hate; so what? It sucks to see a “takedown” in one of your “favorite” publications, but at the same time, Mast is expanding and making money. They are, objectively, winning. If they handle this mini-scandal well — either by addressing it, or by ignoring it while continuing to scale back their statements about being bean-to-bar — they’ll continue to be successful and this will all be a footnote on their Wikipedia page
Things like this probably seem like bigger deals to founders whose companies have a half-life of a year or two, rather than ten, fifty, or a hundred years. Mast is approaching 10 years old and still has tons of room to grow; Morin’s startup Path will be lucky to survive that long. To put that into perspective, Bayer has been in business for over a century, their Wikipedia page includes incidents where people died, and what’s more, they invented heroin.
While there’s glory in advocating for the gritty, hustling, entrepreneurial American will to succeed — preferably without enduring any criticism or bad feelings along the way, because we all know what fragile hothouse flowers businessmen are — there’s more grace in, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, shaking it the fuck off.
When people retell the legend of Steve Jobs, they don’t talk about how he enjoyed two decades of unquestioned public support and unfettered success. He was fired from Apple after shipping one failed and one troubled product, then spent ten years trying to find a follow-up success at NeXT and Pixar, then — two decades after its founding — rebuilt a nearly dead Apple into the most valuable company in the world, while he was dying from cancer. Apple and Jobs are Silicon Valley’s most inspirational founding myth — almost a second origin story, the New Testament to the semiconductor boom’s Old Testament. And there’s as much darkness and humanity in that story as there is genius and triumph.
There’s that, and then there’s a culture where employees blog about changing jobs like they’re LeBron leaving Cleveland, and where founders take it personally when their taste in luxury chocolate makers is called into question. If Dave Morin thinks it’s an outrage when someone reports critical things about his favorite candy company, how would he weather a scandal at his own company? I can tell you how, because there was one: Morin apologized, fixed the problem, and moved on.
As I’ve said, I think Mast customers are entitled to whatever joy they get from buying that product; that the Masts are so good at creating and selling that experience is a big factor in their continuing success. This may be a bump in the road for them; it probably won’t kill them, because they’re not really in the artisanal chocolate business — they’re in the joy business. They’ll be fine, as will Dave Morin, as will we all. We know this. Hopefully, he knows it too.
