The World’s Best Umbrella

When I was six years old, my favorite kids’ TV program solicited submissions to a competition to design an umbrella for the future. I was obsessed and spent days sketching an umbrella that I was quite certain was going to win the prize. After sending it off through mail, I waited weeks and months and tuned in to that program every single night to hear my name being called.

It never happened. “It might have gotten lost in the mail!” my mom would try to console me. My little mind could not fathom how they did not appreciate the bold vision my design conveyed. I was so disappointed that to this date I still remember that hurt feeling of getting my first rejection in life.

My umbrella is essentially a drone. It flies, hovering over you and following you like a cute drone pet. It also carries your bag, which, mind you, is filled with snacks instead of books. It has a TV screen embedded at the front, playing your favorite program, certainly not that one that rejected my submission – it’s blacklisted – sorry I digressed. The umbrella is so awesome that if it had a tagline, that would have been “You wish every day is a rainy day!”

(After taking my description of the umbrella, Dall.E recreated my design. To my dismay, I could not quite hang the backpack on the handle. Dall.E put it on the girl no matter how I prompted, bribed, and coerced it. Alas, I guess the current AI model is still very restricted by training data and limited by its imagination. But to my delight, this rendering made the umbrella look like a time machine, which, had I had it in my original design, could have made a difference and won me the prize I coveted.)

Decades later when I was building Mealvana the meal planning app, I think of my umbrella quite often, because my app started to resemble my umbrella, in the way that it tries to solve every problem and do everything. It plans meals, creates a shopping list, calculates nutrition, minimizes waste, and looks for coupons and discounts. It doesn’t do your tax, but probably will soon. I claim that I am a big fan of building the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and I readily embrace progress via iterations, but my app has become embarrassingly maximum and quite honestly, an "Frankenstein" of apps.  

There is nothing more addictive than adding more features. “One more – just this one more thing – and this app is going to be awesome.” I was possessed by this demon of mindset again and again and my team patiently indulged me and went the way I wanted. Fortunately, we are close to releasing it. But it could have happened a lot earlier and many design flaws – which we will soon discover – could have been eliminated by now.

I remember laughing at the latest SAMSUNG refrigerator which can call an Uber for its owner: too many aspiring umbrella designers have gotten their way and found other creative outlets. But some better designers did exist and thought out of the box. For example, a 2014 invention of an air umbrella produces a "force field" of air to keep you dry. What made it even better was that it looked like a magical wand. I never saw that design made it to the market, though. Maybe it was too expensive to produce? Maybe it didn’t work for heavy storms? Maybe its battery died at an inopportune time? There is an old Chinese saying “Why use an ox-cleaver to carve a chicken?” It reminds me of the Amazon Go stores or using drones to deliver supper. (Unless that supper is for Elon Musk, who probably uses an air umbrella anyway and named it Xella.)

Keeping us dry is a need that has existed for as long as our history book can take us back. Right now, a dumb, old-fashioned, boringly shaped umbrella still rules the market. Do we need a startup to address that? What about an AI-powered umbrella? Maybe. Maybe not. One thing is sure, though, that we will all need one to weather the AI storm.