It was the year 2016, and there were no worlds left to conquer.

Cloud computing, unleashed a decade prior, was now the status quo. Mobile computing had matured, with Apple and Google the two winners splitting the platform market. Web 2.0 had ossified into a handful of dominant networks, with Facebook controlling the most users.

Still, the zero-interest age churned on. Investors needed places to park their money, and venture funds were happy to allocate it.

So the realm of fresh juice was, naturally, the next frontier.

Since its founding in 2013, Juicero raised $120 million in funding. The plan? Sell special fruit pouches that the Juicero machine alone could convert into fresh juice.

The pouches had little QR codes for validation and everything.

It was, if you squinted, a tech play. The juice company would enjoy recurring revenues that rhymed with SaaS, shipping ongoing fresh pouches as they were consumed. Just to lock it in, the company really splurged on the engineering.

And so in March 2016, Juicero brought its $700, WiFi-connected "juice press" to market.

There was little enthusiasm, but the kill shot landed a year later when reporter Ellen Huet revealed that simply squeezing a pouch with your hands would produce the intended juice, no expensive engineering required.

The company folded months later.

What really gets me, though, is that estimates place development of the first iPhone in a similar range: roughly $200m to research and ship the 2007 model.

But the game doesn't yield just to money. Capital is necessary but not sufficient: timing matters too. Capital invested when a new substrate is ready but not yet mobilized can go much, much further than capital deployed once substrates have matured.

Still, later moves can score a win if they find fertile substrate and create human leverage. By 2013, the cycle's foundational substrates had firmed into their winners — cloud, mobile, and the social platforms had largely settled. But that still left fertile soil atop them, new patterns and platforms for solving tough problems. Spring had shifted into a hot, ebullient summer, and a last window to capture leverage.

Slack was one summer bet that paid off big. It repackaged all the new affordances of social media, it leveraged open source and cloud computing to speed its time to market, and it brought workplace communication straight to your mobile device.

But beyond taking advantage of ready substrate a couple layers up, Slack did something important: they gave people more power.

Slack was just better for those using it than any workplace chat that came before it, and far superior to email. So much better that the product grew like a weed, introduced bottom-up by frustrated workers. By the time a sales team landed on your CFO's doorstep, it was already too late. The company was dependent.

Juicero, instead, invested in a hardware and logistics stack that led nowhere. It didn't create new leverage, and no one gleefully forced it on their peers. Indeed, its machine was entirely unnecessary. Juicero was also a signal: by 2017 money had saturated the game well beyond the ability to deploy it intelligently.