The Melt had cash, technology, and some of Silicon Valley’s finest minds — yet it failed to disrupt the humble sandwich.

In the spring of 2011, more than 500 tech luminaries, kingmakers, entrepreneurs, and journalists convened in southern California for the D: All Things Digital Conference. The sold-out event promised “digital disruption out the wazoo,” and a crowd had shelled out $4,795 a head for a lineup of heavyweights the likes of Eric Schmidt, Reed Hastings, and Marc Andreessen.

Waiting in the wings was a smaller, but still recognizable name: Jonathan Kaplan, one of Silicon Valley’s prodigal sons with a moon shot of a second act. The founder of Pure Digital Technologies, a maker of cameras and video recorders, Kaplan had first walked onto the All Things D stage six years earlier to debut his Flip video camera. The Flip quickly became a consumer favorite; four years post-debut, Kaplan sold his company to Cisco for $590 million. But true to the entrepreneur trajectory, Kaplan found the stability of a large company stultifying. He wanted to change the world one more time.

Bianca Bosker is a journalist and the author of Cork Dork. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

His new project, Kaplan teased, was “founded on the exact same fundamentals” as the Flip. After a few warm-up questions from his interviewers, tech journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, Kaplan revealed the cutting-edge creation he was poised to unleash: grilled-cheese sandwiches. Five different kinds of them, in fact. Featuring not only cheddar, but also fontina, gruyere, and jalapeño jack.

The new company was called The Melt. Its motto seemed cribbed from the clumsy English slogans sometimes featured on Asian T-shirts: “Grilled Cheese Happiness.” The sandwiches formed a minimalist menu, accompanied only by soup. “It turns out when you put soup and grilled cheese together, it’s really wonderful,” Kaplan informed his audience, as if divulging a trade secret.

Forget Mars colonies and AI. Kaplan declared he had “developed a set of technology that allows us to make the perfect grilled cheese.” The innovation was as meaningful as it was miraculous: the sandwich had “that nostalgic thing,” Kaplan explained. Grilled-cheese sandwiches were the fast food equivalent of Proust’s madeleines, priming them for disruption.

Swisher and Mossberg openly smirked. “I feel like this is post-traumatic stress from Cisco,” said Swisher. “I think he went home and looked at his money,” Mossberg deadpanned.

Kaplan was unfazed. Armed with a tech founder’s unflappable confidence and ambitious growth targets, he announced plans to open 500 fast-casual outlets within five years — all of them company-owned, not franchised. Never mind that it had taken Chipotle three times as long to hit that milestone using the same model. Kaplan felt confident in his melted-cheese rocket ship.

The Melt boasted an elite group of investors — including Sequoia Capital, better known for its bets on Instagram and YouTube — and enough cash to launch 20 restaurants, at a cost of $500,000 to $1 million apiece. Kaplan had recruited some of the Bay Area’s top names, including Michelin-starred chef Michael Mina and former Apple executive Ron Johnson, the genius behind the tech giant’s retail stores.