half-2
Explanation
The comic shows two people in what appears to be a startup meeting or pitch scenario. One says: "That's true, yeah, but we can market it as an execution device to get funding until we get the second half of the process worked out." The caption reads: "The Minimum Viable Product approach applied to Star Trek teleporters."
The joke hinges on how Star Trek teleporters work: they disassemble a person at the molecular level in one location and reassemble them in another. If you only had the first half of the process working -- the disassembly -- you would have a device that destroys a person without reassembling them, which is effectively an execution device. The comic imagines Silicon Valley startup culture applied to this technology, where the entrepreneurs plan to market a half-finished teleporter as a product (an execution device) to generate revenue while they work on completing the reassembly part.
This satirizes multiple targets at once: the "minimum viable product" philosophy in tech startups, where companies ship incomplete products and iterate; the willingness of tech entrepreneurs to spin catastrophic shortcomings as features; and the general moral flexibility of startup culture when funding is at stake. The dark comedy comes from the breezy, casual tone with which the character discusses what is essentially marketing a murder machine as a stepping stone to a transportation device.