PLACEHOLDER FOR MAFIA
PLACEHOLDER FOR MAFIA
Last edited by DeacDiggler; 08-11-2022 at 09:31 AM.
just drivin' round in John Voight's car
based on CT title I actually thought plama won this upon returning from a work call
I oft get confused if this is just a semantic commentary or whether phan doesn't understand what people mean when they type
just drivin' round in John Voight's car
This will be a boring side topic that nobody cares about but ITC asked me what I found interesting about that article and diggler said this
First let me stipulate I’m an English major and an idiot who talks out of his ass. With that out of the wayalso, the entire game of running a startup is to keep growing revenue forever and sell to a bigger sucker before the music stops playing. anyone not invested in it should be thrilled that uber and the rest of these companies existed, where the rich essentially funded the lifestyles of the middle class. too bad the music stopped.
I now work on the product management/development side, and I feel like diggler’s analysis is emblematic of the Big Capital Problem. A startup should have a product that solves an actual need and differentiate itself from existing products by XYZ and has a path to being profitable. At the highest end of VC/tech funding like Uber/Netflix/DoorDash, they skipped some major steps and there is no path to profitability except for raising your prices or exploiting your labor, neither of which is sustainable. And yet you can take those companies public and trade on them and get rich AF or sell them for a 100x and get rich AF, and you’ve created absolutely zero value.
And in the case of Netflix, who cares if they go out of business, it was entertaining and for a while before they had competitors, cheap for customers and decent for creators. No real harm done. But in the case of Uber you decimated an industry (cabs) and exploited cheap labor and you don’t have a real product that will last even with your other verticals. DoorDash even worse for restaurants, killing what was already a razor thin margin.
Feels like a serious structural problem exacerbating inequality and not a very good and just and neoliberal well regulated market approach to running an economy. I don’t really care at the end of the day that the Atlantic needed to put “millennial” into the angle to get people to click, I feel like we misdiagnose the underlying issue in our typical conversation about this. But if I missed the conversation and it was already had, oh well.
but Uber was a superior experience - it did solve a problem
I don't think these companies can't be profitable (and a better experience than the old alternatives), that's the big assumption you're making
they just can't be profitable at the SCALE all the VCs who have burned money into them want them to be to make that burnt money worth it, so it just looks like they can't be successful because that's what their win condition is now set too
if they totally drop out there's no reason smaller versions can't bootstrap their way to profitability in this space, or taxis can't make a resurgence with hopefully better ride-hailing and payment systems in place now that we've all seen what it can be and expect it
I figure y'all will appreciate I'm deciding to take losing weight seriously. So now I walk home every day for lunch (no more delivery) and play Dance Dance Revolution for 30 minutes a day.
just drivin' round in John Voight's car
man
semi-aquatic like otters be.
actually depressing
semi-aquatic like otters be.
the other real problem is that if you're bootstrapping a company like this and trying to be profitable from the get-go, you do get FUCKED (or just acquired) by the companies pursuing growth at all costs with free VC money
so you just don't get many companies doing it until that goes away