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Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it. It is an exponentially-g

Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it. It is an exponentially-growing new industry built atop ride-hailing infrastructure, which itself only emerged a few years ago. The driver network can pick up food from literally anywhere and deliver it anywhere within a city-sized radius. When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery?

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Found that really interesting, too. Hopefully he'll talk about it at some point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818 What a difference 2374 days makes. Really, though, Steve can go work for whoever he wants to, as long as he keeps blogging.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  I'd rather he go to work wherever he wants to for whatever reasons, but stop blogging about it. It's clear that the internet is signal boosting his opinions far more then they deserve to be.
edanm 9y ago
I wouldn't trivialize food delivery. Eating is literally something everyone has to do, multiple times a day. Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society. I mean, I didn't think about it much before, but now that I have a child, the days of just throwing together random things from the fridge doesn't cut it, and ordering takeout is too expensive. It's either cook every few days or spend tons of money. If the market starts giving me cheaper, healthier options than ordering pizza, then I'd consider it a huge quality of life improvement, not to mention a huge time saver.
- Thriptic 9y ago
  If someone came out with a service where I could get healthy meals delivered to me, with decent nutritional macros (a bunch of protein, not just vegis), and costs which were substantially less than eating out, I would be standing outside their offices on day 1 waiting to sign up. Healthy food delivery services do exist, they just end up being astronomically expensive when you look at the amount of food (calories or macros) you get for your money. I was looking at one a few days ago which was trying to charge me 10-12 dollars for a single 400 calorie meal. As a lifter who eats 3500 calories per day, that is an absolute non-starter.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society." Just making food cheaper is not an "enormous" benefit to society. For evidence of this see the dollar menu at McDonalds[1]. Food delivery has existed for years now in the US and EU. Please provide any evidence that these services have resulted in either cheaper or healthier food consumption. [1] http://time.com/money/5085896/mcdonalds-dollar-menu/ http://time.com/money/5085896/mcdonalds-dollar-menu/
  - edanm 9y ago
    err I did write cheaper or healthier. Obviously both is a good option, too. And I don't know for sure that these new delivery services will result in cheaper and/or healthier foods. I'm guessing (and hoping) that, as per the article, relying on these new delivery "layers" will provide more options, and more options will translate to lower prices. But either way, that doesn't matter. My disagreement with parent was only whether it's valuable to improve things like food delivery, and I pointed out that the food industry, in general, is incredibly important to most people's lives, so trying to improve it is a huge value to society.
agumonkey 9y ago
I think it takes a serious amount of motivation to shift onto the medical field. Large body of knowledge, large regulations, structures of trust. You don't step in and get the spotlight like that. It's vast and not trivial.
taneq 9y ago
We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. It's still at the base of Maslowe's Heirarchy. Having it arrive automatically after pressing some buttons on a smartphone seems like a big thing, no?
- wbl 9y ago
  Pizza delivery works after some buttons on my dumbphone.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Malnutrition and hunger in the world are not "last mile food delivery" problems, and hence can't be solved by last mile food delivery solutions such as UberEats or whatever Grab calls its service. People who are dying of hunger aren't dying because food is available 2 miles away from them and they can afford it but don't want to go get it. If you are going to invoke Maslow's hierarchy, consider that getting food at the click of a button is WAAAAY high in the pyramid.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. The question wasn't about food, but food delivery.
deleted 9y ago
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simonsarris 9y ago
Food is really, insanely important. Way more important than 99% of Americans give it dues for. In fact food is more important than a cure for cancer. Bad food will kill and maim more Americans long before they get the opportunity to be struck down by cancer. And for that matter, "Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity Make up 40 percent of Cancers Diagnosed in the United States", CDC 2017: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-obesity.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-obes... And look at this graph (my own work, for something I'm writing): https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy (Does America have an opioid crisis, or a food crisis?) Anything that gets more quality food availability to Americans, especially healthier cooked food delivered in lieu of microwaving a frozen processed thing, is an improvement to celebrate.
- marnett 9y ago
  No. It really isn't. This is a luxury service. If you use it to redistribute uneaten food in-masse, sure. But let's be honest, these services are for those who can afford laziness when it comes to walking outside their door (in a city might I add, where huge amounts of food options are available in a small radius) and getting food.
  - jdtang13 9y ago
    You're projecting and not seeing the big picture. Cheap, high-quality, and healthy food delivery would be beneficial to all Americans, especially the working class and especially fledgling restauranteurs. Just because you live a life of luxury doesn't mean that all services are luxuries. Someone who is working oddjobs from 9am-9pm and still barely making next month's rent payment would benefit both from having extra time, and hopefully their health would not suffer if they were eating decent food.
    - omikun 9y ago
      Someone who is barely making rent isn't going to splurge on food delivery fees.
gms 9y ago
It's been 14 years. That's enough time to change one's mind about a thing or two.
jokola 9y ago
That was probably around the time when SV was trying to justify its existence with arguing that it could also do 'hard science'. The hype around Theranos maybe being the most prominent example. I don't think the Grab is innovative either, but it is just as innovative as the majority of popular things coming out of SV in the last decade. I think a lot of the skepticism has to do with it being in Asia, outside the reality distortion field of SV.
yakitori 9y ago
> When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery? It's where the money is. Online food delivery is growing ridiculously and still have tons of room for growth since it is following the growth of smartphones and the rise of "online taxis". It isn't just food delivery. Grocery delivery, liquor delivery and all other delivery services haven't caught up to smartphone/online taxi service yet. It's similar to what amazon did with their AWS. Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use. If you think about it, most taxis ( even online taxis ) are in idle state. So why not use that idle time for delivery. Also slogans from large corporations or people working for multinationals are just PR nonsense. "Do no evil", "fair and balanced", "just do it", etc are marketing PR rubbish. Steve Yegge, like alphabet, is in the business of making money. Cancer research is high risk/high reward. Food delivery is low risk/high reward.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  What you say is true, but - and I believe that's GP's point - it's also an admission of defeat. There will always be low-risk/high-monetary-reward trivialities to cater for. But when you see your visionaries getting into them, instead of working on the actually important things, that's when you realize, with sadness, that they no longer care.
- erik_seaberg 9y ago
  > Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use. That's not how AWS started, according to one of the principals. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing...
thaumasiotes 9y ago
No, his Big Thing is banking. He goes on at some length about how southeast asians don't use banks and don't trust banks to hold their money, but they do trust food delivery companies to hold their money. However you break into the market, holding everyone's money is a good business to be in.
SkyPuncher 9y ago
For the elderly and home bound, food delivery can literally be a life saver. I know it's not why a lot of these companies get started. The average person doesn't need food delivery for any substantial value in their life. However, the average person being interested in these types of services make it better for everyone.
msteffen 9y ago
Well, per Steve Yegge's original post, it's distribution in general. My understanding of his general argument is that when distribution is controlled by Amazon, everybody buys everything from Amazon. When distribution is controlled by thousands of independent drivers, everybody buys everything from thousands of independent businesses (like the couple selling food out of their kitchen that he mentioned) and the cost of starting a small businesses goes way down. For a related argument that vertical integration, especially with respect to distribution, leads to homogeneity, see www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-beer-industry/550850/ I've read that the biggest problem in B2C businesses in general is often distribution, so I think the idea is that if grab is successful, they'll boost southeast Asian entrepreneurship and collect a portion of all of that growth
- deleted 9y ago
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- e_b 9y ago
  People who purchase a service from Grab are purchasing from a company. Not from independent businesses. There is no difference whatsoever from buying from Amazon. Delivery people perform tasks just like the people working in Amazon's warehouses or delivering their packages.
coldtea 9y ago
>Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it. So the "world" is the US? Because the rest doesn't have "network football games" or "food delivery" ads, and tons of countries have had perfectly thriving delivery businesses, even open 24/7.
soulnothing 9y ago
Anecdote. I can't drive for medical reasons. I lived in an area where the walk to a grocery store was difficult. No public transit either. Seven miles round trip. It was doable, but the store didn't have the best selection. This was several years ago, and grocery deliveries to my area. Carried a 50 to 60$ delivery surcharge. There are a growing number of food deserts. Delivery of take-out meals isn't that big to me. But delivery of good quality food, that's a bigger deal.
siliconc0w 9y ago
What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers. The Soylent founder had this idea of 'deprecating kitchens' and while I'm not a huge fan of soylent I really liked the idea. We really don't all need kitchens - it's a huge waste of space and everyone cooking for themselves generates a lot inefficiency and food waste. It makes a lot of sense to get your food from local communal kitchens - which is what much of the world does - but there also needs to be a bit of a culture shift around 'food as religion'. It's become a source of virtue signaling and everyone has such specialized food requirements it makes it difficult to economically scale. Right now food delivery is a luxury product but I'm not sure has to be.
- eric_h 9y ago
  > What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers. Maple tried this in New York City. They had delicious, healthy, locally sourced food and more or less replaced my lunch orders while at work (they were not available in my outer borough). They couldn't hack it, though - the margins weren't high enough and they ended up selling to some UK company and dismantling their New York operation.
- marcell 9y ago
  Munchery tried this but, at least IMO, the food quality was not great. They had to use a lot of salt and preservatives to make the food hold and transport from their central kitchen. Also they did a lot of things to improve efficiency and cut costs which made the food taste unnatural...
archgoon 9y ago
This was transportation in general in South East Asia; coupled with thee possibility of becoming a non corrupt banking system (reading a bit into it there; but if everyone has a ride sharing account with money put in, and they are viewed as more trustworthy than the banks; why not?)

aaron-lebo 9y ago

Found that really interesting, too. Hopefully he'll talk about it at some point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818 What a difference 2374 days makes. Really, though, Steve can go work for whoever he wants to, as long as he keeps blogging.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
I'd rather he go to work wherever he wants to for whatever reasons, but stop blogging about it. It's clear that the internet is signal boosting his opinions far more then they deserve to be.

edanm 9y ago

I wouldn't trivialize food delivery. Eating is literally something everyone has to do, multiple times a day. Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society. I mean, I didn't think about it much before, but now that I have a child, the days of just throwing together random things from the fridge doesn't cut it, and ordering takeout is too expensive. It's either cook every few days or spend tons of money. If the market starts giving me cheaper, healthier options than ordering pizza, then I'd consider it a huge quality of life improvement, not to mention a huge time saver.

Thriptic 9y ago
If someone came out with a service where I could get healthy meals delivered to me, with decent nutritional macros (a bunch of protein, not just vegis), and costs which were substantially less than eating out, I would be standing outside their offices on day 1 waiting to sign up. Healthy food delivery services do exist, they just end up being astronomically expensive when you look at the amount of food (calories or macros) you get for your money. I was looking at one a few days ago which was trying to charge me 10-12 dollars for a single 400 calorie meal. As a lifter who eats 3500 calories per day, that is an absolute non-starter.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society." Just making food cheaper is not an "enormous" benefit to society. For evidence of this see the dollar menu at McDonalds[1]. Food delivery has existed for years now in the US and EU. Please provide any evidence that these services have resulted in either cheaper or healthier food consumption. [1] http://time.com/money/5085896/mcdonalds-dollar-menu/ http://time.com/money/5085896/mcdonalds-dollar-menu/
- edanm 9y ago
  err I did write cheaper or healthier. Obviously both is a good option, too. And I don't know for sure that these new delivery services will result in cheaper and/or healthier foods. I'm guessing (and hoping) that, as per the article, relying on these new delivery "layers" will provide more options, and more options will translate to lower prices. But either way, that doesn't matter. My disagreement with parent was only whether it's valuable to improve things like food delivery, and I pointed out that the food industry, in general, is incredibly important to most people's lives, so trying to improve it is a huge value to society.

agumonkey 9y ago

I think it takes a serious amount of motivation to shift onto the medical field. Large body of knowledge, large regulations, structures of trust. You don't step in and get the spotlight like that. It's vast and not trivial.

taneq 9y ago

We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. It's still at the base of Maslowe's Heirarchy. Having it arrive automatically after pressing some buttons on a smartphone seems like a big thing, no?

wbl 9y ago
Pizza delivery works after some buttons on my dumbphone.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Malnutrition and hunger in the world are not "last mile food delivery" problems, and hence can't be solved by last mile food delivery solutions such as UberEats or whatever Grab calls its service. People who are dying of hunger aren't dying because food is available 2 miles away from them and they can afford it but don't want to go get it. If you are going to invoke Maslow's hierarchy, consider that getting food at the click of a button is WAAAAY high in the pyramid.
coldtea 9y ago
>We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. The question wasn't about food, but food delivery.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

simonsarris 9y ago

Food is really, insanely important. Way more important than 99% of Americans give it dues for. In fact food is more important than a cure for cancer. Bad food will kill and maim more Americans long before they get the opportunity to be struck down by cancer. And for that matter, "Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity Make up 40 percent of Cancers Diagnosed in the United States", CDC 2017: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-obesity.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-obes... And look at this graph (my own work, for something I'm writing): https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy (Does America have an opioid crisis, or a food crisis?) Anything that gets more quality food availability to Americans, especially healthier cooked food delivered in lieu of microwaving a frozen processed thing, is an improvement to celebrate.

marnett 9y ago
No. It really isn't. This is a luxury service. If you use it to redistribute uneaten food in-masse, sure. But let's be honest, these services are for those who can afford laziness when it comes to walking outside their door (in a city might I add, where huge amounts of food options are available in a small radius) and getting food.
- jdtang13 9y ago
  You're projecting and not seeing the big picture. Cheap, high-quality, and healthy food delivery would be beneficial to all Americans, especially the working class and especially fledgling restauranteurs. Just because you live a life of luxury doesn't mean that all services are luxuries. Someone who is working oddjobs from 9am-9pm and still barely making next month's rent payment would benefit both from having extra time, and hopefully their health would not suffer if they were eating decent food.
  - omikun 9y ago
    Someone who is barely making rent isn't going to splurge on food delivery fees.

gms 9y ago

It's been 14 years. That's enough time to change one's mind about a thing or two.

jokola 9y ago

That was probably around the time when SV was trying to justify its existence with arguing that it could also do 'hard science'. The hype around Theranos maybe being the most prominent example. I don't think the Grab is innovative either, but it is just as innovative as the majority of popular things coming out of SV in the last decade. I think a lot of the skepticism has to do with it being in Asia, outside the reality distortion field of SV.

yakitori 9y ago

> When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery? It's where the money is. Online food delivery is growing ridiculously and still have tons of room for growth since it is following the growth of smartphones and the rise of "online taxis". It isn't just food delivery. Grocery delivery, liquor delivery and all other delivery services haven't caught up to smartphone/online taxi service yet. It's similar to what amazon did with their AWS. Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use. If you think about it, most taxis ( even online taxis ) are in idle state. So why not use that idle time for delivery. Also slogans from large corporations or people working for multinationals are just PR nonsense. "Do no evil", "fair and balanced", "just do it", etc are marketing PR rubbish. Steve Yegge, like alphabet, is in the business of making money. Cancer research is high risk/high reward. Food delivery is low risk/high reward.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
What you say is true, but - and I believe that's GP's point - it's also an admission of defeat. There will always be low-risk/high-monetary-reward trivialities to cater for. But when you see your visionaries getting into them, instead of working on the actually important things, that's when you realize, with sadness, that they no longer care.
erik_seaberg 9y ago
> Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use. That's not how AWS started, according to one of the principals. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-computing...

thaumasiotes 9y ago

No, his Big Thing is banking. He goes on at some length about how southeast asians don't use banks and don't trust banks to hold their money, but they do trust food delivery companies to hold their money. However you break into the market, holding everyone's money is a good business to be in.

SkyPuncher 9y ago

For the elderly and home bound, food delivery can literally be a life saver. I know it's not why a lot of these companies get started. The average person doesn't need food delivery for any substantial value in their life. However, the average person being interested in these types of services make it better for everyone.

msteffen 9y ago

Well, per Steve Yegge's original post, it's distribution in general. My understanding of his general argument is that when distribution is controlled by Amazon, everybody buys everything from Amazon. When distribution is controlled by thousands of independent drivers, everybody buys everything from thousands of independent businesses (like the couple selling food out of their kitchen that he mentioned) and the cost of starting a small businesses goes way down. For a related argument that vertical integration, especially with respect to distribution, leads to homogeneity, see www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-beer-industry/550850/ I've read that the biggest problem in B2C businesses in general is often distribution, so I think the idea is that if grab is successful, they'll boost southeast Asian entrepreneurship and collect a portion of all of that growth

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
e_b 9y ago
People who purchase a service from Grab are purchasing from a company. Not from independent businesses. There is no difference whatsoever from buying from Amazon. Delivery people perform tasks just like the people working in Amazon's warehouses or delivering their packages.

coldtea 9y ago

>Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it. So the "world" is the US? Because the rest doesn't have "network football games" or "food delivery" ads, and tons of countries have had perfectly thriving delivery businesses, even open 24/7.

soulnothing 9y ago

Anecdote. I can't drive for medical reasons. I lived in an area where the walk to a grocery store was difficult. No public transit either. Seven miles round trip. It was doable, but the store didn't have the best selection. This was several years ago, and grocery deliveries to my area. Carried a 50 to 60$ delivery surcharge. There are a growing number of food deserts. Delivery of take-out meals isn't that big to me. But delivery of good quality food, that's a bigger deal.

siliconc0w 9y ago

What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers. The Soylent founder had this idea of 'deprecating kitchens' and while I'm not a huge fan of soylent I really liked the idea. We really don't all need kitchens - it's a huge waste of space and everyone cooking for themselves generates a lot inefficiency and food waste. It makes a lot of sense to get your food from local communal kitchens - which is what much of the world does - but there also needs to be a bit of a culture shift around 'food as religion'. It's become a source of virtue signaling and everyone has such specialized food requirements it makes it difficult to economically scale. Right now food delivery is a luxury product but I'm not sure has to be.

eric_h 9y ago
> What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers. Maple tried this in New York City. They had delicious, healthy, locally sourced food and more or less replaced my lunch orders while at work (they were not available in my outer borough). They couldn't hack it, though - the margins weren't high enough and they ended up selling to some UK company and dismantling their New York operation.
marcell 9y ago
Munchery tried this but, at least IMO, the food quality was not great. They had to use a lot of salt and preservatives to make the food hold and transport from their central kitchen. Also they did a lot of things to improve efficiency and cut costs which made the food taste unnatural...

archgoon 9y ago

This was transportation in general in South East Asia; coupled with thee possibility of becoming a non corrupt banking system (reading a bit into it there; but if everyone has a ride sharing account with money put in, and they are viewed as more trustworthy than the banks; why not?)