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VCs would not be giving billion $ valuations if they thought this will be a highly competitive market with many players. Everyone is betting on a winner takes m

• repsilat 8y ago
  Scooters are cheap enough and slow enough that the benefits to scale - aren't hard to reach for anyone with funding, and - can be maintained over relatively small geographic areas (neighbourhoods/cities, not states/countries/globally). If some new company invents a scooter with better tires or a better battery or a disco ball and a stereo it's not hard for them to enter the market. And, in fact, this regulation is happening because the city thinks it's too easy for upstarts to get a toe-hold and cause negative externalities like sidewalk crowding. (Besides these points: Has anyone made the argument that "overwhelming, unapproachable network-effect leads" are kinda great outcomes for consumers? Like, assume there were 10 facebooks instead of one -- kinda terrible. Or if there were a hundred Ubers and Lyfts, and you didn't know which one had cars close to you... awful.)
• twblalock 8y ago
  I’ve noticed that a lot of “natural” monopolies are regulated under the assumption they will become monopolies but before they actually do. I suspect a lot of that regulation has been wrong, monopolies would not have emerged, and we would be better off regulating only the monopolies that actually exist. I’d rather see the scooter companies fight it out than have the city government pick winners and losers when the industry is only a few months old and multiple viable competitors already exist.
• jonathankoren 8y ago
  That's certainly the conventional wisdom, but there's very little in the way of evidence that this is anything other than a cheap commodity.