The platform is not hard, at least from a software standpoint. Moreover, they can take advantage of several years of the market leaders having done a lot of th

The platform is not hard, at least from a software standpoint. Moreover, they can take advantage of several years of the market leaders having done a lot of the UX refinement work and making mistakes. Realistically, I could see a MVP-grade ordering/dispatch/registration/billing/accounting platform costing well less than a million dollars. Hell, open source it and each community's drivers can spin up its own locally-owned Lyft/Uber clone. It makes sense as a geographical natural monopoly, and building at that level may avoid some scale-to-infinity technical problems. The New York co-op can build clever features and share them with Chicago without worrying that undermines their viability.