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Ok, no. This is a bad meme. Read the comments here and you can see why. You know what startups came out of the 2008/2009 recession? A car sharing company. A ro

Ok, no. This is a bad meme. Read the comments here and you can see why. You know what startups came out of the 2008/2009 recession? A car sharing company. A rooms-for-lease company. Many, many different delivery companies and a sh*t-ton of gig economy jobs. Do you know what they all have in common? Taking advantage of people's weak economic situation. That's the sort of company that comes out of bad economies. The ones that take advantage of people being in poor economic situations. But starting something that matters? You have to do it when customers can actually buy your products. And that takes a GOOD economy. I can't wait to see the slew of low-quality companies that come out of this next upcoming, inevitable recession

jmkd 7y ago
Starting something that matters? No better test of that than a bad economy...
- rexreed 7y ago
  How would you propose testing that if the market can't actually buy or validate the need for your product? The best test is a ready customer base. Otherwise, it's just venture capital floating a lot of half-digested ideas and seeing which sh*t doesn't sink.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure he meant that if you have a ready customer base in a bad economy, you're providing something of real value because people reduce spending on luxuries.
holler 7y ago
> Taking advantage of people's weak economic situation Wouldn't it just be simple supply/demand? What about all those jobs the gig workers have access to, which otherwise wouldn't exist?
- rexreed 7y ago
  There's a difference between a job and work. There's been many studies about chronic underemployment and lack of benefit by gig economy workers which are in effect working at rates drastically lower than what would be expected if it was actual full time employment as a job.
cletus 7y ago
> Do you know what they all have in common? Taking advantage of people's weak economic situation. I don't agree with this characterization. If anything, these companies provided a way to extract value from under-utilized assets. For example, most people in the US have a car anyway. It's required. It's not a luxury. Taking Uber as the example, to work as a taxi driver previously required you to do strict shifts in a car that very much looks like a cab (that you may not own anyway). While many Uber drivers do it full time, some don't and some started off part-time because that was an option. I'm more critical of AirBnB as I think the communities around AirBnBs suffer the externalities as people essentially run unregulated hotels. I'm not a fan of that at all.

jmkd 7y ago

Starting something that matters? No better test of that than a bad economy...

rexreed 7y ago
How would you propose testing that if the market can't actually buy or validate the need for your product? The best test is a ready customer base. Otherwise, it's just venture capital floating a lot of half-digested ideas and seeing which sh*t doesn't sink.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure he meant that if you have a ready customer base in a bad economy, you're providing something of real value because people reduce spending on luxuries.

holler 7y ago

> Taking advantage of people's weak economic situation Wouldn't it just be simple supply/demand? What about all those jobs the gig workers have access to, which otherwise wouldn't exist?

rexreed 7y ago
There's a difference between a job and work. There's been many studies about chronic underemployment and lack of benefit by gig economy workers which are in effect working at rates drastically lower than what would be expected if it was actual full time employment as a job.

cletus 7y ago

> Do you know what they all have in common? Taking advantage of people's weak economic situation. I don't agree with this characterization. If anything, these companies provided a way to extract value from under-utilized assets. For example, most people in the US have a car anyway. It's required. It's not a luxury. Taking Uber as the example, to work as a taxi driver previously required you to do strict shifts in a car that very much looks like a cab (that you may not own anyway). While many Uber drivers do it full time, some don't and some started off part-time because that was an option. I'm more critical of AirBnB as I think the communities around AirBnBs suffer the externalities as people essentially run unregulated hotels. I'm not a fan of that at all.