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Fascinating topic and read. You can see it in their smile and hear it in their tone...these people take a rare sense of pride in their work. Dabbawalas appear
by _curious_ 6y ago
Fascinating topic and read.
You can see it in their smile and hear it in their tone...these people take a rare sense of pride in their work. Dabbawalas appear to be a happy, grateful, and fulfilled workforce that do a sufficient job. Add in the cultural prestige and this model strikes me as very tough to compete with. So why?
What aspect of this current approach is broken or inefficient like to the point of justifying the time, money and effort to compete with as a startup? (I didn't gather that part from the article). Is it marginal food cost?
Is it merely because it's a big market operating the old-school way and therefore easy money is being thrown at trying to capture share or supplant using apps? No wonder these ventures are having a tough go at things...seems to me as a solution seeking a problem.
- sk0g 6y agoNothing has to be broken for a startup or a big corp to attempt to make money themselves. There's money to be made in offering choices - enough money to justify the expenditure in getting something new up and running, seemingly. Speaking of solutions seeking a problem, early on in my career I was at a blockchain startup of sorts, though I have no idea what blockchain work they actually did. I got a few offers from other blockchain companies too, and I could never figure out what problem they were solving that a database wouldn't solve even better.
- sokoloff 6y agoSeparating investors from their money is a problem more easily solved with blockchain that a run of the mill database.
- sk0g 6y agoYou say that like they're mutually exclusive! One project, a custom Ethereum based coin was running behind on time - like way, way behind. A DB based system was delivered as a prototype (where I noticed floats were used for transaction amounts!), and since the coin was "cloud native", whatever that means, it stayed that way. Client did ask for source code but the company wasn't able to serve that, for obvious reasons...