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> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying"). San Francisco's population leans qu

> Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying"). San Francisco's population leans quite left, but they seem to really hate change over there. I've never lived in a place so hellbent on ensuring that nothing changes. In fact--the entire bay seems to hate change, and the peninsula may arguably be worse. There's that old saying: "you couldn't get elected as dogcatcher," that makes fun of the sheer number of elected positions in the US. It feels so true at the local level, with a bunch of domain specific politicians trying to exert their tiny slice of power. San Francisco seemed quite bad while I lived there, but they're hardly alone.

overlordalex 6y ago
> There's that old saying: "you couldn't get elected as dogcatcher," To be pedantic, this phrase actually refers to the quality of the person rather than the number of positions. The meaning is essentially "you're so unpopular you couldn't get elected to the most trivial/inconsequential position imaginable" More on your point I frequently observe that administration expands until it becomes the purpose of the organisation. You start out with something serving users (eg Education, or Government) which as it grows in size requires more coordination. However past a certain point the administrators require help themselves, starting the inevitable growth outside of user pressure. Eventually you reach a tipping point where there are more people working on improving administration than those working on improving user experience.
sharkmerry 6y ago
> 2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass. > We had epic revenue growth w/ burn rate growth. Soon we were burning $1.5-2M/mo! > We were always “1-2 months away” from managing the burn. I dont understand, how in good faith, he can bring up SF-regulations as issue #1. When issue #2 is the crux of all their issues. They lost money on every sale! Food industry is notorious for thin margins, and then had negative margins and growth. SF regulations dont matter compared to that.
- notyourday 6y ago
  People who are not in the actual retail restaurant industry do not understand that there's no way to make money with ghost kitchens. Theoretically, to make money with a ghost kitchen one needs it to be churning out a very large number of standard meals at a price that customers want to pay to achieve the economy of scale which at the same time requires an economy of scale in logistics, which has its own overhead. By the time you figured out how to make eick out money there, customer's preference changes and you need to start from scratch or a competitor shows up and cuts your margins.
  - derefr 6y ago
    > a very large number of standard meals Or a number of meals all made of the same 5-to-7 ingredients arranged differently, i.e. the McDonalds / Taco Bell model.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      McDonalds/Taco Bell do not have ghost kitchens. If all of their meals were completely and totally made off site and were delivered to the customer to order from an off-site then those would be examples of ghost kitchens.
      - derefr 6y ago
        I didn’t mean to imply that they did; just that their kind of menu-planning approach—of having many different (fast) final preparations that all take as input the same small set of pre-cooked ingredients—would also be a workable model to copy, to achieve the economies of scale that ghost kitchens require.
  - sharkmerry 6y ago
    ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. Them being done at scale with VC money, most likely not. But as the below commenter said, if you can use same ingredients across multiple dishes, it reduces waste and can reduce COGS. A small restaurant can do it, the issue there is establishing a brand, but if all your orders are coming via 3rd party apps. not sure how much brand awareness you actually need
jeffbee 6y ago
The people of San Francisco are not "left" on local matters like planning and permitting. In fact they are absurdly conservative or reactionary. And they have plenty of reason to be: the people who own San Francisco property are riding a dynastic money machine. A surprising number of them can trace their family wealth back to literally Mexican land grants, or similar historical accidents. All of them enjoy a state tax system that disallows increasing their property tax rates and allows them to pass real estate to their heirs, tax-free, without ever marking them to market. So of course the people who have a vested stake in this fucked-up system will fight to freeze it in amber.
- ziftface 6y ago
  It's unfortunate that people get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another. It reminds me of how certain religious people have a sense of moral superiority and it makes them incapable of introspection. Not to mention that labelling an entire city as "left leaning" is absurd.
  - idoh 6y ago
    In 2016 only 10% of San Francisco voted for Trump. There was not a single neighborhood that had higher than 30% for Trump. So "left leaning" is apt, if you agree that left / right roughly maps to Democrat / Republican.
    - juuular 6y ago
      Unfortunately, left/right does not map to Democrat/Republican.
  - throwaway21310 6y ago
    People get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another _after choosing among alternative political views by comparing their relative morality_. What do you do? Treat it like being a sports fan? Flip a coin? Labelling an entire city as "left-leaning" is a perfectly reasonable and quotidian practice. For instance, if over a period of time, City A generally voted for left-leaning politicians and passed left-leaning referenda, while City B generally voted for right-leaning politicians and passed right-leaning referenda, most people would think it was fair to characterize City A as "left-leaning" and City B as "right-leaning". I'm guessing by the including of "entire" you are confused about the meaning of "leaning"? It means that on average, compared to some larger (e.g. national) mean, the population of a city has views that are to the left of that mean. It doesn't mean every single person has left views on every single issue. It's a very widely shared perception that San Francisco was left-leaning for the latter half of the 20th century into the beginning of the current. Early San Francisco was dominated by a relatively conservative patrician elite but over time it earned its "Baghdad-By-The-Bay" (https://www.amazon.com/Baghdad-Bay-Herb-Caen/dp/0891740473 https://www.amazon.com/Baghdad-Bay-Herb-Caen/dp/0891740473) reputation from things like electing the first openly-gay man to political office in America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk) to being the epicenter of the sociocultural phenomenon known as "The Summer of Love" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love).
muzz 6y ago
He never says how the business responded to this. I.e. why didn't it shift to Oakland, San Jose, or even another metro area. Unless the business model only worked in San Francisco.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Population density (of target audience) is one of the most crucial things for a service like 15 minute food delivery, so if restricted to the Bay Area, few places can compete with SF. Further, cost of living in SF is significantly higher, which allows you to charge more... but your costs also increase, unfortunately. So you might be motivated to have a second “back office” in a cheaper neighborhood doing as much of the processing as possible, and then doing the final assembly in the “front office”... but food can lose freshness very quickly; so the game goes. I guess the point is that they “learned” that there doesn’t exist a sustainable market for food delivery in the given situation.

overlordalex 6y ago

> There's that old saying: "you couldn't get elected as dogcatcher," To be pedantic, this phrase actually refers to the quality of the person rather than the number of positions. The meaning is essentially "you're so unpopular you couldn't get elected to the most trivial/inconsequential position imaginable" More on your point I frequently observe that administration expands until it becomes the purpose of the organisation. You start out with something serving users (eg Education, or Government) which as it grows in size requires more coordination. However past a certain point the administrators require help themselves, starting the inevitable growth outside of user pressure. Eventually you reach a tipping point where there are more people working on improving administration than those working on improving user experience.

sharkmerry 6y ago

> 2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass. > We had epic revenue growth w/ burn rate growth. Soon we were burning $1.5-2M/mo! > We were always “1-2 months away” from managing the burn. I dont understand, how in good faith, he can bring up SF-regulations as issue #1. When issue #2 is the crux of all their issues. They lost money on every sale! Food industry is notorious for thin margins, and then had negative margins and growth. SF regulations dont matter compared to that.

notyourday 6y ago
People who are not in the actual retail restaurant industry do not understand that there's no way to make money with ghost kitchens. Theoretically, to make money with a ghost kitchen one needs it to be churning out a very large number of standard meals at a price that customers want to pay to achieve the economy of scale which at the same time requires an economy of scale in logistics, which has its own overhead. By the time you figured out how to make eick out money there, customer's preference changes and you need to start from scratch or a competitor shows up and cuts your margins.
- derefr 6y ago
  > a very large number of standard meals Or a number of meals all made of the same 5-to-7 ingredients arranged differently, i.e. the McDonalds / Taco Bell model.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    McDonalds/Taco Bell do not have ghost kitchens. If all of their meals were completely and totally made off site and were delivered to the customer to order from an off-site then those would be examples of ghost kitchens.
    - derefr 6y ago
      I didn’t mean to imply that they did; just that their kind of menu-planning approach—of having many different (fast) final preparations that all take as input the same small set of pre-cooked ingredients—would also be a workable model to copy, to achieve the economies of scale that ghost kitchens require.
- sharkmerry 6y ago
  ghost kitchens can absolutely make money. Them being done at scale with VC money, most likely not. But as the below commenter said, if you can use same ingredients across multiple dishes, it reduces waste and can reduce COGS. A small restaurant can do it, the issue there is establishing a brand, but if all your orders are coming via 3rd party apps. not sure how much brand awareness you actually need

jeffbee 6y ago

The people of San Francisco are not "left" on local matters like planning and permitting. In fact they are absurdly conservative or reactionary. And they have plenty of reason to be: the people who own San Francisco property are riding a dynastic money machine. A surprising number of them can trace their family wealth back to literally Mexican land grants, or similar historical accidents. All of them enjoy a state tax system that disallows increasing their property tax rates and allows them to pass real estate to their heirs, tax-free, without ever marking them to market. So of course the people who have a vested stake in this fucked-up system will fight to freeze it in amber.

ziftface 6y ago
It's unfortunate that people get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another. It reminds me of how certain religious people have a sense of moral superiority and it makes them incapable of introspection. Not to mention that labelling an entire city as "left leaning" is absurd.
- idoh 6y ago
  In 2016 only 10% of San Francisco voted for Trump. There was not a single neighborhood that had higher than 30% for Trump. So "left leaning" is apt, if you agree that left / right roughly maps to Democrat / Republican.
  - juuular 6y ago
    Unfortunately, left/right does not map to Democrat/Republican.
- throwaway21310 6y ago
  People get a sense of moral superiority for having one political view or another _after choosing among alternative political views by comparing their relative morality_. What do you do? Treat it like being a sports fan? Flip a coin? Labelling an entire city as "left-leaning" is a perfectly reasonable and quotidian practice. For instance, if over a period of time, City A generally voted for left-leaning politicians and passed left-leaning referenda, while City B generally voted for right-leaning politicians and passed right-leaning referenda, most people would think it was fair to characterize City A as "left-leaning" and City B as "right-leaning". I'm guessing by the including of "entire" you are confused about the meaning of "leaning"? It means that on average, compared to some larger (e.g. national) mean, the population of a city has views that are to the left of that mean. It doesn't mean every single person has left views on every single issue. It's a very widely shared perception that San Francisco was left-leaning for the latter half of the 20th century into the beginning of the current. Early San Francisco was dominated by a relatively conservative patrician elite but over time it earned its "Baghdad-By-The-Bay" (https://www.amazon.com/Baghdad-Bay-Herb-Caen/dp/0891740473 https://www.amazon.com/Baghdad-Bay-Herb-Caen/dp/0891740473) reputation from things like electing the first openly-gay man to political office in America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk) to being the epicenter of the sociocultural phenomenon known as "The Summer of Love" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love).

muzz 6y ago

He never says how the business responded to this. I.e. why didn't it shift to Oakland, San Jose, or even another metro area. Unless the business model only worked in San Francisco.

ssivark 6y ago
Population density (of target audience) is one of the most crucial things for a service like 15 minute food delivery, so if restricted to the Bay Area, few places can compete with SF. Further, cost of living in SF is significantly higher, which allows you to charge more... but your costs also increase, unfortunately. So you might be motivated to have a second “back office” in a cheaper neighborhood doing as much of the processing as possible, and then doing the final assembly in the “front office”... but food can lose freshness very quickly; so the game goes. I guess the point is that they “learned” that there doesn’t exist a sustainable market for food delivery in the given situation.