18 ms·

Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb a

Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion" era.

Terr_ 2y ago
It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Er no, they totally transformed things through technology as well. Their product was fantastic. Hail a cab in the 2000s in the UK and tell me Uber had no improvement for its customers.
  - daxfohl 2y ago
    I understand GP's point, but to yours I'll add they have also open sourced and mainstreamed some of their key technologies. So it's not all bad.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Not all bad != good.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    Right but how much of this improvement came from the invention and popularity of smartphones and how much of the innovation came from a company called Uber.
    - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
      Struggling to see the relevance of this question. How much of Uber's "innovation" was actually Ford/GM/Toyota innovation in car manufacturing?
      - labster 2y ago
        But those car companies are just riding on the coattails of Exxon, Chevron and the like with their improvements in oil discovery and hydraulic fracking.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Getting a taxi in my college town in 2005 was agony. Make a phone call from a loud bar and shout at some guy who can barely tell what you're saying that you want a taxi and then maybe if you're lucky they show up in an hour and cost 3 times as much as you expected (and that's on a good night!) vs. "press a button, get a ride" (and have a feedback mechanism for horrible drivers or gross cars, etc.). Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    In my city of Berlin, we simply had an app called MyTaxi that would hail the cab for you. No need for Uber and its predatory business model.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Sure, but there's a difference between "that kind of success" and "any success". To illustrate, imagine an alternate timeline with a company called "Rebu", which provides all the same phone-apps and servers and whatnot for thousands of taxi-services across the world to adopt, replacing their shitty old "computerized dispatch" systems. Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features? I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
    - tristor 2y ago
      You're right, but you're treating that as a net-negative. The reality is that the government regulations structured taxi services in most cities in the world into cartels that operated in a way that was to the detriment of their customers. Uber broke the taxi cartel, and yes, it broke the law to do it, but it wouldn't have been possible to do this way if they'd tried to work with the existing taxi companies, because their anti-customer cancer would have infected Uber while it was young and before it could even scale. Part of their value proposition is their scale, itself.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  Pretty hard for me to lament laws being broken when the laws boil down to "you're not allowed to compete with this monopoly".
  - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
    Do you lament e.g. Uber knowingly breaking laws, and then in the knowledge that they are knowingly breaking laws and under scrutiny for doing so, also actively building functionality into their systems that helps them criminally evade scrutiny? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak-reveals-global-lobbying-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-... This is a level of deliberate, optional fraud that goes a step beyond, is it not? It's organised crime.
    - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
      No, I don't care about that at all. Why do you care? Someone, generations ago, made a law saying people in your town could only solicit car rides if they paid a special tax, and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model. State-enforced monopolies are often legalized corruption. I care more about that than some corporation using their resources to break that corruption.
      - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
        > and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model. This is a bit of projection. But good for you, being open about your support for fraud :-)
        Citizen_Lame 2y ago
        Taxis were fraud to begin with. Anything that can hurt them and make my life easier is a plus in my book.
      - 2y ago
- agumonkey 2y ago
  it was social cocaine, a lot of shiny results that made a lot of people high on numbers and progress fantasy old is new, 2.0
- kelnos 2y ago
  I'm not sure if this counts as being "empowered to be more productive", but both Airbnb and Uber are (to me, at least) still miles ahead of what were the only options pre-Airbnb and pre-Uber. The hotel experience of course was (and is) not universally bad, but I still prefer an Airbnb in most cases, for most trips I take. And when it comes to taxis... no thanks. Unless I have foreknowledge that taxis are significantly cheaper than Uber/Lyft in a place I'm visiting, I will take that Uber/Lyft every single time. Airbnb is certainly more fraught, given the problems for communities that rampant short-term rentals can cause. And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are. Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents. "Social expectations" is a bit of a weird thing to bring up, since it's so amorphous and hard to pin down. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that people can't rent out their house or apartment for a few days or a week. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that the only way to hire a car was to call a number that often doesn't pick up, and then wait 30-60 minutes for a car that often doesn't ever arrive.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are. "Technology and throw-caution-to-the-wind made life better for me as a consumer, and I openly don't care (much) about the negative impacts on communities and other individuals". > Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents. Certainly. That's why we have a process to change them, rather than simply ignore them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
akira2501 2y ago
> we've been throwing cash I think you find most of the answer you want if you simply examine who "we" is in this context. It certainly wasn't "us."
MichaelZuo 2y ago
That’s a pretty good point. Are there any, at least somewhat credible, unicorns that have appeared over the last 5 years?
- al_borland 2y ago
  Does OpenAI count? Founded 8 years ago, but have completely blown up in the last couple years.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Ehh that’s pretty iffy, since I think they were already worth more than a billion dollars well before Oct. 2019…
- reissbaker 2y ago
  Zepto is the largest grocery delivery service in India and was YC Winter 2021, and currently is valued at $5B. Realistically people were making these kinds of points back in 2015, and now a large percentage of the lists of unicorns were from somewhere around 2015. It just takes time for most of these companies to become well-known unicorns. The last five years is always the worst five years, until you wait another five years and in hindsight consider it a golden era. Edit: although I do think that the couple years of high interest rates will slow the growth of startups from this era, since it has a meaningful impact on how much cash VCs can spend. The AI boom at the tail end of high interest rates will probably cover a bit of that though; OpenAI is the first runaway success but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the last.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Thanks, that does seem like a bonafide ‘unicorn’ by any metric.
__alexs 2y ago
This is purely an artifact of our cultural myopia rather than a lack of unicorns. There are tens of companies hitting >$1B valuations every year.

Terr_ 2y ago

It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.

robertlagrant 2y ago
Er no, they totally transformed things through technology as well. Their product was fantastic. Hail a cab in the 2000s in the UK and tell me Uber had no improvement for its customers.
- daxfohl 2y ago
  I understand GP's point, but to yours I'll add they have also open sourced and mainstreamed some of their key technologies. So it's not all bad.
  - adamc 2y ago
    Not all bad != good.
- CPLX 2y ago
  Right but how much of this improvement came from the invention and popularity of smartphones and how much of the innovation came from a company called Uber.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    Struggling to see the relevance of this question. How much of Uber's "innovation" was actually Ford/GM/Toyota innovation in car manufacturing?
    - labster 2y ago
      But those car companies are just riding on the coattails of Exxon, Chevron and the like with their improvements in oil discovery and hydraulic fracking.
CalRobert 2y ago
Getting a taxi in my college town in 2005 was agony. Make a phone call from a loud bar and shout at some guy who can barely tell what you're saying that you want a taxi and then maybe if you're lucky they show up in an hour and cost 3 times as much as you expected (and that's on a good night!) vs. "press a button, get a ride" (and have a feedback mechanism for horrible drivers or gross cars, etc.). Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  In my city of Berlin, we simply had an app called MyTaxi that would hail the cab for you. No need for Uber and its predatory business model.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Sure, but there's a difference between "that kind of success" and "any success". To illustrate, imagine an alternate timeline with a company called "Rebu", which provides all the same phone-apps and servers and whatnot for thousands of taxi-services across the world to adopt, replacing their shitty old "computerized dispatch" systems. Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features? I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
  - tristor 2y ago
    You're right, but you're treating that as a net-negative. The reality is that the government regulations structured taxi services in most cities in the world into cartels that operated in a way that was to the detriment of their customers. Uber broke the taxi cartel, and yes, it broke the law to do it, but it wouldn't have been possible to do this way if they'd tried to work with the existing taxi companies, because their anti-customer cancer would have infected Uber while it was young and before it could even scale. Part of their value proposition is their scale, itself.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
Pretty hard for me to lament laws being broken when the laws boil down to "you're not allowed to compete with this monopoly".
- sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
  Do you lament e.g. Uber knowingly breaking laws, and then in the knowledge that they are knowingly breaking laws and under scrutiny for doing so, also actively building functionality into their systems that helps them criminally evade scrutiny? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak-reveals-global-lobbying-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-... This is a level of deliberate, optional fraud that goes a step beyond, is it not? It's organised crime.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    No, I don't care about that at all. Why do you care? Someone, generations ago, made a law saying people in your town could only solicit car rides if they paid a special tax, and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model. State-enforced monopolies are often legalized corruption. I care more about that than some corporation using their resources to break that corruption.
    - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
      > and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model. This is a bit of projection. But good for you, being open about your support for fraud :-)
      - Citizen_Lame 2y ago
        Taxis were fraud to begin with. Anything that can hurt them and make my life easier is a plus in my book.
    - 2y ago
agumonkey 2y ago
it was social cocaine, a lot of shiny results that made a lot of people high on numbers and progress fantasy old is new, 2.0
kelnos 2y ago
I'm not sure if this counts as being "empowered to be more productive", but both Airbnb and Uber are (to me, at least) still miles ahead of what were the only options pre-Airbnb and pre-Uber. The hotel experience of course was (and is) not universally bad, but I still prefer an Airbnb in most cases, for most trips I take. And when it comes to taxis... no thanks. Unless I have foreknowledge that taxis are significantly cheaper than Uber/Lyft in a place I'm visiting, I will take that Uber/Lyft every single time. Airbnb is certainly more fraught, given the problems for communities that rampant short-term rentals can cause. And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are. Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents. "Social expectations" is a bit of a weird thing to bring up, since it's so amorphous and hard to pin down. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that people can't rent out their house or apartment for a few days or a week. I don't think I ever had any "social expectation" that the only way to hire a car was to call a number that often doesn't pick up, and then wait 30-60 minutes for a car that often doesn't ever arrive.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > And I won't claim that Uber/Lyft is fair to their drivers. But I don't really care if they had to break laws to get where they are. "Technology and throw-caution-to-the-wind made life better for me as a consumer, and I openly don't care (much) about the negative impacts on communities and other individuals". > Sometimes laws are wrong. Sometimes laws are the result of corruption and lobbying that isn't in the interests of the actual constituents. Certainly. That's why we have a process to change them, rather than simply ignore them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

akira2501 2y ago

> we've been throwing cash I think you find most of the answer you want if you simply examine who "we" is in this context. It certainly wasn't "us."

MichaelZuo 2y ago

That’s a pretty good point. Are there any, at least somewhat credible, unicorns that have appeared over the last 5 years?

al_borland 2y ago
Does OpenAI count? Founded 8 years ago, but have completely blown up in the last couple years.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Ehh that’s pretty iffy, since I think they were already worth more than a billion dollars well before Oct. 2019…
reissbaker 2y ago
Zepto is the largest grocery delivery service in India and was YC Winter 2021, and currently is valued at $5B. Realistically people were making these kinds of points back in 2015, and now a large percentage of the lists of unicorns were from somewhere around 2015. It just takes time for most of these companies to become well-known unicorns. The last five years is always the worst five years, until you wait another five years and in hindsight consider it a golden era. Edit: although I do think that the couple years of high interest rates will slow the growth of startups from this era, since it has a meaningful impact on how much cash VCs can spend. The AI boom at the tail end of high interest rates will probably cover a bit of that though; OpenAI is the first runaway success but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the last.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Thanks, that does seem like a bonafide ‘unicorn’ by any metric.

__alexs 2y ago

This is purely an artifact of our cultural myopia rather than a lack of unicorns. There are tens of companies hitting >$1B valuations every year.