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It's a better experience for sure, and that's why they got the viral start that gave them the opportunity to eat the world, but presenting that as "worth it" se

It's a better experience for sure, and that's why they got the viral start that gave them the opportunity to eat the world, but presenting that as "worth it" seems pretty dubious considering: - Tons and tons of users buying vehicles they can barely afford to drive for them - Tons of restaurants already struggling to get by saddled with needing an iPad or two at their counter to intercept online orders, and needing to charge more and anger customers just to break even on the fees - Huge amounts of sexual assaults because Uber didn't vet drivers And lest we leave it merely implied: Uber is worth what Uber is worth because it's a taxi company that owns no Taxis and pays no taxi drivers a proper wage. That's why it's a billion dollar unicorn. Same as AirBNB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels, UberEats/Doordash are food delivery services that don't own restaurants, Instacart is a grocery chain that doesn't own grocery stores. Honestly if you want to really be cynical about it, the true path to finding the next tech unicorn is figuring out how to be a $business that owns none of what a $business normally does, and hires no employees that $business usually does, and then wrap that up in an app, and convince poor people to do the work for you because they have no other options. Boom, unicorn. The way taxi companies had languished in obsolescence was definitely a problem, but I struggle to consider if Uber was the best way to solve that on any front.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary US business is about value extraction not value creation. Put differently, a common business model in late 20th century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a transaction that is already happening "at scale" and figure out how to insert your own company into the transaction and extract some percentage of the value. The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for whatever you bring to it. This does not mean that there is no value added. What these companies do not represent are new transactions: no new products, no new macro-scale services ("but you get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to "someone will drive you where you want to go").
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary US business is about value extraction not value creation. I wouldn't even say it's isolated to businesses anymore. This is the same economic forces that's prompting all the crypto nonsense from a few years back, bullshit businesses like drop-shipping, social media influencers, etc. There's just nothing left to build anymore it seems. Every industry is stagnating, year over year there's no crazy new innovations anymore, nothing to get excited about. Just dumber and thinner versions of things we already had. The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete.
  - carlmr 2y ago
    >The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete. I wouldn't say nothing there, and that something is something. Translation, rephrasing and a lot of management tasks like summarizing what happened are way easier and better than any previous models I've seen. Creating images and logos is usually very constrained by what you can describe without describing what's not there, it's impressive nonetheless. Autopilot code autocomplete is pretty good, but not replaces all engineers good, rather increased efficiency good. The problem is they all lie about it being the thing that will replace all knowledge work. CEOs are buying it up and salivating. It could replace a lot of middle management at my company. But those are the people that are staying.
  - NoGravitas 2y ago
    What's worse is that "there's just nothing left to build anymore". There's tons of work that needs to be done in the real economy (infrastructure repair and upgrades, housing, especially infill), but can't be, because the asset economy is much more profitable. Everything seems useless because it's not being built to use, it's being built to inflate equity "mystery box" values.
- 2y ago
CalRobert 2y ago
Any service that took money for rides would turn in to this. You know lyft? Before it was lyft, it was zimride. And zimride was just a way for college students to share rides places, a bit more organised than the Craigslist ride share board (which I used often) Then zimride said “you can use that gps receiver you’ve got in your pocket to find people who need a ride near you and we’ll suggest how much gas money to split”. But pretty quickly people started just taking passengers even when not on their own trips, and lyft morphed in to…. Basically Uber.
musicale 2y ago
The other trick is to dodge the regulatory requirements that your competitors are saddled with. see: regulatory entrepreneurship

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary US business is about value extraction not value creation. Put differently, a common business model in late 20th century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a transaction that is already happening "at scale" and figure out how to insert your own company into the transaction and extract some percentage of the value. The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for whatever you bring to it. This does not mean that there is no value added. What these companies do not represent are new transactions: no new products, no new macro-scale services ("but you get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to "someone will drive you where you want to go").

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> Lots has been written about how way too much contemporary US business is about value extraction not value creation. I wouldn't even say it's isolated to businesses anymore. This is the same economic forces that's prompting all the crypto nonsense from a few years back, bullshit businesses like drop-shipping, social media influencers, etc. There's just nothing left to build anymore it seems. Every industry is stagnating, year over year there's no crazy new innovations anymore, nothing to get excited about. Just dumber and thinner versions of things we already had. The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete.
- carlmr 2y ago
  >The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete. I wouldn't say nothing there, and that something is something. Translation, rephrasing and a lot of management tasks like summarizing what happened are way easier and better than any previous models I've seen. Creating images and logos is usually very constrained by what you can describe without describing what's not there, it's impressive nonetheless. Autopilot code autocomplete is pretty good, but not replaces all engineers good, rather increased efficiency good. The problem is they all lie about it being the thing that will replace all knowledge work. CEOs are buying it up and salivating. It could replace a lot of middle management at my company. But those are the people that are staying.
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  What's worse is that "there's just nothing left to build anymore". There's tons of work that needs to be done in the real economy (infrastructure repair and upgrades, housing, especially infill), but can't be, because the asset economy is much more profitable. Everything seems useless because it's not being built to use, it's being built to inflate equity "mystery box" values.
2y ago

CalRobert 2y ago

Any service that took money for rides would turn in to this. You know lyft? Before it was lyft, it was zimride. And zimride was just a way for college students to share rides places, a bit more organised than the Craigslist ride share board (which I used often) Then zimride said “you can use that gps receiver you’ve got in your pocket to find people who need a ride near you and we’ll suggest how much gas money to split”. But pretty quickly people started just taking passengers even when not on their own trips, and lyft morphed in to…. Basically Uber.

musicale 2y ago

The other trick is to dodge the regulatory requirements that your competitors are saddled with. see: regulatory entrepreneurship