12 ms·

It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introduc

It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place? It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website, which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some bigger fool because we know people who know people. Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show). I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...

CPLX 12y ago
> It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. Exactly. If they were't connected to YC or someone else that could grease the wheels they would have their merchant account and CC acceptance terminated in the first 72 hours for the obvious and flagrant violations outlined in the Wired article, and quietly fade into the ether.
aqme28 12y ago
It's the little things. It allows you to focus on whatever you think is more important, while someone specialized in the task can do it maybe more efficiently than you can. It's the good ol' fashioned trade of money for time, and trading is what makes an economy work.
- reasonish 12y ago
  You know who's specialised in taking pizza orders and delivering them? Pizza delivery companies!
  - mod 12y ago
    Arguably not as optimized as Magic, strangely. Call your pizza company and see how much effort it takes you to order a pizza to your house. They don't know your card number, your address, etc. Compare with magic: "I want a large pepperoni pizza". Confirm the price, you're done. About 20 seconds of time involved. Assuming your time is worth, I don't know, $20/hour or more, this seems to be worth the money directly--not even accounting for less cognitive load, loss of focus, daily happiness, whatever. The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
    - reasonish 12y ago
      BS. How does Magic magically know my address or payment details? In any event, I usually order pizza online, and it takes a couple of clicks. Even on the phone it's less than a minute. Do you really consider your time so important that you refuse to even spend one minute on the phone talking to another human being to order a pizza?
      - mod 12y ago
        No, but I understand that there's plenty of people who do. FWIW it's more like 5-10 minutes every time I've ever ordered pizza (admittedly not often, I'm sure my pizza skills could improve, if I worked on them. I don't want to.) Magic doesn't magically know your address/payment, of course, but it remembers it in the future. For every service, including new ones. I'm sure you actually knew that already. Point is it's one-time, ever.
        gknoy 12y ago
        My Domino's Pizza online account remembers both my address and my last/favorite orders. (I could even let it remember my card number, but I don't.) Ordering pizza consists of visiting the website, selecting "Yep, that same thing again", and following through the order process. Granted, Magic has that for all transactions, but pizza can already be pretty convenient.
        mod 12y ago
        I'm not wholeheartedly disagreeing, but there's so much more to consider: 1) You're not at home. 2) You don't always order Dominos. 3) You don't even know what's available for delivery (I'm in a less urban area than most--Pizza Hut just started delivering in the last 12 months, and doesn't deliver to the whole city) Essentially, when things get complex, Magic's cognitive load hardly changes at all. If it's a matter of routine (same pizza, same company, same house), your way is probably worth saving the money they charge. Anyway, my pizza place has none of that. Including "online account," my pizza guy would have a good laugh at that.
      - 12y ago
Swizec 12y ago
> How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place? In the old days we used to call this a personal assistant. Now an Uber for personal assistants is something that would be really useful because I sure as hell don't have the money or the need for a full time assistant. Although I have considered hiring somebody on a retainer basis to just be available for a few hours of menial tasks a few times a week or month.
nugget 12y ago
I spent the weekend with a bunch of venture partners at a firm's off site and Magic came up a few times in conversation: not ''is it a killer idea?'' (of course, if it works) but ''can it scale?''. Some business models simply don't scale until some amorphous inflection point in tech/attitudes/etc hits, no matter how much we want them to. There's a healthy argument to make for raising and burning a bunch of money to aggregate users together in anticipation of the market shortly hitting that scaling inflection point, but it's still a big gamble (albeit one I think Magic and a handful of competitors will all take). And then ultimately if it can scale, I think Amex and Visa/MC buy up competitors and make it a loss leader/free service attached to their card services. I predict a lot of new SMS services headed our way. e.g. If I'm EXP on American Airlines, why don't they have a concierge # for me to text with? Why doesn't Seamless have a # for food delivery? etc.
- aqme28 12y ago
  I don't think there will be "a lot of new SMS services headed our way." The real value to the user for Magic is that you can use it for everything. Pizza one day, flight reservations the next. You don't need to google multiple numbers for things. And if there were multiple SMS services for pizza ordering or flight reservations or whatever, then Magic would just subcontract out to those smaller services, and people would still just use Magic.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Magic isn't going to exist in a year, so that's a non-premise. They're going to drown and the temporary hype will go away (needed to support the volume, which will fall out from under their service just about the time they're trying to raise serious capital), long before they can scale up and deliver on the premise. Someone else will make a lot of money off of a service like this, but it is not going to be Magic.
    - aqme28 12y ago
      Why is this service not sustainable within a year? Seems like a totally valid business to me. edit: Next year, one of us is going to be laughing.
Karunamon 12y ago
Is the cynicism truly necessary? I can practically taste the bile dripping off your comment. Every minute that someone's spending on some random, menial task is a minute that someone isn't getting something else more productive done. Maybe the world isn't getting saved, but I find it hard to call a service that gives people more time in their day anything but "making the world a better place".
- bendoernberg 12y ago
  There's still a person spending their minutes on a random, menial task, it's just not someone with a Hacker News account anymore.
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    Yes, but with scale, they'll get better at it. They might even be able to automate large portions of it. Also, it's a person spending their minutes on it, who might not have a better job available to them at the time. Don't get mad because someone is willing to OFFER money for a service that YOU would find demeaning to provide. Just don't take that job. Problem solved. Sheesh.
    - kefka 12y ago
      Great idea. If you're not in the gig economy, you're a turk.
      - VikingCoder 12y ago
        Just off the top of my head, World of Warcraft gold farmers. This has been a thing for a LONG TIME.
        wpietri 12y ago
        Is you argument really that if there is something that "has been a thing for a LONG TIME" that it isn't problematic and that we shouldn't be concerned about avoiding it?
mentat 12y ago
So how are you saving the world or does it bother you that other people are trying to make a difference? This tone towards startups and founders, I get it, but in the anonymous internet I have to wonder, who are these people and what are they doing that they think gives them a superior moral position. Or is it just that the other person has supposedly taken a superior moral position so you can argue however you want?
- reasonish 12y ago
  I'm not the one claiming to be saving the world. A lot of startups do seem to genuinely believe that what they are working on will save humanity (Or they'll sell the crappy website for billions and spend the money solving world hunger or something). You should watch "Sillicon Valley" if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure they took a lot of it straight from YCombinator. And it's hilarious. "Magic" would fit right in on there, as it's comedy gold.
nsxwolf 12y ago
What it demonstrates to me is that online pizza ordering systems are too difficult to use. I know what I want and don't want to be asked a million questions or fill out endless forms. Magic might not be a good service, but lessons can be learned from it.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Hey lots of people use administrative assistants, for good reason. Days have 24 hours; somebody else to help you save minutes or hours has good marginal value. Doesn't matter what they're doing, just so you don't have to do it.
VikingCoder 12y ago
If my wife, desperate to calm our crying daughter, texts Magic that she needs Similac Advance, a gallon of purified water, and a CLEANED set of Tommee Tippee bottles at 3 AM, and Magic is able to fulfill that need in short order... that's a MASSIVE win for everyone. Honestly, if you had to get those three things at 3 AM, how much time and effort would it take you? Add a screaming child to the equation. Anything that makes it easier for a consumer to get what they need, when they need it, if they are willing to pay the price, makes the world a better place. Especially if there's competition for that service.
- legoisbest 12y ago
  You would seriously trust some random person to clean baby bottles for you? Seriously? What the hell. If I had to get those things at 3AM - I don't know where you live, but for me (Out in the country), it's a 10 minute journey to a 24 hour supermarket, then 10 minutes back. The child would likely nap in the car.
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    It's extremely hard to not be sarcastic when I respond to you, so I'm not going to try: You're right, all problems anyone ever has are solved by the Walmart 10 minutes away. I retract my assertion that sometimes consumers are willing to spend money for convenience.
- laurafurr_TP 12y ago
  VikingCoder, Have you actually used Magic? I'm a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. Looking for users. Please let me know! Thanks!
adventured 12y ago
Magic is chatroulette. A bizarre, temporary amusement. It acquires your curiosity, it gets media buzz because of the premise (which can't be delivered on), but the foundation under it and the 'company' behind it is sand. To pull off Magic, realistically, will require extraordinary resources and execution. Magic will flame out long before they can manage to acquire such. A company like Amazon however, might just attempt a variation of it. For Amazon it can be another AWS service: ordering things as a web service. Amazon sources contractor labor, said labor gets reviewed / rated. It's a form of mechanical turk.

CPLX 12y ago

> It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world. Exactly. If they were't connected to YC or someone else that could grease the wheels they would have their merchant account and CC acceptance terminated in the first 72 hours for the obvious and flagrant violations outlined in the Wired article, and quietly fade into the ether.

aqme28 12y ago

It's the little things. It allows you to focus on whatever you think is more important, while someone specialized in the task can do it maybe more efficiently than you can. It's the good ol' fashioned trade of money for time, and trading is what makes an economy work.

reasonish 12y ago
You know who's specialised in taking pizza orders and delivering them? Pizza delivery companies!
- mod 12y ago
  Arguably not as optimized as Magic, strangely. Call your pizza company and see how much effort it takes you to order a pizza to your house. They don't know your card number, your address, etc. Compare with magic: "I want a large pepperoni pizza". Confirm the price, you're done. About 20 seconds of time involved. Assuming your time is worth, I don't know, $20/hour or more, this seems to be worth the money directly--not even accounting for less cognitive load, loss of focus, daily happiness, whatever. The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
  - reasonish 12y ago
    BS. How does Magic magically know my address or payment details? In any event, I usually order pizza online, and it takes a couple of clicks. Even on the phone it's less than a minute. Do you really consider your time so important that you refuse to even spend one minute on the phone talking to another human being to order a pizza?
    - mod 12y ago
      No, but I understand that there's plenty of people who do. FWIW it's more like 5-10 minutes every time I've ever ordered pizza (admittedly not often, I'm sure my pizza skills could improve, if I worked on them. I don't want to.) Magic doesn't magically know your address/payment, of course, but it remembers it in the future. For every service, including new ones. I'm sure you actually knew that already. Point is it's one-time, ever.
      - gknoy 12y ago
        My Domino's Pizza online account remembers both my address and my last/favorite orders. (I could even let it remember my card number, but I don't.) Ordering pizza consists of visiting the website, selecting "Yep, that same thing again", and following through the order process. Granted, Magic has that for all transactions, but pizza can already be pretty convenient.
        mod 12y ago
        I'm not wholeheartedly disagreeing, but there's so much more to consider: 1) You're not at home. 2) You don't always order Dominos. 3) You don't even know what's available for delivery (I'm in a less urban area than most--Pizza Hut just started delivering in the last 12 months, and doesn't deliver to the whole city) Essentially, when things get complex, Magic's cognitive load hardly changes at all. If it's a matter of routine (same pizza, same company, same house), your way is probably worth saving the money they charge. Anyway, my pizza place has none of that. Including "online account," my pizza guy would have a good laugh at that.
    - 12y ago

Swizec 12y ago

> How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place? In the old days we used to call this a personal assistant. Now an Uber for personal assistants is something that would be really useful because I sure as hell don't have the money or the need for a full time assistant. Although I have considered hiring somebody on a retainer basis to just be available for a few hours of menial tasks a few times a week or month.

nugget 12y ago

I spent the weekend with a bunch of venture partners at a firm's off site and Magic came up a few times in conversation: not ''is it a killer idea?'' (of course, if it works) but ''can it scale?''. Some business models simply don't scale until some amorphous inflection point in tech/attitudes/etc hits, no matter how much we want them to. There's a healthy argument to make for raising and burning a bunch of money to aggregate users together in anticipation of the market shortly hitting that scaling inflection point, but it's still a big gamble (albeit one I think Magic and a handful of competitors will all take). And then ultimately if it can scale, I think Amex and Visa/MC buy up competitors and make it a loss leader/free service attached to their card services. I predict a lot of new SMS services headed our way. e.g. If I'm EXP on American Airlines, why don't they have a concierge # for me to text with? Why doesn't Seamless have a # for food delivery? etc.

aqme28 12y ago
I don't think there will be "a lot of new SMS services headed our way." The real value to the user for Magic is that you can use it for everything. Pizza one day, flight reservations the next. You don't need to google multiple numbers for things. And if there were multiple SMS services for pizza ordering or flight reservations or whatever, then Magic would just subcontract out to those smaller services, and people would still just use Magic.
- adventured 12y ago
  Magic isn't going to exist in a year, so that's a non-premise. They're going to drown and the temporary hype will go away (needed to support the volume, which will fall out from under their service just about the time they're trying to raise serious capital), long before they can scale up and deliver on the premise. Someone else will make a lot of money off of a service like this, but it is not going to be Magic.
  - aqme28 12y ago
    Why is this service not sustainable within a year? Seems like a totally valid business to me. edit: Next year, one of us is going to be laughing.

Karunamon 12y ago

Is the cynicism truly necessary? I can practically taste the bile dripping off your comment. Every minute that someone's spending on some random, menial task is a minute that someone isn't getting something else more productive done. Maybe the world isn't getting saved, but I find it hard to call a service that gives people more time in their day anything but "making the world a better place".

bendoernberg 12y ago
There's still a person spending their minutes on a random, menial task, it's just not someone with a Hacker News account anymore.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  Yes, but with scale, they'll get better at it. They might even be able to automate large portions of it. Also, it's a person spending their minutes on it, who might not have a better job available to them at the time. Don't get mad because someone is willing to OFFER money for a service that YOU would find demeaning to provide. Just don't take that job. Problem solved. Sheesh.
  - kefka 12y ago
    Great idea. If you're not in the gig economy, you're a turk.
    - VikingCoder 12y ago
      Just off the top of my head, World of Warcraft gold farmers. This has been a thing for a LONG TIME.
      - wpietri 12y ago
        Is you argument really that if there is something that "has been a thing for a LONG TIME" that it isn't problematic and that we shouldn't be concerned about avoiding it?

mentat 12y ago

So how are you saving the world or does it bother you that other people are trying to make a difference? This tone towards startups and founders, I get it, but in the anonymous internet I have to wonder, who are these people and what are they doing that they think gives them a superior moral position. Or is it just that the other person has supposedly taken a superior moral position so you can argue however you want?

reasonish 12y ago
I'm not the one claiming to be saving the world. A lot of startups do seem to genuinely believe that what they are working on will save humanity (Or they'll sell the crappy website for billions and spend the money solving world hunger or something). You should watch "Sillicon Valley" if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure they took a lot of it straight from YCombinator. And it's hilarious. "Magic" would fit right in on there, as it's comedy gold.

nsxwolf 12y ago

What it demonstrates to me is that online pizza ordering systems are too difficult to use. I know what I want and don't want to be asked a million questions or fill out endless forms. Magic might not be a good service, but lessons can be learned from it.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Hey lots of people use administrative assistants, for good reason. Days have 24 hours; somebody else to help you save minutes or hours has good marginal value. Doesn't matter what they're doing, just so you don't have to do it.

VikingCoder 12y ago

If my wife, desperate to calm our crying daughter, texts Magic that she needs Similac Advance, a gallon of purified water, and a CLEANED set of Tommee Tippee bottles at 3 AM, and Magic is able to fulfill that need in short order... that's a MASSIVE win for everyone. Honestly, if you had to get those three things at 3 AM, how much time and effort would it take you? Add a screaming child to the equation. Anything that makes it easier for a consumer to get what they need, when they need it, if they are willing to pay the price, makes the world a better place. Especially if there's competition for that service.

legoisbest 12y ago
You would seriously trust some random person to clean baby bottles for you? Seriously? What the hell. If I had to get those things at 3AM - I don't know where you live, but for me (Out in the country), it's a 10 minute journey to a 24 hour supermarket, then 10 minutes back. The child would likely nap in the car.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  It's extremely hard to not be sarcastic when I respond to you, so I'm not going to try: You're right, all problems anyone ever has are solved by the Walmart 10 minutes away. I retract my assertion that sometimes consumers are willing to spend money for convenience.
laurafurr_TP 12y ago
VikingCoder, Have you actually used Magic? I'm a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. Looking for users. Please let me know! Thanks!

adventured 12y ago

Magic is chatroulette. A bizarre, temporary amusement. It acquires your curiosity, it gets media buzz because of the premise (which can't be delivered on), but the foundation under it and the 'company' behind it is sand. To pull off Magic, realistically, will require extraordinary resources and execution. Magic will flame out long before they can manage to acquire such. A company like Amazon however, might just attempt a variation of it. For Amazon it can be another AWS service: ordering things as a web service. Amazon sources contractor labor, said labor gets reviewed / rated. It's a form of mechanical turk.