Dubai Billionaire's Tech Startup Takes on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Dubai Billionaire's Tech Startup Takes on Amazon

wsj.com

55 pointsjkuria54 comments

Who would want to work for someone like this? If I can get my work done efficiently, why do I have to stay at the office?

This billionaire should read deep work, maybe he would attract more talent.

>“I want people who sleep in the office,” says Mr. Alabbar, the founder of the now three-month-old startup. “Want to go walk your dog in the afternoon and all that? I’m not the guy you work for.”

Sounds like Elon.

No, not really. Tesla + SpaceX have ~25,000 employees. While Musk is without a doubt a hard charger, always pushing his employees, it's a pretty big leap to suggest those 25,000 employees are all working 80 hours per week, sleeping under their desks, and can't walk their dogs in the afternoon.

Here's the actual reality: 99% of those 25,000 employees are on normal work schedules, with normal work expectations. There are no organizations of that scale in the US where the employees all work crazy hours and sleep under their desks; quite the opposite, organizations that large always drift toward the middle by necessity (they can't attract tens of thousands of workers in a highly competitive labor market otherwise).

Do you actually know any Tesla employees personally? Because I know one ex-Tesla and two current Tesla employees. Tesla sounds like a burn-out factory once you have a deep conversation about the reality of working there.

Factories in general aren't known as a great workplaces. A great factory is barely 'ok place to work there'. Everyone knows that they are stuck in their salary bracket, you don't have the energy to educate yourself for a better job, competition between promotions is high and even if you become a line manager , you still have all the problems.

I worked in a factory. It's almost impossible to build a large factory with great work environment.

There are no organizations of that scale in the US where the employees all work crazy hours and sleep under their desk

The US Navy expects officers at sea to only sleep about 5 hours a day. This is implicated in at least 3 incidents of warship collisions.

I have no clue where you're getting your information from. But as an ex SpaceX'er with friends still working there and friends at Tesla, they absolutely work at least 70-80 hours a week. This is not an 'anomaly', but the norm. In addition, the expectations are incredibly high.

Well at least Elon's got a vision and push innovation. How motivating is it to copy a business that is already ubiquitous and very efficient?

I think, in both the cases, the prime motivation would be money, if at all.

Elon "pushing" innovation means zero for most sane employees unless paid handsomely and compensated for the loss of "life" (depends on what a person calls life, because I have colleagues who are happiest at the work place and make an effort to stay extra hours; w/o overtime).

So speaking generally, both Elon and this Saudi billionaire are similarly bad employers if they advocate and push for for such unhealthy work-life balance.

Basically the most desperate and cheapest available out there. Also the paywall causes the article to end at this quote, which is perfect because I have no desire to read any more of it.

Like so many startup founders, he expects everyone working for him to share his passion for his vision. It's an unrealistic expectation when your business depends on being able to scale rapidly and by orders of magnitude.

he expects everyone working for him to share his passion for his vision.

So long as they also have an equal share in the equity... oh wait

And this: "Noon laid off at least 200 employees out of a total of 700 as it readied itself". That's quite insane for a startup taking on Amazon.

I'm giving it 0.1% chance of outcompeting Amazon locally, zero chance globally.

Give US working hours + 0% equity :D I am sure this is a recipe for unbelievable success... Did he get his inspiration in Berlin?

Please explain.

It's popular in German-speaking countries, especially in Berlin, to lure developers to work on startups, offering 0% equity, insane working hours (crushes), barely livable wages, low job protection (small companies can fire more-less at will), all for glory of owners getting pay off at the end if successful (mostly by copying existing US companies and adapting them to local market specifics), being subject to treatment as "idiots" as those owners can't value people that would voluntarily work for them under those circumstances of course.

What type of salary do you mean ? Example is 50K good (normal conditions) ?

Often <45k. You should aim for 70K+ if you want to move to Germany, preferably 85K which would give you middle-class life. 100K+ is fairly rare. Or go to Switzerland and get 250K.

ooo Berlin, my amazing city. wannabe startup people, German mentality of taking any risk, cheap labor and hipster. Also, is not cheap anymore :)

Sounds like a modern day of slavery.

They actually have real slavery in Dubai and I'm guessing because this guy is in real estate that he is probably involved in that.

Amusing, considering that his employees are likely to have also been sourced from India.

Slavery is well and alive in many middle eastern countries. Especially in construction industry often work is done by foreigners who are treated basically like slaves, often their passports being held and them forced to work for very little money.

Sounds like Bezos.

He means he simply wants hardworking and smart slaves whose only mission in life is to achieve his goals and increase his wealth

Follow that up with firing 200 out of 700 employees when money became an issue. Sounds like an amazing career opportunity. If nothing else, you will leave with a new appreciation for you next opportunity at a realistically demanding organization...

I'm not comfortable with a company like noon being called a startup. They're not really cash strapped (billion dollars went right in), granted building a logistics company isn't cheap but it's not like they went through phases of operation and testing the market/product, they just launched straight in like a regular business.

On another note, their glassdoor reviews are outright scary. Granted there are only 7 reviews but it sounds like typical dubai: throw money acquiring the best (in this case talent) then screw up the execution.

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/noon-Reviews-E1669856.ht... if anyone is interested.

This worse than what I expected

https://archive.is/sPiBx

You're a great man

Redirect through FB gets you past the paywall. Put the following in a bookmarklet and click it when on a WSJ page.

javascript:window.location="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window...;

What a motivating call for talent! I'm applying right away, I love being a slave to my employer.

Thought exercise. You're on the Fortune 500. Your goal is to be on the top of that list. So you decide you want to spend $1B to build a single venture to create something with stereo typical VC return expectations: >100x.

IOW, you're looking at potential trillion dollar markets. Not too many of those! Taking on Amazon may be one of the most accessible, IMO. Start by dominating a region that Amazon has trouble in, like the Arab world.

But like any startup execution and team is more valuable than idea...

I'm sceptical, to begin with, they need to overtake Alibaba and co. who are the real elephants in the room there.

My father ran a construction materials wholesale business in Russia's East for like 20 years. Naturally, he does a lot of imports from China and he had an Alibaba outlet. Despite fact that it was written black on white in bold font that the product is warehoused in Russia and is imported from China, he was receiving regular orders from companies in the gulf countries who were saying something like "we care not where it is warehoused, just get it there for n amount of money by that date". Companies in the gulf shop stuff on Alibaba as if they buy cookies in a corner store, and they don't care much about money (you can understand now why and how Alibaba charges companies up to $1m and more for front page placement and first positions in search)

For anybody who ran an Aliexpress store, it is know that the only people who can order DHL delivery for <$1 items are guys from Saudi Arabia or UAE

It will be super tough for any newcomer to break the habit even if the talk is about B2C market.

Moreover => halfpastnoon's post below.

This guy sounds like he has more dollars than sense.

He’s made many foolish investments as stated in the archive link another user mentioned.

But what can I judge. He’s rich I’m not.

"This guy sounds like he has more dollars than sense."

Well, that's Dubai for you.

Aside from the ambitious goal itself, the Arabic version of the website is executed well https://www.noon.com/ar-sa which is somewhat rare. I couldn't read the whole article due to the paywall, but I don't think Noon is trying to compete with amazon.com directly. I think they're trying to compete with Souq[1], which was recently acquired by Amazon in an effort to enter the Middle East market.

1) https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/amazon-souq-com-completed/

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. I was expecting a mess of a UX in the website but found otherwise.

The site is very fast and it offers a smooth experience.

A key missing aspect are product reviews and the shipping time is not great (5 days for a book)

Of course, because the must have microscopic inventories, and they order stuff on short notice from wholesalers in China.

This is and old old trick

But what a joke. Compare:

https://www.noon.com/en-sa/search?q=i7-7700hq

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=i7-77...

ex-employee here. throwaway for obvious reasons.

This isn't a three month old startup. People literally were sleeping under their desks. Wretched company. Multiple people burned out and one suicide attempt. Hired some of the best and brightest from all around the the globe. Used them. Burned them. Banned people from working in the UAE ever again. Zero transparency between investors and management. Zero transparency between management and product. Zero transparency between product and engineering. Missed three launch deadlines successively with Alabbar committing to hard dates for launch in the press. Alabbar looked like an idiot one too many times in the press and fired everyone including the CEO. Threw away all intellectual property. Purchased competitor JadoPado with zero due diligence. Intent was to repaint JadoPado with noon paint. Founder of JadoPado joined as CTO, left seven days later. Threw away JadoPado code base and created everything from scratch. Minimal lovable product was ready to launch nine months ago but didn't sign up enough suppliers or SKUs to actually launch.

https://www.reddit.com/user/halfpastnoon

https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/6813vw/nooncom_is_no...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/6c23nb/noon_closing_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/6elfio/nooncom_reshi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/69vjgt/can_confirm_j...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/6fsmkb/exnoon_ama/

https://omarkassim.com/whats-hiding-behind-noons-beta/

https://blog.esanjo.com/the-jadopado-experiment-is-at-an-end...

https://www.arabianbusiness.com/alabbar-s-noon-com-set-launc...

3 weeks, but who's counting.

Also, the codebase wasn't thrown out. Some bits definitely were (we had a fair amount of legacy given 7 years), but large parts of the same team (e.g. SVP of Product, VP of Engineering) that built our product by and large designed and built the product that noon launched with.

Hi Omar, how can we reach Mr. Alabbar. I briefly reviewed your site and believe we can help you with Conversion Rate Optimization. Here's what we do: http://blog.capitalandgrowth.org/wp-content/conversion_wizar...

What is your email?

Non-paywall link:

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/dubai-billionaires-tech-sta...

Change link from wsj.com to fullwsj.com to bypass. Uses Facebook redirect.

you are the hero Hacker News needed, good sir.

We've been waiting for you for years, thanks

only works for me sometimes. facebook redirect is a good hack!

https://outline.com/AEnNh6

Totally off topic, but I am genuinely curious what copyright law says with regard to these archive-type services, especially ones that alter the content, in this case by removing “clutter”. Awesome service IMO, I’d consider running one myself but don’t want to be sued.

Edit: I just read their DMCA section. It appears that they are saying “don’t submit content you don’t own” but then on their home page describe it as a service to remove ads (and other nuisances) from articles. In other words, they are trying to hide behind the DMCA while encouraging people to submit content that isn’t theirs. Again, I love the service but I fear for their legal standing should WSJ or others decide to pounce.

Only works if you clean their cookies first

Real-estate tycoon, Dubai, 3-months-old startup, take on Amazon.

I get that he is a billionaire, but IMO this is not newsworthy.

Good luck. Taking on amazon is basically taking on an arm of the USA directly now.

That's really helpful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com