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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

So some of the fake-innovators are finally failing (long overdue). Startups are no longer a "fashion", so hopefully there will be less posers and less people who brand as startups businesses that are more fit for slow organic growth. Like really, WTF did Uber or Airbnb really innovate or invent?! Grateful to them that they finally raised the bar in areas of the service industry where everything sucked for the consumers... but there should be other stuff to focus on if you want 100x ROI. What they did was pretty much mundane and incredibly boring, they succeeded by incredibly-smart-business-sense and uberhuman bubble-surfing-skills!

Finally more breathing room. And hopefully less competition for capital, so that the people actually really innovating and inventing new stuff have more chances of getting it.

Overall there's only reason for optimism!

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Not sure how to respond to this, because they really did innovate in the beginning, in a way that’s not obvious to the “makers:” they created whole new business models. Or at least AirBnB did. It’s still unclear whether the Uber model is actually (financially) sustainable.

With that said they didn’t innovate in any other way, and haven’t shown that they’re able to continue innovating on business models. The world takes for granted their original business-model innovation, now that it’s so commonplace, so all the same, it’s easily understandable to be hearing this.

People have been renting out rooms, houses etc. for a very long time. When I was a kid you could call up the tourist board or various organisations for a list of people renting out rooms in their house. Other than a new delivery medium, exactly what has AirBnB added? The only thing I can think of is the feedback features.

Wow, you are really trying to reduce Airbnb's business arent you? How do you not see a global house/room rental platform not being a complete game changer on how people travel?

Their point is probably that Airbnb did not execute anything particularly well and its usefulness is because of scale, not in spite of it. The contrasting example would be Google, where even before it was popular was superior because of better execution (better search algorithms).

Consider a hypothetical p2p car renting company (not Uber). With a few thousand users it probably wouldn’t be that useful as a service, but if 80% of the worlds population had their cars available on it the service would be incredibly useful, despite the core idea existing now already.

Right, and I think what you're missing is that its not luck that allowed airbnb to scale, but exactly the combination of ingredients that it had when it started and during its growth. This is not a government monopoly situation. All those users chose to use Airbnb over other options for a reason. Let's not forget or diminish that.

AirBnB monopolized the financials of the transaction.

You could rent someone's vacation house through Craigslist and agree to pay cash/check, but if the place was not what it's cracked up to be, or the owner suddenly demands a higher rate (or slaps some fee that was not previously discussed), you were out of luck.

AirBnB has its own share of scams with non-existent apartments, but their payout rules (as well as reliance on credit cards) provide some new consumer protection previously unavailable with p2p rentals.

If your thesis is true, then any of those "tourist board or various organisations" can just put up a Web site, accept payments and start raking in millions of dollars. Besides Homeaway and Flipkey very few do.

I am not sure if you said this as a joke but Uber did create a whole new market while shaking up the status quo. Isn't that what innovation is supposed to be ? Airbnb , whether you love them or hate them, have had a substantial impact on real estate economy nearly all over the world.

I don't believe venture capital investment is a zero sum game. Money will always chase higher returns. It may come from Private equity, it may come from angels' savings -- if there is a possibility of higher return with lowered risk -- money will find a way to it.

It's easy to criticize AirBnB and Uber. Try to do something with a similar impact. If that's not an innovative company, I don't know what is it.

I don't particularly like Uber and AirBnB, to be clear. But it's hard to deny they're rare and valuable.

Why can't they be rare and valuable without being innovative?

Because they are new.

To me, the innovation was changing social norms to allow complete strangers in your cars and homes and dealing with legal implications of trying to skirt around commercial drivers (taxis, etc.) and residents (hotels, motels, etc.). At the same time, convincing people the liability of driving someone around or hosting them in your house was worth it as an individual seemed like another challenge.

If you asked me years ago if either concept would work at mass scale, I'd think you were crazy. Too many risks and unknowns to be worth it. These days, people seem to be more willing to take risks and work for AirBnB or Uber. I suspect the economic pressures a typical laborer in the US are currently under has made people more accepting of doing this to help alleviate their financial pressures. I know a lot of people who do AirBnB just to help pay off their mortgages and plan to stop as soon as they finish or make some headway on payments.

Handling the payment processes was also a big win. When riding a traditional taxi, it was always a hassle to count out the cash, or scan the card and sign the receipt, etc. etc. There's a big win to just getting out of the car and dealing with payment on the app.

Same with AirBNB, its really nice to not have to coordinate any of that, and to be protected from scammers, fake checks, chasing people for money, etc.

AirBNB is rife with scammers, and from my understanding they tend to side on the side of the scammer during a dispute. You might want to check on that false sense of security they are giving you.

Every single word you use is defensible, but in the context of Uber presently losing billions of dollars a year. There is a huge surplus of people who can create something rare, valuable and innovative if they are allowed to lose billions of dollars a year of other people's money.

It is critically important that all this business activity happens at a profit, otherwise it is unsustainable and a bad use of resources. Profitless activity will stop fairly quickly and won't come back.

You need to consider it a form of warfare, a tremendous cost absorbed in the hope of conquest. Once the adversaries, i.e. cabbies and taxi companies, are defeated, Uber expects to be in a strong position in an oligopoly.

What do you mean by "valuable", when you say it's hard to deny?

personally I would still find Uber/Lyft extremely useful even if they had to double fares to pay drivers better and make a profit. being able to hail a ride with your phone and being able to track its progress on a map is a game changer by itself.

one significant benefit of Uber that I've noticed is that people outside of cities are much less likely to drive themselves home after drinking. they either use a ride share both ways, or experience less friction later on when they realize theyve had too much to drink. ten years ago they would just say fuck it and risk a DUI.

It is rare for innovation to be technical or purely technical. It is far more common for innovation to be from a novel business model, which perhaps is enabled by the technical innovation from someone else. Many times one technical innovation (Internet, smartphones, PCs) leads to many business opportunities (Amazon, Uber, Microsoft)

Agreed. I'm a software developer (and I really enjoy coding; I'm an open source developer of 10 years) but I want this recession to happen so badly that I'd be prepared to work as a construction worker, gardener or laborer of any kind if that's what it takes to deal with the consequence of economic collapse because it would create a lot of opportunities for me.

At this stage, I'd vote for communism, fascism or whatever it takes to make this nightmare end.

You're gonna get more then you bargained for

If I have to eat my neighbors' dogs to survive, it would be worth it.

Err...

Maybe the nightmare wouldn’t end with your proposed solutions... in fact, maybe your personal problems aren’t related to society’s organization scheme but rather something in your decision making system.

I hope you find peace.

I'm genuinely curious. What opportunities do you think an economic collapse would create for you?

Chaos and violence is the primary dividend in a collapse. I’m going to guess it’s something in that vain.

It's a complicated story but basically the current high market valuations within my industry are giving certain unproductive individuals and organizations a lot of power and allowing them to waste a lot of money without any consequence. If valuations collapsed, it would level the playing field and productive projects would finally be able to get attention from users and investors.

My industry is severely impacted by filter bubbles so investors and customers often don't realize that much better, cheaper, more efficient solutions exist and some of these investors may even intentionally turn a blind eye because the market doesn't seem to care that the incumbents are wasting millions.

The industry has become so detached from value creation that market caps seems to fluctuate randomly and not affected by any decision or any activity of market participants. My industry is quite an extreme (and obvious) case, but I feel that the rest of the economy is in a similar state.

A lot of investors and users are focused on unproductive incumbents and completely missing the real innovation which is happening because of the noise that the incumbents create.

How do I invest in this?

It's in the blockchain space so it requires deep technical knowledge (or trustworthy social contacts with strong understanding of the space which is basically impossible to find right now with all the noise and scams) and some understanding of economics to evaluate different nascent decentralized business models. Most blockchain projects just waste money and are backed by nothing with no real strategy to generate continuous demand for their tokens. It's 99% speculation right now but investors are throwing bucket loads of money at wasteful projects simply because they're already valuable.

> I'd vote for communism, fascism or whatever it takes to make this nightmare end

Chill. You don't want to go that way.

Talk to anyone in a country that experienced that... I can tell you that the way actual communism subtly broke the minds of people and twisted their thinking patterns is horrible. I takes more than a couple generations for a society to recover from that.

Try to fix what you have, don't go "burn the system down" and throw the baby with the bathwater!

Airbnb was certainly at the forefront of Docker and the microservices revolution (for good or for bad). They certainly innovated technically -- at least in the beginning.

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