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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

Back in my day, businesses that made income by selling goods or services to customers were just called businesses, not lifestyle businesses.

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Another crazy old idea:

Businesses that prioritize people over capital.

Or governments take care of people, businesses focus on selling products and services.

Or, maybe.... just maybe... both businesses and governments consider and prioritize the humans in the equation.

Businesses that don't prioritize winning in the market will be outperformed by businesses that do.

Let the government do the job of setting the boundaries on the market so they can do what's best for humans, and let businesses do the job of optimizing for victory within the market.

That's where their respective incentives lie, so that's what they do best at.

tl:dr; don't hate the player, hate the game.

Ok. That's what your economics textbook thinks. What do you think?

Competition is not the only way to get things done. Humans are definitely capable of collective action. You may recall a few weeks ago where hundreds of millions of Americans just said "fuck 2 AM, it's now 1 AM" early one Sunday. How would you harness that?

Those millions of Americans followed rules set by the government. That the game.

Make the rules do useful things. If you want business with social conscience, legislate it; don't whine for the uncaring hand of the free market to deign to suddenly show empathy.

Hey, here's a thought: why don't we get rid of such dehumanizing institutions and everybody just get along? How about we not commodify every single aspect of human existence, from birth to death?

How would you accomplish that?

I do not know how, hence needing a government to enforce rules.

How would you accomplish it using government as a tool? It's clear that most (all?) current governments are wholly inadequate to this task. What are the right rules, and how can government help the situation? What does society look like when you implement those rules and enforcement mechanisms?

You should read Atlas Shrugged

Yes, it's a very funny book once you get past the droning sentences and start seeing the core absurdity of its ideas. The gushing praise it lavishes on the rich has to be read to be believed.

As the old joke goes, there are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

How do you think startups make money? We're talking about two different things -- one is the value the business provides to their customers which is selling goods and services, and the other is the value the business provides to the founders and investors which is profit.

Whether or not something is a lifestyle business is a shuffling around of who owns the business and gets the profit, not at all about how the business operates except as second order effects.

> How do you think startups make money?

Do you think most modern startups actually do make money?

A great many don't, they lose it hand over fist. Especially those that intend to grow fast and get bought (or IPO) fast. It worked for a number of current big names, and many smaller names that those big names since bought.

You're just describing a growth strategy. The whole time they're burning cash they're still providing value to their customers. Nonprofits don't make money either and still provide value.

> Nonprofits don't make money either and still provide value.

They can make a surplus? And then reinvest it to further their cause?

Which is also what growth companies do? They reinvest their own earnings along with outside investment, which is the same as nonprofits (via donations).

Are the providing value or reallocating it from VCs temporarily in order to obtain enough market share to then extort consumers for higher prices (less value per dollar) later on?

> obtain enough market share to then extort consumers for higher prices (less value per dollar) later on?

Are there many examples of this extortion?

Casper and Blue Apron plummeted after adjusting pricing because they weren’t providing sufficient value. Uber became profitable. It probably lost some customers. But nobody I know felt extorted by it—those who didn’t like the new prices stopped using it.

>Are there many examples of this extortion?

Uber is definitely such an example - a lot of taxi companies disappeared because they couldn't compete with the scale of Uber with its subsidised prices.

Now Uber have significantly increased their prices there are a lot fewer alternatives to turn to.

> Now Uber have significantly increased their prices there are a lot fewer alternatives to turn to

Can you give an example of a city where Uber has a meaningful monopoly? Hell, I’ll even give you Uber and Lyft. Where the alternative modes of transport—be it private cars, public transport or taxis—are non-existent to someone who would have otherwise made use of them?

It's not that the alternatives are non-existent, it's that their cost (in dollars or some other parameter) have gone up a lot. For example, if you don't use Uber or Lyft in San Francisco, it takes a LOT longer to hail a taxi on the road than it used to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852

Or undermining other similar businesses that actually have to make more money than they spend. After said businesses are gone, and the investor cash dries up, what benefit is actually left?

How does that work with other kinds of investments like loans? You don't "save up" to open a restaurant, you put together a business plan and go to a bank. VCs are just doing that but willing to take on riskier businesses in exchange for equity instead of interest payments.

I suspect you'll find few restaurants opening up with the intention of opening as many locations as possible as quickly as they can be built, all providing food at under cost for years on end until the local restaurant scene is sufficiently disrupted that McDonalds buys them to make them go away.

I mean you're essentially describing DoorDash + competitors and HelloFresh + competitors. But in the restaurant industry proper it's the same thing except your exit isn't to get bought by McDonalds but to secretly dominate the mid-high tier dining scene in a given area and collect all the profits. So they won't build a bunch of the same restaurants but will take on massive debt to buy everything in a trendy area. I didn't really expect that in 2018ish that there would be a pivot from these companies to a real-estate play so they don't even have to own the restaurants anymore but can force them to use the company payment system and suppliers but it makes total sense in a boring dystopia way.

"Support Local Restaurants! (being puppeted by a massive hybrid restaurant/real-estate conglomerate)"

> businesses that made income by selling goods or services to customers were just called businesses, not lifestyle businesses

No, they were called shops. Where the business stops working without the owner-manager’s labor. “Business” referred to industrial-scale activity. (Before the industrial revolution, “commerce” was the broad term including trade merchants and shopkeepers.)

Similar to the industrial revolution’s change in nomenclature, the advent of modern computing has delineated small businesses, which include shops and shop-like tech firms, from enterprises, which are industry-like ones. Mom-and-pops thinking of themselves as businesses is a modern phenomenon.

If the owner-manager of Delphi goes home for the night, automotive parts do not stop being made. If the owner-manager of JBS goes home, McDonald’s still gets their hamburger patties. Semiconductors. Raw ore. Train wheels. All of those things were enterprise businesses, not shops, long before computers were heard of

Your response is through the same exact lens being critiqued. Even today there’s a vast economy of businesses, not shops, that fulfill key parts of the world economy and aren’t building for an exit. The idea that that’s weird/lifestyle is a modern, SV VC phenomenon and has nothing to do with computing nor the industrial revolution at all

This is obvious enough to most people that we sometimes wonder why we call startups businesses. Really they’re a new model of offshore R&D which often amounts to a hole into which to pour capital speculatively in hopes it will grow a tree

> “Business” referred to industrial-scale activity. (Before the industrial revolution, “commerce” was the broad term including trade merchants and shopkeepers.)

That sounds very weird to me because OED has plenty of meanings not related to industrial-scale activity that predate the industrial revolution. For example,

"In general sense: action which occupies time, demands attention and labour; esp. serious occupation, work, as opposed to pleasure or recreation.

c1400 Apol. Loll. 3 Hatyng to be enpliȝed wiþ seculer bisines. 1532 More Confut. Tindale Wks. 826/1 Occupied in honorable businesse. 1600 C. Percy in Shaks. C. Praise 38 Pestred with contrie businesse. 1653 Walton Angler Ep. Ded. 3 To give rest to your mind, and devest your self of your more serious business. ..."

And there's more of those where this came from, like "a task appointed or undertaken; a person's official duty, part or province; function, occupation" (dating back to Chaucer).

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