Hacker News Reader

Comment by herunan | Hacker News Reader

Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.

View on HN

It's called a platform co-op and many exist, but it's hard to compete with VC money.

Uber is losing money so I don't know think drivers want a slice of the profits.

What, if anything, is preventing for-profit platform co-ops from obtaining VC money and chasing a similar growth-to-unicorn curve?

Is it just cultural inertia, i.e. nobody has tried yet?

If the purpose of the co-op is to ensure that profits go to the workers and not to company owners/investors, then either you plan to fail at that purpose or you're not interesting to the investors. If the lion's share of the operating profits would go to the investors, it's no better than Uber, if the lion's share of the operating profits would go to the drivers, then what's the motivation to invest?

Based on my limited experience, VCs could be dissuaded from investing in co-ops by:

1. No prospects of a big payout (IPO, acquisition).

2. VCs like to have a single point-of-contact (the CEO) and few other owners. In a start-up, the CEO is answerable and serves only the investors. Co-ops behave more like a member-driven organization whose obligation is first and foremost to its members.

3. No option for majority ownership. A co-op eventually has to be majorly owned by the employees rather than by investors.

Is there any known platform cooperatives to support that has some traction so far?

Can we get an open source gig economy app

Sure, start writing it now. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Huh? Nothing stops gig workers as it is from organizing and just paying an app developer. The unions simply can't make inroads with them for whatever reasons.

One reason being union-busting behaviors from the threatened firms, obviously.

The workers are independent contractors. Uber drivers and TaskRabbit workers and the like are not on employee time or property. So what behaviors are you talking about? Uber certainly doesn't have to sell the Teamsters ad space on their app of they don't want to. It's their app.

The problem is investors building huge piles of money to corner a market. You can't easily beat that kind of betting power.

https://drivers.coop/

If you are in New York City you can use drivers.coop.

IMHO, such apps should be considered infrastructure and be regulated accordingly (or be managed by foundations).

Isn't that what Gitcoin does?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com