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Comment by medion | Hacker News Reader

Classic investment driven startup with likely no true profit, utilizing workers without contracts who work all hours of the day, and can be dumped without a moments notice. Cute little apology about not being able to serve customers as well as they’d like - shame people can’t talk truths. I can’t wait for all this VC nonsense to come crashing down.

*edit - I’ve since read they are compensating riders, so I’m retracting some of my snarkiness.

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To be replaced by what?

Why does it need to be replaced? Pizza shops can deliver on their own like they used to. Lazy people can go out and pickup their own food. Not everything needs to be centralised and appified and run as a giant VC gamble.

If you can’t be profitable on 1 unit, you won’t be profitable on 1 million units either.

Scale brings complexity, and complexity has its own cost.

Doesn't make sense. If you have 10 engineers building a product and you sell one subscription for $100 you won't be profitable. When you sell a million you will have generated $100M, with have a far greater probability of being profitable.

Ya this is basic economics, fixed investment vs markup driven return.

That's software products that have marginal distribution costs.

I'm talking about physical products and/or services. Delivering a single package to an individual has a very real cost that doesn't really go down with scale.

This makes no sense.

If a bar had 1 customer only, it should price drinks so that the entire rent and salaries were covered by that 1 customer. Which is not how it works in reality.

"We'll lose on every sale but make it up on volume" takes me right back to the dot com era. It's amazing what central banks can achieve when they really put their minds to it.

The responses to my statement just reconfirms my belief that all these startups and the people running them will never be profitable. Way too many clever "ackshually..." responses that keep confusing (maybe deliberately) the context of the problem.

The same happened in the dot com era. They don’t understand the layers beneath them that make their businesses temporarily viable. Well, maybe their CFOs understand, but the rest of them either don’t, or have to pretend that they don’t.

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