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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

I once heard that a well-known gig economy company would open up new cities by giving employees essentially-unlimited credit cards and telling them to buy whatever they thought was needed, with no controls or multi-person approvals.

It'll be interesting to see how VC changes in the modern environment - will they still be all-in on founders willing to unsustainably burn money just to incrementally boost the probability of growth, or will they begin looking more for experienced operating teams who reach and maintain profitability (or a rapid path to get there at all times)?

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> I once heard that a well-known gig economy company would open up new cities by giving employees essentially-unlimited credit cards

That's pretty documented in the history of Uber :-)

Can anyone recommend a reasonably accurate history of Uber?

Ubers lie was it would be profitable at scale. They were never profitable at all while growing, but always claimed that if they just had a few more markets they'd finally be profitable.

Turns out unsurprisingly, if your revenue is negative and you multiply it by 1000000 it's really negative.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is the most well-known tell-all book. I think they also made a TV miniseries based on the book but I haven't watched it yet.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination is mostly a summary of the headlines involving the company rather than a tell-all but it's accurate enough if you want to familiarize yourself with the subject.

I don't believe anyone has written a book about the technology team specifically which is sad because they actually made some really great technology, especially in the monitoring space, and I would love to hear the story of how that came to be.

I don't get what the issue is here.

Option A- you task some employees with buying office furniture and equipment and then waste everyone's time by having some extra meetings and emails and bureaucracy where someone asks "is that a good price for 50 desks? Did you get multiple quotes?" and the employee says "yes" and then they approve the expense.

Option B- the same employees make the same decisions, but without the extra meetings and emails and paperwork.

Being more efficient, giving employees more autonomy and focusing on what actually matters is why startups displace incumbents. These are good things.

Well, yeah as long as you trust the employees and they know what they are doing, sure. Otherwise, those 50 desks are going to be expensive.

> will they still be all-in on founders willing to unsustainably burn money just to incrementally boost the probability of growth

From some previous experience, outside of crypto - which was DIFFERENT™ - this already started changing in 2019 or so. Softbank was one of the most infamous players, and when they started to pull back, so did some others.

Not that there aren't still some "huh"-inducing things - like the new thing from the WeWork guy - but it seems a bit saner-paced on the ground, and now even crypto will get its reckoning.

This happens because of the boom-bust cycle we see in capitalism. I was a child in the 1990s when the Netherlands went through a boom that looked like the Japanese bubble and lasted 20 years.

I don't expect anything to change because it never does.

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