This year's gonna get real interesting.
I would say nearly all of Silicon Valley tech startups. Around 90% them are a complete SaaS grift and are also eternally unprofitable and are very good at losing money.
Hence why they are solely dependent on begging for VC money every month to pump the pyramid scheme that recently collapsed a week a ago. We saw which startups were affected and would have instantly been bankrupt had it not been for them beggeing to the government for a totally-not-a-pseudo-bailout scheme to 'save' them.
To see who was caught in the fallout, we needed catalyst events such as the start of the market crash in November 2021, the collapse of crypto in 2022 and now in 2023, a large tech bank (SVB) becoming insolvent and failing.
> It's incredible that since 2008 it actually seemed immensely easier to skirt regulations and laws (under the banner of 'innovation'), and not just in finance.
Now the grift has continued to spread into the AI hype squad with everyone and their bots spinning their own ChatGPT SaaS startup. Don't be surprised to see them falling like dominoes since the real winner in this AI hype is OpenAI. Not the startups built around it.
I haven't seen any particularly strong profitability case for ChatGPT and the like yet, unless you call ad dollars from promoting "ChatXX does this amazing trick!" as proof.
People barely even questioned the ludicrous wages being thrown around in silicon valley, supported by 'funding rounds' and silly valuations of future growth.
But, it all sucks because the people that will lose are the last-in-chain investors and the to-be-unemployed. Not the VC crybabies currently out there complaining about their need for protection by the establishment they protest.
Until I moved, I earned five figures, you know a bit more each year, and was happy. I had a house, a big spacious house by San Jose standards, and a nice town with friendly friends and so on. When I started in SV, they raised me to USD 120,000 and the HR recruiter literally apologized for it not being more. Since then it has gone up about four x, for no really good reason that I can see, since it is fun work I would do for much less. Only when you get into profit per worker does it make sense.
And that isn’t due to some moral failure entirely, but something about the weird asymmetries that networked technology seems to facilitate. One little neighborhood, but services and products for dozens or hundreds of countries. Each time a country is added to the network, the winner takes some more.
So the question (if we suspend judgement of these initial tech waves) is: if ignoring and bypassing regulations to introduce new approaches is also broken, what is the solution to the original problem? As an illustration, examine a hypothetical of when or if civic centers would themselves modernize transporation for hire regulations, mechanisms, etc.
What do you mean by this
For drivers, yes. But in many cities the taxi system was engineered so that the owners of "positions" got lavish profit.
Revel, in New York, has employees and does fine.
Then Revel does fine.
They’re not, particularly since “spending and losing VC money” is often tossed around Uber, which doesn’t make sense, since it’s no longer VC backed.
I’m interpreting your sentiment as having a cash-flow positive operating model. Ridesharing absolutely works on a fundamental level with enough gross profit to fairly compensate drivers. (It doesn’t if drivers can log on and off at will, nor in low-population density or poorer areas.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-commission-thwart...
You claimed the “moment that [ridesharing companies] have to start treating drivers like employee's they can't make money.” I showed a counterfactual. You’re doubling down with hunches and suppositions.
> Revel NY ridesharing isn't going so well
You’re citing an article from 2021 on the TLC blocking Revel’s application for more vehicles [1]. (It was since approved.) How is the government telling a company to stop growing an indictment of their business model?
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-commission-thwart...
WeWork is a real company and managed it for a while
The other half is that they used nearly free money provided by the US central bank, routed through VC firms, and engaged in anti-competitive predatory pricing.
The pricing issue is stark and impossible to miss. I produce events for a living and I'm in a different city every week. The cost of an uber ride now is invariably 2-3x higher than it was a few years ago at minimum sometimes 5-10x higher.
I remember tooling around Chicago and getting fares that were like $2.17 and $3.22 a couple years ago. Any fares within downtown Brooklyn were $8, period, often discounted via a promo to $4-5. Now they're routinely $25, maybe $15-18 on a slow day.
That's where all the VC money went, and it simply wasn't possible to compete with that unless you had access to all that free money too, which local business didn't.
The main thing they get from offshoring the driving is scalable renting of capital. But well, I have no idea if one could not just rent it without the labor.