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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

So suddenly everybody is rushing to build a human dispatch service for everything, and the end result will be that there will be one winner, who cashes in a big percentage of every transaction in the particular market segment. The actual AI can wait, because what matters now is the cornering of the market.

As you can see, this development does not make me happy.

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> the actual AI can wait

Scaling such services is hard.

I want to hear back from "Magic", "Cloe", "Luka", "Path Talk", "Rabbits", "Jarvis" - a post mortem, what went right, what went wrong.

How do they bootstrap - with a few friends or with outsource partners from Asia?

Magic (59 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819, Jarvis (266 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8094351 . The creator of Magic wrote a response 3 days ago on PH: http://www.producthunt.com/posts/magic#comment-89372

Why not? I'm not trying to be snarky, what specifically don't you like?

Many of these companies aspire to things that are great for themselves, like controlling markets and integrating vertically, but not so great for everyone else.

Is this generally different from the world of business and entrepreneurship where companies aspire to have market share, profits, etc..? IE, specific to the ‘Do It for Me’ market?

The problem is mostly that these companies seem to try to put a wall around a market and try to become the gate-keeper for that particular market, and will then become the regulator of that market. This goes against the principle of "free markets".

Besides these "do it for me" markets, roughly the same pattern is seen with app-stores, and probably many more markets.

(Of course, in a truly free market it should in theory be possible to create such nested markets, but this just shows that the concept of a totally free market is nonsense, and that we should act against these patterns.)

I think more of the business potential of these companies require bad things compared to other companies. Most companies have some sort of core business and the things that in part end up being bad for other are second to that. With DIFM companies those things, at least almost, ends up being the core business.

https://www.uber.com/jobs/list

(of course the sector of businesses we are talking about isn't very well defined)

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