Hacker News Reader

Comment by ealexhudson | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see how Instacart can be considered "infrastructure", at best it's a marketplace-driven service. There are lots of examples of private infrastructure - e.g. the internet - which don't suffer the various problems described, and all the examples cited still rely on actual infrastructure to exist..

View on HN

I don't think Instacart is, or ever wanted to be an infrastructure. At least not as a transportation infrastructure. There is an argument to be made that it is becoming an infrastructure "within" a supermarket, mainly because of their pick & pack infrastructure (this is probably what Aaron is referring to) and understanding of inventory. Compare that to what we're doing at Postmates. We're in the process of creating a transportation layer by combining tens of thousands of people with cars and bikes or on foot into a "programmable layer" that can be accessed through our API and utilized by third parties. Both have huge potential.

It's infrastructure so far as it is a supplementary good to physical infrastructure. You could think of it as virtual infrastructure. By the time you are cooking dinner, there is no difference between having an accessible grocery store vs Instacart. Similarly, when you are at your destination, there is no difference between having taken the subway and having used Uber.

It's a layer of abstraction. Like Uber or APIs or development frameworks like Rails. The layer of abstraction allows other people, services, companies and ideas to be built on top of them.

For example, Instacart and Uber allow neighborhoods that aren't near grocery stores and transportation hubs to be more viable because they can replace the functionality of needing to have those near by.

I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't really answer the question. "Infrastructure" doesn't mean the same thing as "layer of abstraction", there's an essentialist quality to infrastructure.

You could build an infrastructure _using_ self-driving cars (as an example), but they are not an infrastructure in and of themselves. There's not a huge heap of difference between Instacart and bike couriers (except they provide slightly different services), and while couriers are a very useful service they're really not infrastructure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com