1,450 karma · joined May 31, 2012
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/venantius; my proof: https://keybase.io/venantius/sigs/-q1GLlB9txQNpo2NHvriIXfiM5Qc8vjC6a9AAIUMLP8 ]
Consider: I am probably 0% likely to book an Airbnb in my own city. Almost all of my Airbnb’s will be somewhere else, so I only really care about remote stock.
By contrast, something like 90%+ of my Uber rides are going to be local. In many of the places I might travel to, I don’t need Uber at all (the location is rural/suburban, the public transit system is cheap and effective, cabs are widely available, etc).
At any rate - the idea that there is an alternative deal that someone can deliver on persists even now, which is insane. My favorite quote on this came from Michael Gove:
> “It’s a bit like a load of people in their mid-fifties at a swingers’ party holding out for Scarlett Johansson to arrive,” Mr Gove said.
> Amber Rudd, work and pensions secretary, added: “Or Pierce Brosnan.”
> Meanwhile David Gauke, justice secretary, claimed Labour’s Brexit policy was so fanciful it was “like hoping Scarlett Johansson is going to turn up on a unicorn”.
By contrast, Uber has to fight to win each city, and most of its users will use Uber for the most part within that city. Adding more drivers to Tokyo does not have a meaningful impact on the resident of New York.
Of course, that only accounts for one of the various pages you'll see in the checkout flow, and I agree that not everything is as snappy as it could be. But keeping things snappy turns out to be a very hard problem when you're growing as quickly as Airbnb has.
Airbnb does not, in fact, have a CTO who dictates the company tech governance and/or stack. They prefer to run things in a federated manner, with individual teams making the decisions that they feel are best for them. While they're encouraged/required to draw up design docs and have them reviewed by an architecture review group, the group's recommendations are non-binding.
This model has advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, it creates an environment where people can take risks and do things that haven't been done inside of the company before. On the other hand, it means people sometimes go out on a limb and push the company into supporting something that turns out not to be sustainable in the long term.
As a matter of personal preference, I like to have a set toolchain that a company is built around. But it would be unwise to suggest that Airbnb's strategy hasn't worked out pretty well for them overall.
Unfortunately the peril one often encounters in such ecosystems is that "the right technical path" for working with BigCo's system is totally un-translateable to general working knowledge. By that I mean it often means having to work around specific constraints that have evolved and are specific to that BigCo and not to other BigCo's, let alone to smaller startups. It also pushes you to generally work with technology which may be a bit older, which can often mean having to accept that current best practices simply aren't at play.
I do agree with the second part of your thesis, which is that the social challenges of working in a big company are significant and can make one very well suited generally for management and leadership in a way that's not the case at a smaller company.
I don't think this is Facebook's "fault" in isolation since we see the same trend across most social networks, but I do think it suggests that social networks ought to be regulated, if for no other reason than that it's pretty clear that the default behaviors we're already seeing emerge en masse are not good for society or for us on an individual basis.
It turns out when the financial incentive is big enough, people will commit crimes! Especially when they're in an institution that seems to prize making money and "being clever" above following the law.
We're rapidly moving towards a world in which people get most of their financial services from non-bank fintechs than they do from banks. The problem is, most of those companies need to partner with a bank to actually hold their cash. We're building a purpose-built bank to do exactly that - power the global fintech revolution.
We're applying for full regulatory permissions and building a brand new platform bank, launching in the UK first. We've been working on this quietly for about 18 months and are now looking to hire our first engineer.
Tech stack: Clojure / Postgres / Kafka / AWS / Kubernetes
Email jobs+hn@griffin.sh
Seedcamp (London) has backed 3 unicorns: Revolut [$1.7B], UiPath [$3B], and TransferWise [$1.6B], and that's just a venture firm I know off the top of my head. While these days they're closer to a first-round fund (with a similar economic deal to YC) than an accelerator, most of those were from back when they were operating in a proper accelerator model.
I suspect there are probably a few other accelerators around the world that have unicorns in their portfolio - you just don't hear about them because they're not local.