Imagine looking at this chart and then thinking building the front-end of the app was the hard part of scaling a multi-sided marketplace
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As an aside, this chart is how every startup should be judged (well, cashflow vs. operating profit, but that's pedantic).
Not valuation, not who got in at what price and out at what price, but how much more cash did you produce than what you consumed, and over what time period.
I had claude code me a FoodDeliveryApp and it hallucinated all restaurants, menu items, and drivers, but if i launch it then im going to be a BILLIONAIRE according to ex paramedic psychology major in LA and all the wall st retards who listened to him
You don’t get it. People want completely bespoke front ends that change every time they use them. Only AI allows that kind of mayhem.
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This is another reason why you can't just "vibe code" an app like Uber. The infrastructure behind it and customer acquisition took a decade before profitability.
Uber helped create the driver network and those drivers drive for many platforms. AI agents can totally take advantage of that to increase driver pay and lower customer price.
Hot take: this investment is never going to pay out. At the end of it the ROI will be on the negative.
Just in time to be replaced by robo taxis. Alternatively, if Tesla pivots to selling/leasing them to Uber, could cause profitability to go vertical.
Always expensive to be the first. Empower seems to be doing OK with only $10m raised by the looks of it
"i just can't play with bulls anymore"
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Nate Lorenzen
@anatelorenzen
Software investors right now.
The media could not be played.
A marketplace is the most difficult business in the world. Change my mind.
Either you’re lucky or you just have to burn a lot of cash to attract people to it
Note that the tiny profits they now have is due to raping the fuck out of their drivers, taking >50% of revenues in many cases. Absolutely terrible rent seeking behavior akin to the worst company town abuses.
So I agree… but the promise of an AI version of it is that you can lure drivers with promise of higher pay. The new company doesn’t need the same infrastructure and can run with lower margins
The impact of AI will be cost structures and margins
Uber can do it themselves though
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How much of this was building both sides of the marketplace that agentic can now more easily replicate ?
The chart starts in 2014.
Today compute is faster and cheaper, supply and demand behaviors are trained and instrumented to engage with each other digitally.
Not
I feel like the self driving car threat is the real one. Depends how good waymo is compared to others to see if commoditized
Well they fought all the hard regulatory fights. Plenty of space for competitors to come in with better pricing models for drivers.
Fr fr
Moreover: Facebook was built overnight. Any software engineer can build the software, 'even' without AI. The software isn't the moat
The media could not be played.
They will see two years of profitability. Also there was no hard part. They were chosen by the powers that be and given a blank check to form a monopoly. See also: Amazon
Are you implying that it would take an epic level of whiteboard naivety to make said assumption?
There's islands in the med with their own uber style apps that are functional. The interface and technology doesn't seem to be the hard bit
Building the frontend is not the hard part of scaling a marketplace
Anyone who thinks it is hasn't tried to solve the cold start problem
Honestly the code is the easy part
The problem will be in a few years when there are three or four major AV providers. Then an AI agent on your phone can do some damage to Uber.
And arguably even more difficult with DoorDash. Uber competing with taxis. That was a bigger improvement than DoorDash versus other ways to get food.