

Sources: Shyp Is Raising $50M at a $250M Valuation - awwstn
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/sources-shyp-is-raising-50-million-at-a-250-million-valuation/

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rdlecler1
Cool idea, but I just can't get my head around the economics of many of these
VC-subsidized economy companies. I don't claim to be the smartest guy in the
room, so I would love to be educated on the how companies like Shyp and
Instacart can make a profit, and what assumptions underlie this. Any takers?

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jaksmit
for Instacart for example; the postage fee of $3, or whatever they advertise
is more of a trojan horse. The company makes most of it's money through
partnering with stores and also marking up the prices of items. i.e. the price
that an item has on Instacart is not the same as the price the item is
actually sold for if you go into a Safeway (or whatever) store.

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rdlecler1
Even with markup, shopping & delivery are expensive. They'll have the 1%ers
but I doubt they can scale beyond when they have to compete with Google and
Amazon. Google could spend $1b/year for 10-years preparing this market for
driverless/drone-based delivery. And this would be a rounding error on their
balance sheet. No one, not even Amazon has that muscle.

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BadassFractal
Shyp is super awesome, I hope they can manage to maintain the current pricing
and don't crank it up once they reach the mainstream.

