
The Coming Food Bubble - kposehn
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/22/the-coming-food-bubble/
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rjbwork
>Money is flowing into the food sector; VCs raised $48 billion for food
startups in 2014, the highest amount since 2000.

This is just amateurish, or intentionally completely misleading. that 48bil is
for ALL startups, not food. That number would be absurd otherwise. The words
"food" and "agriculture" and "delivery" do not appear once in the referenced
source @ [http://nvca.org/pressreleases/annual-venture-capital-
investm...](http://nvca.org/pressreleases/annual-venture-capital-investment-
tops-48-billion-2014-reaching-highest-level-decade-according-moneytree-
report/)

That said, yeah instacart seems kind of over valued. Its a thing i do when I
don't feel like leaving the house once every couple of months - not a weekly
thing. Then again, $10 * 100,000,000 adults * 2x / quarter is approximately a
ton of money.

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oldmanjay
I suspect that link is only available to members of some sort or another. Or
it's been removed. In any case, it doesn't work.

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rjbwork
Interesting...It appears to work when clicking from the article itself, but
linking doesn't work... I wonder if they have referrer based permissioning.

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ajhit406
Investment at 200x MRR for such a low margin business is extremely overvalued
IMO. The only case for that type of multiple is if instacart grew more than
100% YoY (which they probably did).

Also of note and let's not forget -- $100M 2014 revenues are the "groupon-
esque" pass through revenues -- Whole Foods, Safeway, etc... are also booking
these as revenue.

Remember when Groupon, on the eve an IPO, cut it's reported revenue in half?
Yeah, only a $300,000,000 difference.

> "On Friday, Groupon said it would change what it books as revenue after
> discussions with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It will now only
> count as revenue its commission on sales, rather than the total value of an
> online coupon."

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119037915045765892...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903791504576589211214409214)

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jqm
There might be a "food related start-up" bubble but I don't think there is
actually a "food" bubble. If anything, its the reverse. More mouths to feed.
Less water and land and pristine ocean to do it with.

Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1
of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those
titanium bodies.

~~~
lsc
>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day
1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those
titanium bodies.

It might be the most important challenge, but it's certainly one of the
challenges we seem to be rising to. People have been predicting mass
starvation with population growth forever; From the seventeen hundreds to the
seventies, Malthus has been a huge influence on the hippies, and he's been
wrong for most of that time, too. Our ability to grow food is growing faster
than the population; apparently arable land isn't the limit people thought it
was.

At this point in history, famine is generally a political problem, not a
resources problem.

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ceras
We can produce enough now, but at a cost to future production. We're
increasingly cutting down forests, draining non-renewable water supplies, and
reducing the quality of arable land.

In other words, at the current usage levels places like California will not be
arable forever.

~~~
lsc
Eh, perhaps sometimes?

I think we are vastly more conscious of this sort of thing than we were, say,
in the '20s and the '30s, and that consciousness is going to help us screw up
less.

Which isn't to say we aren't screwing up some things now; I'm just saying that
we're getting better at this sort of thing, in the two steps forward, one step
back kind of way that humans as a whole seem to get better at things.

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lotsofmangos
Perhaps we are in a bubble-bubble, where the idea of being in a bubble is so
popular that many investors are betting on being in a bubble even when there
isn't one.

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Jedd
"Entrepreneurs are the foundation of a growing economy and goodness knows, we
need growth."

Well that's certainly an opinion. I know it's TC, so a certain agenda is
assumed, but facts not in evidence and all that.

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plink
So, San Francisco is doomed revamp its grocery shopping?

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SocksCanClose
...is it me, or did I miss the argument here?

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penprogg
The argument was money -> bubble It's not very good

