

What’s it like to have Google and Amazon try to kill your startup? - simas
http://fusion.net/story/119202/q-and-a-whats-it-like-to-have-google-and-amazon-try-to-kill-your-start-up/

======
zaroth
What I hope actually kills all these products is a decentralized p2p open
source system which lets humans find and rate other humans for whatever goods
or services they may be selling.

The payment system is getting there (e.g. Bitcoin). The consensus algorithms
are being worked out, the distributed trust systems are coming into place
(e.g. Stellar). The scalable p2p discovery and mesh is pretty much already
working (e.g. BitTorrent).

Why do we need to pay a 10% tax to companies to do this? I mean, as a
civilization. To think the algorithms could never exist that would let me find
a professional ______ near me which is, a) an actual person, b) someone who
actually does this work for a living, and c) has real-life honest reviews from
people who have actually paid that person to provide that service... it just
doesn't seem like an intractable problem.

If you add up all the expert help, trusted reviews, on-demand this, cloud
assistant that, we're talking what, at least 100 billion dollars of rent
seeking?

Whether or not such a system has an optional secure anonymity layer (a la
OpenBazaar) is just a matter of how you want to boot-strap the initial user
base. Needless to say, "50% of the world's drug trade also happens to be
conducted on the same code-base" may or may not be a great answer to the "how
did you hack this system" question.

I think the "1099 Economy" is actually a great thing, I just think we could do
without the gatekeepers.

~~~
qq66
If you want to see the non-rent-seeking version of a local marketplace, look
at Craigslist. Their service is completely free to most participants.

Craigslist has a lot of things going for it, but the "rent seekers" are able
to create other advantages that Craigslist can't. They can staff people to
bring businesses onboard, get everyone's metadata formatted in the right way,
take business photos, handle payment disputes, etc., that they wouldn't have
the resources to do without charging a fee on the transaction.

For some, Craigslist is better, for others, the Thumbtack experience is
better.

~~~
mreiland
plus I don't trust Craigslist, but I won't give a moments thought to
purchasing anything from Amazon or from a 3rd party _through_ amazon.

And yes, paying an extra 10% is ABSOLUTELY. FUCKING. WORTH IT.

It's exactly like paying for insurance. Insurance is peace of mind.

~~~
zaroth
Amazon is an incredibly powerful band, and brands can do that. But there's
also no reason a distributed system can't also have a brand which evokes the
same level of trust. In many ways, distributed trust can be stronger and more
resilient than centralized trust.

~~~
jstandard
I'm curious, what do you mean by "distributed trust"? A big reason why I find
a brand trustworthy is exactly because my trust is consolidated in one entity
that produces repeatable, desired results.

Taking Craigslist as an example, Craigslist isn't trustworthy to me precisely
because its trust system is distributed. It doesn't police the interactions,
moving trust into the realm of peer-to-peer, where definitions of
trustworthiness tend to vary greatly. Craigslist in effect has built a well-
known brand with overtones of "buyer beware!" because of this distribution of
trust.

~~~
zaroth
So then you would have the same level of trust that the system works to
produce repeatable desired results. E.g. With Bitcoin, if you do trust it, you
are trusting that the _system_ works to produce repeatable desired results.
The fact that it works through (in theory) a resilient distributed consensus
algorithm is an implementation detail.

Amazon happens to achieve their consistent experience through top-down
hegemony. I believe that in time a distributed software system will provide an
even more reliable and consistent experience in many cases.

For example, Amazon's warehouses and level of automation are often regarded as
a key competitive advantage. But when you're buying a good or service from a
neighbor who lives within a couple square miles, distribution doesn't get much
more local (and scalable) than that!

Craiglist pushes the problem under the rug, they wash their hands of it and
say "buyer beware". That was the only possible solution in 1995. 20 years
later we are starting to figure out, you can actually do a heck of a lot
better, even without a central authority or billions of dollars of
infrastructure.

I think that's the hidden message in the nascent "sharing economy". Not only
can individuals successfully monetize their assets or go to work for
themselves, but once the tech catches up, they can do it _directly_ and in
fact way more efficiently than any centralized system could ever dream of.

By the way, I'm not saying there's no place in the world for Amazon. But in
particular making connections to qualified service providers are low-hanging
fruit for a p2p distributed system, and longer term much, much more.

~~~
jstandard
I don't understand enough about the details of how Bitcoin works to evaluate
how apt that is of an analogy it is here. I've heard some very positive as
well as a large enough number of surprisingly negative experiences with it
making it hard for me to evaluate and thus hard to trust.

I'm having a hard time following your argument about the sharing economy
showing us that distributed trust systems work more efficiently. Many of the
major players in the sharing economy I've seen (Uber [0], AirBnB[1]) have all
moved from open-ended, less regulated distributed trust systems to tightening
and more strongly imposing rules as a centralized authority to rebuild damage
to their trust due to bad actors.

To avoid thoughts that I'm cherry-picking companies with controversies, my
broader point is that the sharing economy isn't really built differently than
Amazon or any other marketplace model. Central authorities (TaskRabbit, Exec,
AirBnB, Homejoy, etc) inject trust into p2p marketplaces because without their
centralized authority, p2p marketplaces wind up like Craigslist or, even
worse, Silk Road.

[0] [http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/18/technology/uber-
background-c...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/18/technology/uber-background-
checks/) [1] [http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Airbnb-hosts-must-
app...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Airbnb-hosts-must-appear-in-
person-to-comply-with-6025767.php)

edit: minor wording correction

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metaphorm
crappy website that throws up a "like me on facebook" popup that I have to
dismiss before I get to read the article. guess what, I didn't even read the
article. I certainly won't be pre-emptively liking anything on Facebook.
seriously, can you at least let me read the damn thing before begging for
social media help?

~~~
steamy
Are you on your phone?

Coz it's working here on my desktop and I have Ad Block installed on the
machine

~~~
metaphorm
desktop machine (an iMac), using Chrome, with Ad Block Plus installed. it got
through to me.

I shouldn't need browser extensions to read an article without getting
harassed. this kind of user hostile behavior is like a throw back to the bad
old days of javascript popup hell.

~~~
steamy
FF Dev edition on Win 7 and just one click in the body region and the modal
box is gone!

------
birken
Having been one of the people who built Thumbtack (and a shareholder), this
would have been much more of a concern 2 or 3 years ago. At this point
Thumbtack (and other companies like Homejoy) are big enough to be able to
compete against huge companies.

It isn't like the big guys can just jump into the market and undercut
everybody on price. Most people who hire service professionals are looking for
a high quality experience at a good value. Actually finding those high quality
professionals and facilitating the experience with a customer is really really
hard. You can't just underprice everybody, you can't just find the cheapest
service providers.

And having previously worked at Google, local services is like 10x higher
touch than any other business Google has. Maybe they bite the bullet and try
to do it, but this isn't a very Google-like business.

~~~
sparkzilla
What about Google's documented history of pushing competitors lower in search
rankings?

~~~
birken
They already do. Search for "Los Angeles House Cleaning" (or many similar
types of searches). There is a 'Google places' block of results pushing down
people like Thumbtack and Homejoy. Having used both services, I can guarantee
you Thumbtack or Homejoy is a much better result than the 'Google places'
results linking to random house cleaners. For example, on my SERP this sparse,
unhelpful page
([https://plus.google.com/116731524137013411814/about?hl=en](https://plus.google.com/116731524137013411814/about?hl=en))
ranks above both Thumbtack and Homejoy.

Once you are big enough you don't need to worry about Google anymore. When I
want to buy a product, I don't search on Google and then go to Amazon; I go to
Amazon directly. Whoever "wins" the local services space is likely to be
similar. People will just go to that site and skip Google completely.

~~~
vezycash
If this behavior is intentional, there's one other possible motive to consider
- Adwords.

I've learned to understand Google's actions by how such actions affect its
ability to sell Ads.

------
JacobEdelman
I upvoted this and now I feel ashamed. This article has a provocative title
but in the end all it does is try to make a dramatic situation where there is
none. I will be reading fusion.net articles with increased suspicion in the
future.

------
at-fates-hands
I wouldn't worry about either for a couple of reasons.

Google has the worst customer service ever. When they come into your market,
all you have to is hammer their customer service, in advertising if necessary.
If you have great customer service, nobody will take a chance with them
because their track record of customer service is so horrendous and well
documented.

With Amazon, as stated in the article, it's not their niche. As soon as they
started in your market, start running promotions for discounts for Amazon
Prime customers. Pretty sure once they can't sustain their growth, they'll
bail out of your markets.

Both companies have fatal flaws and are just being opportunistic. If this guy
hangs in there, it won't take much to deal with them properly.

~~~
untog
I think that's an optimistic view. If their scale means that they can offer
the same product at half the price, people are going to be very forgiving of
customer service snafus.

~~~
msandford
How on earth are they going to do it for "half price"? These are already very
competitive industries where the pricing is largely based on time (and
estimations thereof). And the estimating is based on stuff that's going to be
hard to capture in an algorithm that doesn't involve a physical person going
to $wherever and punching in a bunch of estimates of various things into a web
form for processing. At which point your algorithm isn't a tremendous
advantage since the trip cost is what dominates the equation, not if it takes
the estimator 5 minutes or 15 minutes to come up with a price.

The only way it might succeed is if Google or Amazon can squeeze people harder
than Homejoy or whoever already does. And that's a recipe for disaster, no
matter if they're employees or independent contractors. If people can't make a
living through your service, they simply won't participate.

------
wehadfun
Angie's List and Craig's List not Google and Amazon

------
spiritplumber
I don't know about Google, I do know about one project manager there, who felt
that it wasn't good that I finished his pet project about six months ahead of
him.

Then I told him that my stuff is all OSS and he was welcome to crib from it.

At a robotics society meeting in Palo Alto in 2010, he told me that I was just
a hobbyist and my project didn't exist. My 'bot had just run circles round his
when his stopped working, in front of people.

So I put one of my production logic boards in his hands. It had through-hole
parts and was spiky. Then I squeezed his hand around it. Hard.

"So, if it doesn't exist, how is it making you bleed?"

(My American friends told me that I did not handle that well. My Italian
friends told me that I handled that masterfully. I tell this story to
highlight differences in culture.)

~~~
chimeracoder
> "So, if it doesn't exist, how is it making you bleed?"

> (My American friends told me that I did not handle that well. My Italian
> friends told me that I handled that masterfully.)

That's a great story, and thank you for sharing it. Though at the risk of
getting downvoted, I think I know why your [American] friends were telling you
that you didn't handle it well.

Aside from the lawsuit potential (which is real), it doesn't really advance
the situation in a way that helps anybody - either you _or_ him. Clearly he
feels intimidated by you, and that's why he's mentally unwilling to
acknowledge you and/or your project. But after you assaulting him[0], he's not
going to suddenly change his mind and acknowledge that you beat him. Rather,
he's going to double-down, and now have even more reason to believe that
you're unstable/immature/unprofessional, or whatever he needs in order to
convince himself that you're not worth paying attention to.

As for you, it makes you feel better, but it also doesn't really get you what
you ultimately want (him admitting that he was wrong). You win the battle, but
the "war" goes on, with both sides even more emotionally entrenched in their
existing positions.

[0] yes, this would qualify as assault

~~~
magicalist
Yeah, that guy sounds like an asshole, but the GP sounds like an unstable
violent person. Bringing it up now to apparently brag about the situation
doesn't help but reinforce that...

You just beat the crap out of his robot. I don't see how trying to stab him
with solder spikes is handling anything "masterfully".

~~~
spiritplumber
I did not beat the crap out of his robot, we both demoed the same thing
(Android-brained tank bot) and mine worked properly, while his didn't. He
became angry, and insulted me and my work.

I am not a violent person by Mediterranean standards - maybe by Anglosaxon
standards. The last time I started a fight, I was nine years old. I got such a
thrashing by my old man that I never did again. But he always said, hit
second, hit last.

~~~
magicalist
> _I did not beat the crap out of his robot, we both demoed the same thing
> (Android-brained tank bot) and mine worked properly, while his didn 't._

Sorry, I meant in terms of the competition, not physically.

