“Winners Take None:” Coworking, Self Storage, Scooters Have Burned Billions

[herbertl]

https://hunterwalk.com/2023/08/07/winners-take-none-coworking-self-storage-scooters-have-burned-billions-of-investor-dollars-and-maybe-were-never-tech-companies/

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"The "Uber for X" and "Airbnb for X" largely lacked positive attributes that transportation and travel possessed and accordingly found infrequent usage, low margins, complex processes and so forth. Winner take none."

These idiotic analogies were all over HN.

[iancmceachern]

These are all examples of businesses that should never take VC funding.

These are all bank loan types of companies. Why on earth they would go the vc route makes no sense.

[opine-at-random → iancmceachern]

Maybe doesn't make sense for the company. But there's many people involved for whom it must have been an extremely good decision to juice the VC funding quickly and at any expense. Better to have a few millions from a failed startup than nothing XD

[iancmceachern → opine-at-random]

Who? I'm genuinely curious

[dragontamer → iancmceachern]

Jet.com

This startup sold goods 10% off from Amazon. They did this by buying from Amazon, repackaging the goods in a Jet.com box, and then shipping the new box to the customer.

After losing money on every sale for months, Walmart bought them out and the owners made tons of money.

I'm pretty sure Walmart did nothing with Jet.com and it ended up as a giant waste of money.

[iancmceachern → dragontamer]

Thank you!

Seems like these are cases of basically exploitation.

They're not adding actual value to the economy, but taking lots out.

[ilrwbwrkhv → iancmceachern]

We work founder? Not just millions. Billions.

[iancmceachern → ilrwbwrkhv]

Yeah, but he is basically a crook

[ilrwbwrkhv → iancmceachern]

Didn't stop him from raising 300 million again from a16z.

[runnerup]

This article is far too short to contain interesting analysis of the situations that it briefly mentions.