WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism • Hacker News Board

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#221

Post by munk-a » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:19 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #159

askafriend wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ben is one of the greatest thinkers in technology writing today - period. You're only depriving yourself of an important perspective in this case. He's open to arguments and is extremely reasonable. If you're only looking for writing that agrees with what you already believe then you might be disappointed, but if you're looking for extremely thoughtful thinking on strategy and technology then you won't find anyone be…

Which is why that article that OP points out is such an odd outlier. In contrast to the normally wonderful and insightful reading on that site, the one on privacy stood out as total defensiveness. I’m not going to condemn the author over just that one but it was weird!

I agree, I'm pretty unfamiliar with that source personally but I did check out that article and was quite disappointed with the content of it... It didn't seem malignant but it was certainly quite ignorant of potential issues.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#222

Post by vonmoltke » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

johnfactorial wrote: post #120

jamiequint wrote: post #40

> This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is false. First, Amazon is far from controlling the whole market. They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Second, Amazon didn't predatory price, or if it did, it didn't for long, certainly not long enough to achieve its current m…

> They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Both of these numbers are surprising to me, can you source them? Particularly the first one, which I assume is a global measure, and I'd be interested to know what % of North American e-commerce Amazon controls. I wager I could walk outside my home and ask 100 people on the sidewalk to name one e-commerce site and f…

> I wager I could walk outside my home and ask 100 people on the sidewalk to name one e-commerce site and far more than 50% would name Amazon first.

I don't know how many people would consider the likes of Wal-Mart, Target, and Kohl's "e-commerce sites" even though they have probably ordered stuff through their websites.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#223

Post by mrfredward » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

talkingtab wrote: post #103

cargo cult - where someone sees bounty falling from the sky and then imitates the behavior without understanding it. Supposedly this happened in New Guinea during WWII where people saw parachutes of food and weapons coming down after the soldiers laid out marker panels. So they laid out marker panels in a ritual. Also this happened in 2019 when companies were constructed without understanding what was required to act…

Funny enough, the founders who are cargo-culting are finding monetary success (Neumann will still be rich when the dust settles, although I'm not suggesting he got all that money out of WeWork by accident). It's the investors who will find out that just making it look like you are investing in a world-changing tech company isn't enough to make it rain.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#224

Post by munk-a » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #204

hef19898 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with the last pint, people completely tend to ignore the effort and attention to detail Amazon puts into executive and planning. That plus a very sound strategy. Also Amazon was profitable, even if just barely, for the most time while growing appr. 20% constantly. Not comparable to, say, WeWork from what I know. But it shows how powerful that narrative can be.

I'm pretty sure Amazon was profitable all along - it's just that the profit was all spent on expanding the business. Hence, there was no taxable profit. Amazon was also able to make money selling products at little or no markup by taking advantage of the float. They'd collect money from the purchaser immediately, and would pay the vendor after 90 days. Then, Amazon would make interest on that money for the 90 days. I…

Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere.

Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories - but it has succeeded in greatly lowering the difficulty and impediments in case that a customer wants a specific book, the unfortunate thing for bookstores is that that user flow is extremely common and winning on that flow pretty much got them the market.

W.r.t. the other flows... Amazon is still terrible, did you enjoy The Colour of Magic? Why don't you try Magic Eraser - guaranteed to get stains out of any fabric! Curious if this book is good? Why not try reading one of the hundred shill comments talking about how this book changed their life!

I think the key here is to focus on winning a specific market segment (a significant one) and winning it hard if you can do that you too can be the next amazon.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#225

Post by crumpets » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #138

janee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?

> When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. No, because at this point the barrier to entry is substantial. And, if a competitor does come in, the incumbent with a huge warchest can just drop the price again temporarily to drive them out.

>No, because at this point the barrier to entry is substantial.

Not really. Unless the product has a powerful network effect, people can easily enter. If that weren't the case, starbucks would have run every coffee shop out of business by now.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#226

Post by crumpets » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #192

nradov wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Return by itself is meaningless. If you want to discuss retirement then you have to account for the other variables: consumer price inflation, risk, contribution levels, lifespan, etc. For individual workers the most practical suggestion is to save more instead of expecting high returns.

Most people don’t make enough money to save that much money so they can retire.

The number of new cars, new iphones, large houses, and other luxury purchases suggests otherwise.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#227

Post by asveikau » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:30 PM UTC

readhn wrote: post #39

Is Adam Neumann - Next Elizabeth Holmes?? I would not be surprised to see SEC involved at some point somehow.

I was coming here to see if there were any comments on this and if I might leave one.

It seems like a sketchy real estate company is a little bit less consequential than a medical device that doesn't work (potentially killing people).

But I find the two points interesting as: What will it take for the Silicon Valley community to start being openly critical of a company and that's OK?

For example if you leave comments on here that are skeptical of any given company or its prospects, even rightfully so, you may get a lot of push-back and people assuming you're some kind of mean jerk. But once the founders are shown to be actual frauds, the tone changes to what it might have been in the first place, had we had a bit more healthy skepticism and less "ra-ra, new companies good" kind of blind faith.

In that I rate Theranos and WeWork to have something in common. They tipped these ocassionaly overly polite scales towards admitting that some companies act in bad faith.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#228

Post by crumpets » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:31 PM UTC

cfors wrote: post #139

jamiequint wrote: post #40

> This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is false. First, Amazon is far from controlling the whole market. They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Second, Amazon didn't predatory price, or if it did, it didn't for long, certainly not long enough to achieve its current m…

I think you have it reversed, AWS accounts for most of Amazon's profit and is used to fund other ventures. > AWS revenue came accounted for 13% of Amazon’s total revenue. Of Amazon’s total $3.1 billion in operating income, 52% came from AWS. [0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/25/aws-earnings-q2-2019.html

No, long before AWS, Amazon intentionally re-invested all of the excess revenue that would be reported as profit back into the business instead (expanding capex and opex).

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#229

Post by crumpets » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #146

kizer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it's just a t-shirt.

That is pretty much exactly the same thing as seeing a character wearing a T-Shirt in a movie and trying to argue it must have just been what the actor came on to the set wearing that day.

No it's not. Actors are meant to pretend to be different people.

The CEO isn't supposed to be pretending to be a different person.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#230

Post by baq » Wed, Sep 25, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

ISL wrote: post #121

baq wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there’s no way to know what’s foolish and what isn’t? The protection we’re talking about here is equal access to information which is a necessary prerequisite for an efficient market.

A maximally-efficient market needs all the information. Equal access is probably less important.

equal access implies every participant has all known information, the key word here being 'known', so you're probably right, but it doesn't matter either way in the real world :)