191–200 of 231 posts
Wasn't this dressed up and sold to the masses as blitzscaling just a few years ago? I like the term "venture predation" better.
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This is our world right now. My wifes father was a plumber. She said as actual plumber, you know someone who provides water and ensures your shity is sanitarily drained away he didn't make really good money. He got a job working for the auto industry running pipes for hydraulics to the machines on the factory floor and made way more money. How is that worth more to our society?
Why wouldn't factory machine hydraulics for the auto industry be more important then an individual's toilet?
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They have money because of AWS, which is a fantastic product in an extremely competitive market, competing against players who lose money like GCP and Azure. Amazon.com as a store makes next to nothing as profit. Who cares what he did to some diaper companies. Are consumers paying more or less because of amazon? Much less. They basically run amazon.com for no profit and consumers get fantastic deals and cheaper produ…
> consumers get fantastic deals and cheaper products and more reliable service than ever before. This hasn't been true for many years IME, and will almost certainly get worse over time. Companies like Amazon don't fight tooth and nail to monopolize industries because they want to be nice to people, they do it because it results in power they can use to increase profits over the long term. Less competition means that…
It's too easy to enter the diaper (or whatever) retail market that such a tactic makes no sense.
This feels related to the idea in "Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability" (1) Basically, if, say, Jeff Bezos never existed, it seems likely that someone else would have created Amazon, perhaps a few years later, and maybe not quite as good. "Big online retailer" is sort of a natural niche, with a bit of a natural monopoly. So while the classic argument for letting people keep most of their wealth gained in the fr…
https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/how-common-is-independent...
Looks pretty unlikely to me, personally, judging by the low stats on independent discovery
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“We lose on every item but we make it up with scale.” — the show “Silicon Valley”
Which doesn't really make sense unless you interpret it as "we make it up with growth."
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Which doesn't really make sense unless you interpret it as "we make it up with growth."
It makes sense in the context that the TV show is a comedy, so the line is supposed to be nonsense.
Surely not the first, but old enough to make the point:
> 7 May 1934, Lewiston (ID) Morning Tribune, “News Behind the News” by Paul Mallon, pg. 4, col. 4:
> The oil men were acting like the peddler who lost money on every sale but tried to make it up on volume.
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Classic zero sum thinking with no evidence or even an overarching thesis on the neutrality of money. You need to back this up with some serious economic citations
> > Classic zero sum thinking All the stuff that gives the most satisfaction is zero sum. Only one team wins the Super Bowl, only one NBA team wins the Finals and only one franchise gets to claim the World Series. You can see it when you look at investors, even the notorious ones, they are rich but mentally they are not stoked or feeling as powerful as athletes who won such trophies.
https://www.kare11.com/article/sports/nfl/superbowl/how-much...
To say nothing of pay and fame - presumably translating to better marketing deals and salaries from improved negotiation positions for simply getting as far as the Super Bowl. Absent other conditions (e.g. worries about exacerbating injuries), chances are you'd show up even if you know you'll lose, and not just out of spite and wanting to make the other guys work for it - but because you'll gain from it, which is a bit counter to the whole "zero sum" thing. Plenty of sport where new records are exciting even when it's simply beating the previous ones.
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Quidsi founder Marc Lore sold his next company, Jet.com, to Walmart for $3.3 billion [1]. Both Quidsi and Jet.com were never profitable, meaning Lore was also playing the game of venture predation, so hardly any pity from me. To add, Lore's current startup is a premium food delivery service called Wondery that raised $350 million at at $3.5bn valuation last year [2], and it's not profitable too. None of Lore's compan…
Being a business owner with actual profits from technology by selling a useful product, I can never understand the bizarre emergent properties of our current financial system that lets folks like Marc Lore to exist.
I believe a lot of this was driven by fed rate shenanigans creating far more investment wealth than there were organic opportunities for investing it. All of these market-distorting startup deals were just symptoms of that broader systemic monetary policy error. While the mom and pop taxi companies and others impacted by it have my sympathy and support, all the regulatory alternatives other than waiting until they ac…
This was the Faustian bargain we made. For us, I think it would be hard to argue this was a raw deal as opposed to living the last 15 years dealing with a depression or who knows what.
Once on this path we will just keep kicking the can down the road and let the unborn pay of it eventually.