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WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

mattstoller.substack.com

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Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#171

Post by Wowfunhappy »

saalweachter wrote: post #148
erik_seaberg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I briefly drove airport shuttles and we'd sometimes rescue people who had been screwed over by taxi dispatchers. I don't think drivers faced any consequences for never showing up at all .

I personally don't blame the drivers, most of the time. My impression is that taxi companies, wanting to be profitable, keep the largest number of drivers on call that can be maximally utilized -- not the smallest number needed to guarantee a certain SLO. So when you call dispatch and they tell you "30 minutes", that's a bald faced lie. It's not that the taxi driver got lost or stopped for a coffee break on the route…

...and I guess Uber's main innovation there was, make the drivers independent contractors, so you don't have to pay them for the time they're idle. :\

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#172

Post by mbesto »

KoftaBob wrote: post #161
iamkroot wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do private investors need protection? Why can't they be held responsible for the foolishness of their actions?

Because the LPs who fund VCs aren't only using wealthy individual's money, people's pensions are in there too.

I generally agree with this, but:

1. Pensions are diversified for exactly this reason and VC isn't usually a large % of the fund.

2. This should be exerted through other pressures at that LP level: political, regulatory, etc...not at the GP level.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#173

Post by throwing838383 »

This is key: "The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly."

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#174

Post by ajb »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #160
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…

The article I referenced boils down to dismissing fears of online privacy invasion as alarmism. Exploring his own site's dependencies, Ben concludes that the third parties phoned home to for every visitor are probably harmless. He recommends that discourse focus on striking a balance between technology being convenient and secure, and not worrying too much. This essay reflects a profound failure of imagination with r…

This.

Say some company found that they could pay landlords to let them borrow everyone's keys, and used them to go inside while you are out and stick an ad inside your bathroom where you will see it when you're taking a dump. Sure, the ad is harmless. But you can't just shrug it off because then you've accepted the principle that companies can pay your landlord for access to you and your house.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#175

Post by blueboo »

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…

Or, it’s true.

Amazon did predatory price for several years, subsidising sale and delivery with venture capital.

I’m baffled by the nonsense point about reinvesting profit from a lack of profit. AWS doesn’t excuse the years of cynical predation.

50% of a market is easily enough to dominate and control one, of the other players aren’t the same order of magnitude of influence.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#176

Post by dmoy »

nradov wrote: post #123
Ididntdothis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like treasuries or money market return acceptable returns for people’s retirement portfolio.

What is an "acceptable" return? No one has a right to achieve any particular return.

Treasuries and money markets basically return zero after inflation.

So, at least more than zero.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#177

Post by theflyinghorse »

empath75 wrote: post #158
cs702 wrote: post #149

Despite a bit of exaggeration and unnecessarily salty language, I found the OP to be a though-provoking piece, well worth the read. This passage, in particular, struck a chord with me -- it criticizes all the money-burning unicorns selling products and services below cost: "What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vis…

Everyone in this thread is nodding sagely along with this while not thinking about how this insanity drives up their own tech salaries to insane levels which will collapse soon after the vision fund collapses.

Would software salaries (in the US that is, we here in Canada get paid nowhere close to American levels) collapse though?

There's practically unlimited amount of work that needs to be done and practically unlimited amount of good ideas left in the world to exploit. One fund going out won't do anything to change that.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#178

Post by alasdair_ »

JackFr wrote: post #73
chrisseaton wrote: post #3

Some of these criticisms are just irrelevant personal abuse - like saying he doesn't think Neumann's t-shirt is fitted well.

And describing Jamie Dimon as a mediocrity is simply ignorant. JPMorgan has outperformed all the big banks for the past 10 years, and it's not close. JPM is tied up in billions of dollars of loans to WeWork, but those loans are commercial mortgages. Typically those loans are largely underwritten based on the building and real estate rather than focusing the borrower. Presumably the loans were made on the same terms t…

WeWork doesn’t own the buildings right now - the landlords do.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#179

Post by legitster »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #132
legitster wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recommend the Stratechery piece enough (or Stratechery in general).

On the contrary, given the author's myopic and rosy perspective on surveillance capitalism as espoused in the article "Privacy Fundamentalism"[1] (and apparently amended in a follow-up which is paywalled), I find it hard to take anything on that blog seriously. [1] https://stratechery.com/2019/privacy-fundamentalism/

> Again, this is not to say that privacy isn’t important: it is one of many things that are important. That, though, means that online privacy in particular should not be the end-all be-all but rather one part of a difficult set of trade-offs that need to be made when it comes to dealing with this new reality that is the Internet. Being an absolutist will lead to bad policy

I don't understand, this article seems completely reasonable. He's asking people to think critically about their absolutist takes.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#180

Post by braythwayt »

empath75 wrote: post #158
cs702 wrote: post #149

Despite a bit of exaggeration and unnecessarily salty language, I found the OP to be a though-provoking piece, well worth the read. This passage, in particular, struck a chord with me -- it criticizes all the money-burning unicorns selling products and services below cost: "What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vis…

Everyone in this thread is nodding sagely along with this while not thinking about how this insanity drives up their own tech salaries to insane levels which will collapse soon after the vision fund collapses.

I understand your concern, but the author’s conjecture is that if we drive this “counterfeit capitalism” out, then instead of a few companies being run by and for financiers, there will be more companies and more startups and more competition.

I suggest that would lead to more tech jobs and higher salaries, because businesses would be based on creating value, not on using an ocean of cash to drive everybody else into bankruptcy.

If you buy his argument, “counterfeit capitalism” is actually at odds with what YC is trying to accomplish.

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