Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy

Your comment comes closer to being substantive, which is often the case with the reactions people post to our requests not to post unsubstantive comments.

Even so, while I understand your perception and like most people I intuitively feel like it must be true in many cases, I'm missing any sense of what specifically makes it true in this case, other than that "dog-walking" sounds trivial. A line of the form "Wag is an idea that could be well executed in about 2 million" feels to me like it's in the orbit of "I could implement that in a weekend"—the sort of thing people say when they're not personally close to the problem, because everything seems smaller at a distance.

Similarly with what you say about "bozos" and "well-paid fools"—ok, such humans exist, maybe including some of the humans who see others as bozos and fools—but do you know something specific about the individuals here? If you think you do, do you really know it, or might this be hearsay based on very little information? Usually what comments like this do is repeat generic reactions about a common topic, which is actually the opposite of a substantive HN discussion.

Or are you spending money on PR that might even get you a direct ROI? Putting $50bn in VC that is primarily invested in the US likely buys you some sympathy, legitimacy and connections.

Well, let's apply the HN guidelines [1] and, more importantly their spirit, to this case. That spirit is to be reflective rather than reflexive [2], which means to interrupt the rapid reflex that springs up immediately ("what everyone is actually thinking"), inhibit the temptation to react, and give the slower, reflective part of the brain time to catch up.

When I do that, the first thing that comes to me is that the dog-owner market is huge—so huge that $300M is likely a small number rather than a large one. Moreover, the emotions that people have about their dogs are intense, profound, and deeply personal. ("Dogs are the new kids", reads a coffee mug I once saw in a kitchen in San Francisco.) So this market is not only broad, it's deep; the potential customers are not only numerous but the chance for repeat business is high. Probably there's a huge opportunity here, if you can satisfy people's needs or at least give them a feeling of that. As for dog-walking sounding trivial, if you've ever been (or known) a stressed-out, overworked dog owner and how it feels to face your sad unwalked dog in the evening when you have no energy left to do anything, this is actually not trivial at all. It is not only a form of suffering, it's closely connected with deeper forms of suffering—because so many of us invest our unfulfilled relational capacity into our pets. People will spend a lot of money to relieve a problem like that. In short: huge market, repeat business, premium pricing.

I know nothing about Wag, but this is more than enough to see how the GP comment broke the HN guidelines by being a shallow dismissal. I totally get why people want to post that kind of rant and share that perspective—I share it too, it's fun and creates a sense of community in its own way. But we have to remember what we're optimizing for on HN. There are tradeoffs in the kinds of discussion we get to have. If we take the shallow route and go for the sugar rush of piling on stupidity at a distance, we forego the quieter, insightful kind of discussion. Compounded, this determines the kind of site Hacker News is going to be.

Edit: I read the article, which seems to me unusually good and to deserve a more thoughtful discussion than most comments have offered here so far. Among other things, it makes clear that the issue is not "a fucking dog walking company" being a bad business per se, because a competitor is actually doing better.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

2. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I had a similar experience in 2018. In fact, I think my application with them is still active, cause I also never heard back from them after my in person interview.

They had me come in at noon, said they'd serve me lunch, then directed me to a galley kitchen where there were some leftovers from something that was served the day before.

I kind of zoned out after that, cause I was hungry and also annoyed, but I remember being condescended to, everyone being late, and everyone seeming like they were in a huge hurry. Never heard a rejection or offer from them.

My ex has our dog, I told her to stop using Wag as soon as possible. I'm not trusting a company that disorganized with my dog.

Sure, though from what I found the Vision Fund is about 10x larger than Ycombinator, so doing the Ycon thing at a VF level would probably involve some scaling challenges. But fundamentally, it seems a better way to go about things than putting nearly all of your eggs into late-stage start ups with highly correlated business models & failure modes.