Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 174 posts

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#41

Post by cowpig »

argonaut wrote: post #15

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech…

> Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying.

This does not match with my experience.

Bureaucracies, like human being, vary greatly. I was able to incorporate in Colombia at the department of commerce four years ago barely speaking Spanish, in just a couple hours as the bureaucrats there were very helpful.

I've also tanked tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers and spent over a year trying to reconfigure my corporate structure in a way that seems fairly trivial to me in Canada.

The idea that all bureaucracies are inherently evil is a self-fulfilling prophecy imo.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#43

Post by jimmaswell »

parthdesai wrote: post #34
jimmaswell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, what a disaster having affordable car transportation that doesn't turn you away for being a minority and having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money renting out extra rooms.

> having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money renting out extra rooms. Yeah, in that case, all the long term residents living in popular cities must be insane to hate Airbnb. Have lived in a city and a building infested with Airbnbs? If you did, you would how fucked up it is for a long term renter.

I've stayed in AirBnB's. The only way any other tenants would even know I was there was that I was taking up a parking spot. Someone would have been insane to be mad about my being there, yes.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#44

Post by nabdab »

isoskeles wrote: post #11
nabdab wrote: post #6

Sounds like standard bureaucracy. They didn’t submit the required information in the required form. SF wants startups to behave, that doesn’t mean that behaving startups get to ignore the standard procedures or get exceptions from requirements.

Sounds like they made a mistake in their submission, rather than they wanted to ignore something or get an exception. For such a large city with a huge amount of tax revenue, I would expect the bureaucracy in SF to do a little better with processes like this one. It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance or to give companies time to submit corrections. Obviously this isn’t how it wor…

> It would have been trivial to review these for required sections in advance

Absolutely. It is trivial! And the company making the submission is expected to do that. Which I think is very reasonable, considering that they know the requirements and make the actual submission in the first place.

It’s silly to want the reviewers to take on an additional burden in the process just because this one company made a dumb mistake which as you say would have been trivial for them to review and catch.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#45

Post by Spooky23 »

yebyen wrote: post #40
reaperducer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. It doesn't have to be this way. I incorporated my first company in Chicago, and was stunned with how helpful the bureaucrats were. Yes, it was a little complex, especially in the years before "startups" were a thing, and you could do stuff online. But each department I had to work with had people who would sit me down at their desk an…

Echo this sentiment from another Midwesterner, ex-pat former New York State resident. I moved to Indiana and have not had the experience of incorporating a business entity, but the experience I had at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles has been one to make me question whether bureaucracies are really necessarily horrible all of the time. Starting with the experience of moving to the state, to contrast (Upstate) Wes…

All DMVs are evil. Indiana is like a flag of convenience for car registration, they are focused on their revenue generation.

A place like New York or Illinois is stuck dealing with all of the bullshit generated in New York City or Chicago. Registration and titles are impossible as a reaction to the industry the popped up in the 90s “laundering” stolen cars by swapping in salvage titles. Same deal with rings of people who’d purposefully cause accidents to defraud insurance companies for phony medical procedures.

It’s even worse with trucks, where there is a complex web of federal, state and local regulations, which scummy operators are good at exploiting.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#46

Post by rolltiide »

argonaut wrote: post #15

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech…

People that defer too much respect to the state are at a disadvantage. What I mean by that is that some people will conclude "well that's the law! so don't break it" as opposed to looking at the consequences or seeing the relativity of the law, or the influence you can have on the law.

Many laws don't have a consequence.

Many laws were written by your rival.

Many laws have consequences that have nothing to do with closing your Series C which is a far greater incentive.

Disagreeing with this reality doesn't change the accuracy of this reality.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#47

Post by Retric »

_v7gu wrote: post #29
mrighele wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant. In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsui…

I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.

Local governments are independent in the US and don’t operate at huge scales. Further, their independently implementing laws written by a separate group so correctness is placed well above UX.

Sadly, politics only cares for people actively involved. If you want different behavior, communicate with an elected official, try to elect different people, or run for office yourself.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#48

Post by jellicle »

jimmaswell wrote: post #32
randomsearch wrote: post #19

And what a disaster Airbnb and Uber have been for the cities they have invaded. That’s why people legislate against them.

Yes, what a disaster having affordable car transportation that doesn't turn you away for being a minority and having cheaper alternatives to hotels available that let people make money renting out extra rooms.

Luckily these cheaper alternatives to hotels appeared out of nowhere and didn't come out of long-term housing stocks, pricing people out of the city.

And luckily these affordable car transportations don't drive around the city empty most of the time, causing huge traffic congestion.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#49

Post by Spooky23 »

mstade wrote: post #18
argonaut wrote: post #15

Yes, this is just standard bureaucracy and it's Skip's fault, as people are saying. But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. That's why this is so comical. It only feeds fuel to the truth that rules should be bent and there really is no point in "moving slow" for startups. You won't be rewarded for it. Most tech…

> But the bigger point is that the SF government apparently places more weight on minor application mistakes than actual, historical "bad" behavior. This has been my experience with pretty much any bureaucracy, regardless of locale. E.g. when I incorporated my company, I had to send in the same application four times, each time paying an additional fee. Reason was I had minor, pointless really, mistakes in the applic…

Bureaucracy values consistency over all else. People are held accountable for not following the process, not for customer experience.

That means either training people to be experts in whatever they are doing or removing agency from the individuals in the system.

Having people with the right training, etc is obviously the better path, but it costs more. End of the day, this is why devops is a thing — traditional IT operations only does what it does, which is a problem when you’re changing and growing.

Re: SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?

#50

Post by kd5bjo »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
kd5bjo wrote: post #8

The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now. The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy”…

Classic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.

I'm certainly not going to defend San Francisco's behavior. I think we can all agree that Skip was wronged by the city here. If you're in a position to do something about the quality of the bureaucrats, fixing their behavior is the right choice; this article is obviously an attempt on the part of the journalist to do that.

Without meaning to imply that Skip did anything particularly wrong, I intended to dispute the lesson its CEO took away from the experience. Skip wasn't in a position to change the bureaucracy: it simply wanted to get something from it. The advice given was implicitly for other people in similar circumstances, so I modeled my take-away for the same context. Dysfunctional bureaucracies are widespread, and knowing how to successfully interact with them is a crucial survival skill in modern business. Doing everything exactly by the book is how you do that; declining to invest in the future is simply an admission of defeat.

Post reply on HN