41–50 of 72 posts
Klarna and affirm are the next gen of bullshit companies. Like Uber and WeWork before it. Absolutely massive scams fed with easy money and dumping on the next fool.
Uber has no business being in this group. They provide real value to customers and drivers. Taxis have provided absolute shit service in many places and Uber absolutely came in with a superior product and business.
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Klarna is notorious for privacy violations. For a good while it was possible to pretty much doxx any of their users just by entering some of their details in any Klarna-enabled online store. If my memory serves, they may even have had a ”which of these similarly named persons are you” dropdown at some point…
Oh dear... Never really bought through them, just saw them all over the internet as a payment option...
IIRC I would have had to log into my bank account through them, giving them my login data and letting them read all of my transactions (data they use to gauge trustworthiness, I think). I was shocked that that's legal and amused to find out it probably isn't.
(Disclaimer: Highly anecdotal, it was multiple years ago)
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at this point the average Uber driver is no better than the average taxi driver, and the last time I compared the price of an Uber ride to the price of a taxi the taxi was 10% cheaper. Uber got where it did by losing vc money and by ignoring laws. That fits my personal definition of bullshit company.
Your Uber driver will never mysteriously "forget to turn on the meter", have a "broken credit card machine", or any of the other scams taxi drivers pulled on me constantly.
If it is raining or the sun is out or the trains are busy or it is any of one a hundred random reasons - you will have surge pricing. Not just 10-15% extra but 100-150% extra. But don't worry keep standing around for a 30-40 minutes and checking the app eventually the price will come down...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
at this point the average Uber driver is no better than the average taxi driver, and the last time I compared the price of an Uber ride to the price of a taxi the taxi was 10% cheaper. Uber got where it did by losing vc money and by ignoring laws. That fits my personal definition of bullshit company.
Your Uber driver will never mysteriously "forget to turn on the meter", have a "broken credit card machine", or any of the other scams taxi drivers pulled on me constantly.
> But if completed, it would represent a huge discount on the company’s valuation when investors led by an arm of SoftBank Group Corp. Why is it that SoftBank somehow always manages to buy the top?
The reason why Softbank buys at the top is because they do not have good internal filters to judge technology. "Masa invests in cr*p," one of them said.
They want the prestige of investing in the best tech companies, and to them, that often translates as "the most overvalued startups with the most media attention."
Their LPs know even less about tech than they do, so who's going to stop them?
For these reasons, Softbank is incapable of making contrarian bets on undervalued companies, and always puts money behind the startups that have already raised too much, too soon.
>"Instead of charging consumers interest, Klarna takes a fee from the retailers."
This suggests they're not subsidizing their customers with VC money in the same way that cheap Uber rides did. Can anyone say why they are they trying to raise more money almost exactly a year after raising the kind of money they did? Are they simply trying to squirrel away some rainy day money or did they burn through most of that $639 million already? If the latter why is this such a capital heavy business if the model is based on retailers paying fees to the company?
Klarna and affirm are the next gen of bullshit companies. Like Uber and WeWork before it. Absolutely massive scams fed with easy money and dumping on the next fool.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber has no business being in this group. They provide real value to customers and drivers. Taxis have provided absolute shit service in many places and Uber absolutely came in with a superior product and business.
at this point the average Uber driver is no better than the average taxi driver, and the last time I compared the price of an Uber ride to the price of a taxi the taxi was 10% cheaper. Uber got where it did by losing vc money and by ignoring laws. That fits my personal definition of bullshit company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've thought about this too and I think it's because their strategy is structurally flawed. Their focus is on new/newish tech companies, but they don't make $3 million investments. They want to make $3 billion investments. But when you're buying stakes that size in companies that aren't yet mature, you're almost necessarily going to be chronically overpaying. There just aren't many 4 year old companies that actually…
If you have that kind of money and you want to invest in newish tech, then you have to accept the fact that your investments will move the market and make that work in your favor. Retail can buy a share here and there but you cannot. So how to make it work in your favor? Ask yourself "who can make productive use of this much money? who needs this much money to even be viable?" And it will be really capital intensive…