Back the day I had a short stint at Flixbus in Germany. Being an ops / logistics guy I wasn't that impressed by their operations at the team I was at (their line business seemed different but grew out of one of Flixbus earlier acquisitions, mein fernbus). Also the tech didn't look revolutionary. What was top notch, and backed by serious money, was advertising and marketing. They had all the metrics, the strategy, the budget, knew the processes, everything.
It was that what gave them the market penetration in new countries, out spending and out performing competition until competition faulted or was bought out. So, the lesson I took, was that a lot of the latest b2c e-commerce start-ups are to a very large extent marketing driven.
At their core they are probably not a “tech” company in the traditional sense (a SaaS business). However, I think you are misunderstanding what they mean by tech company. WeWork is more akin to Flexport. Their bet is that they can run their business 10x better than their competitors by vertically integrating their tech and investing heavily in sensors and efficiency technology. They don’t really intended to sell tech to people, they intend to use tech to bleed the most money they can out of their core business, short term leases.
I am not sure I buy this. Sensors are great and everything, but the electricity for the LED lighting is not what makes buying or renting buildings in major cities expensive.
Similarly to AirBnB and Uber. Same kind of thing - use technology create a company of larger scale and coordination than previously existed in a space.
I think the general WeWork idea is great. Investing in it is another story.
They are in a unique position that they aren’t actually locked into their long term leases but once they start breaking them they won’t be able to get more leases on those terms so it’s in their best interest to get as many as possible then use the option to wipe away the bad ones
I’m on mobile so I can’t find the article but basically each lease is held by a barely capitalized independent entity. If WeWork wanted to close down a specific site they could merely shut down that specific entity without incurring obligations/fines/penalties to the entity of WeWork.
Normal these sorts of things aren’t allowed and building owners won’t sign up for that but somehow WeWork was able to bamboozle a bunch of developers into agreeing to that.
- it doesn't matter how the wealth transfer ends as long as untold billions are burned on a dead end, those people will lose their jobs regardless
- and if Uber does not go bust that means they've cracked the self driving problem in which case those people will be out of a job again
- In the meantime Uber is happy to exploit those people by having them engage in a thinly veiled race to the bottom, one where Uber sets the rules and they walk off with the bulk of the gross which they then spend on their own inefficient machine.
You really can't win with such actors in the market, Uber clearly isn't in it to be a 'good employer', in fact they've done everything they could to strip away what rights those people would have had as employees.
And every one of them has been getting paid less and less each year Uber has existed to there point that some of them can't take care of their own families. I don't think anyone has a problem with the service, consumers are just getting tired of subsidizing the wealthy through taxation policies that advantage people who already have money and low wages across numerous verticals.
So long as the employees are taken care of, fine. If they need to work more than standard hours to make a living wage after expenses, they are being taken advantage of. It’s as simple as that.
Tech should just be for tech people! Mothers and brothers be damed!
I get the frustration, but shouldn’t we be working towards models that allow for better compensation for creators rather than ... well I’m not exactly sure what you’re advocating for here ...
Better compensation for creators is not going to stand up to a multi-million or multi-billion-dollar buyout. Much of the western world has this crazy fascination with tech for the sake of tech, and it is that fascination and subsequent vulnerability that attracts the personalities that have been systematically pillaging all the great things that tech -- particularly lone-wolf individuals -- have built over the years.
It'd be really cool to see more barriers to entry limiting people's ability to access some tech, and limiting the size of businesses that are built around it. The internet was much better when it belongs to and was embraced by nerds, and not the general public, for example.
Our modern world is too complicated for most folks and now we have to build things so overly simplified that it is nearly impossible to be a power user or do advanced tasks when everything is reduced to single-button, shitty-app solutions in the cloud maintained by megacorps with more money than God
The ability to compensate someone who is creating value in a network with ownership of said network (eg giving an early uber driver, or Airbnb host, options or equity.) this is currently not possible to do in the US, but is possible with crypto networks.
It’s the most well known climbing destination, not just a “remote and hostile” place. It speaks to the end of the normal distribution curve for experiences/social signalling like this.
Pretty much everyone in North America and I’m sure Europe and most other countries have heard of Mount Everest since they were a kid.
It’s height may be one of the most commonly known facts in the world.
Not many other tourist destinations have that level of global recognition. Regardless of the difficulty. The difficulty probably only adds to it’s allure and humane are biologically hard wired to seek hard challenges.
It’s not too hard to figure out.
The good news is that there are thousands of other mountains around the world so there will never be a shortage to climb... unlike most natural wonders.
