The last wave of "unicorns" has been hardly "disruptive" in the positive sense of the word. If most of them were to disappear, my life would just be a little more cumbersome, but it won't change in any material way.

DoorDash is nice, but restaurants delivered food before that too. Uber is nice, but it's barely better than the taxis it replaced - at least in my city. Airbnb is a good option, but if it were to disappear, I'll just do what I always did - get a hotel room.

Considering that it tooks tens of billions of dollars to create businesses that were at best "nice to have", I have to wonder what's "disruptive" about any of this stuff.

In my city Uber was worlds better than the taxis it replaced. Before Uber, you would call taxi dispatch and give them your address. If you were lucky, the driver would show up at that address, within the wait time the dispatcher gave you. He (always a he) would rarely take credit cards too...better plan an ATM stop into the ride.

Now that's in my home city. I cannot be the only one who got scammed by a taxi driver in an unfamiliar city when they took a deliberately circuitous route to the destination. Lesson learned: never tell the driver its your first time in <city>. If asked "is it your first time in <city>" tell them, "no, I come to <city> monthly for business".

I am not justifying Uber's sleazy behavior, both internally and with their poor vetting of drivers early on. But the taxi industry in the mid 2000's was just asking for disruption.

In the long run all these apps did was take you away from your traditional means and then put those price increases into the product over 5-10 years. In some cases getting you hooked to a new cost stream (i.e. doordash/uber). Those margins are just getting repackaged to the corp and the dev costs amortized over a longer time period.

Uber, at least in my city (São Paulo), has been truly disruptive and made my life significantly better (since I don’t own a car or even know how to drive)

In my city, they lured in drivers with fat incentives, then encouraged them to buy new cars - even partnering up with lenders to offer loans with low/zero down payment. Of course, the incentives dried up and drivers were left with expensive cars they couldn't pay for unless they worked 12-14 hour shifts.

I have zero sympathy for this godawful exploitative company. If the world didn't see them with the rose-tinted tech shades, they would have the same reputation something like Nestle has - a greedy, reckless, and exploitative corporation.

I agree they are a greedy, reckless, exploitative corporation. I do think though their product is a net positive to society, even a net positive to the drivers class in general (taxi is basically mafia around here and Uber driving was used as a sort of safety job fallback for people that would be otherwise unemployed).

where i live, downtown, uber is nearly equivalent to taxis. pros for taxis: you have to wait less time, you can tell ahead of time if they have air conditioning, and pricing is predictable. cons for taxis: uber is always available, you know what you're paying before you get in, and taxi drivers rob you every chance they get, while uber drivers never do

where my girlfriend lives, in the suburbs, taxis don't exist, so uber/didi/cabify is the only option other than taking the bus (which doesn't run at night) or walking (which is dangerous, especially at night)

'disruptive' innovations are worse in important ways than the incumbents they challenge, but much cheaper; from the perspective of the consumer, this isn't true of rides from uber or lodging with airbnb, but from the perspective of the provider, this is extremely true of uber and airbnb, which are 'competing' with the taxi medallion mafia and the regulatory regime established to protect established hotel chains

getting a taxi medallion or getting licensed to open a hotel are enormously more expensive than signing up with uber or airbnb

You could do vrbo even before airbnb existed. Airbnb innovation was the room in someone else house and almost no one does that at this point.

In San Francisco, Uber was a mobility revolution!

Lyft was! At the cost of public infrastructure, job security for drivers and increased emissions! But is it ever convenient.

You can get 4% on treasuries. It’s amazing how the whole startup game and VC ecosystem doesn’t absolutely trounce that considering the risk and effort everyone is applying.

People want to make money while being at the helm of stuff.

Being the responsible person at a company is some weird mix between being a painter, a father, a helmsman and the leader of a battalion/cult.

Investing in treasuries on the other hand is very depressing considering that it doesnt give you any authority or ability to call the shots in the organization you are investing in (except for voting of course, but everybody can do that)

In places which are up enough on the Maslow pyramid startups and sports teams will always get equity financing regardless of interest rates, because they aren’t just a business, it’s something people do to find purpose.

And actually the real reason for Fed lowering interest rates is to allow people to finance their dreams via debt in order to get the best of both worlds: cheap financing and not having to part ways with equity and not having to share the helm of the company with anybody else.

It’s an anomaly that all that resulted in the explosion of VC/PE. Mostly because both people and banks were scared AF by debt post 2008 even though with low rates it was the moment to be bold not scared. Those who weren’t financed their dream very cheaply and retained control of it.

Whats the real return on a 4% treasury when inflation is running 4-6%.

Its negative.

TIPS have a real return of around 1.5% right now

You can only put 10k into I bonds (current rate 6.89%)

You can put massive amounts into TIPS

You get 4% on some deposit accounts. You get about 5% on 1 year treasuries.

Now 5%!

Sit long enough with that %4 and you will see with opp. cost that you're not getting anything for long term. That's for short term cash and such.

This thread is specifically about A16Z and their "lose money but make it up on volume" strategy. A traditional VC fund, which carefully only invests in startups which are going to succeed, can still make good returns with 4% interest rates.

That this has all happened before and it will all happen again.

So say we all

Subsidies are a powerful drug, with serious withdrawal symptoms

> yes, low interest rates are here to stay most likely, because of all the extremely wealthy retirement funds of aging populations all over the developed world are buying safe assets, so the US Treasury can sell a lot of bonds.

Isn't it also dependent on inflation? Higher inflation = higher bond yields

It's unsurprisingly a bit more complex than that, but yes. The mechanism is something like

general price level increase accelerates (inflation overshoots the target) -> central banks act to cool the economy (they conduct open market operations to remove liquidity, increase various knobs like interest-paid-on-reserves, basically the opposite of "quantitative easing") -> this has a knock on effect on corporate and governmental bond auctions -> bond interest rates go up

but this is a "closed loop" because the end result is that "inflation creeps back down to/below target level", and then bond yields go back to where they were and it seems that's mostly a function of the appetite for safe assets.

of course this might all be irrelevant if central banks basically switch to "nominal GDP targeting"

and one more small but very interesting piece in this puzzle (the jargon is not important, the "bonds stay on the balance sheet, so they are inconvenient" part is): https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2023/02/unders...