Squandered is a bit harsh. I don't have skin in the game either way, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a profitable business to be built once the dust settles. It can be hard to know in advance just how big that market would be, and how defensible.
If they're going to make that many bikes, why not just give them away? Why have them be "shared" and made to be returned to a pile?
It would at least eradicate theft. Most people would have the same model. You could get a handout instead of having it stolen, and if it was stolen, then that person could get the handout. And the only people claiming them would be the ones using them.
In practice, China is highly capitalistic as an economy. It's authoritarian capitalism, not communism, even though it has a "communist party".
This phenomenon of bikes piling up is literally venture capitalists throwing money at startups (in return for equity) to deploy more and more bikes to outnumber competitors in a hopeless race to monopolize bike sharing. It's literally an exhibit of one of the failure modes of extreme capitalism.
Giving them away, as GGGP suggests, would actually be a departure from capitalism, and perhaps a good one.
Profitable is not enough. This is an extremely competitive business space. Employees joined these companies and were granted equity at multi billion dollar valuations and investors invested in these companies at multi billion dollar valuations. What is the addressable market here? What do margins look like? I would be surprised if the companies that win this market are going to be worth more than $2 billion dollars.
> Employees joined these companies and were granted equity at multi billion dollar valuations and investors invested in these companies at multi billion dollar valuations
Hubris and a lack of pragmatism has a cost. Of course the equity is worthless! If you do small things that don’t scale and poop aren’t profitable, and then scale and still aren’t profitable, there’s nowhere else to go.
These investments of time and fiat never seem to ask, “walk me through the milestones you’ll accomplish to corner the market.” Same with Uber (from their S-1): “We include all passenger vehicle miles and all public transportation miles in all countries globally in our TAM, including those we have yet to enter” eye roll
TLDR The koolaid has a bitter aftertaste.
(tangentially, Uber has spent almost $28B and still isn’t profitable)
VCs aren't in the business of creating profitable companies. Their LPs aren't going to be happy with a negative return on their investment, regardless of whether they helped to create a nice, sustainable small business along the way.
I wonder if there is a path to profitability if they have to deal with all the scooter-litter described in the article. That'd probably mean having someone continually going around town moving scooters into racks or something like that.
Well a start would be educating riders on how to safely park the damned thing when their trip is done, instead of literally dumping it on a sidewalk/pathway, and collect fines for bad stewardship.
You could have motion/orientation sensors to complement the GPS to see if they are moved after the rider parks it. It's far from unsolvable its just that nobody cares or is motivated.
Lyft/Divvy does this in Chicago. If you lock the scooter at a docking station, there’s no additional charge, but if you leave it somewhere else, there’s a small fine of $1
At the very least, Lime and Scoot now require a picture of the properly parked scooter upon ride end. I wouldn't be surprised if the other apps are the same.
Squandered isn't harsh at all. The deployment of capital was disproportionate to the size of the profitable business that will result. It could have been better spent elsewhere... or saved.
Though if it takes $2.9 billion in funding to make a business with ultimately, let's say $10m/yr net profit, I'd still call that squandered.
Especially if part of that move to profitability ends up needing to be like european city bike hire schemes where they need docks to avoid theft, reducing availability and adding infrastructure costs.
My reading is that "squandered" doesn't refer to the potential market for scooter-sharing services itself, but to the poor strategy of pumping an insane amount of money into a new/untested category in a very short amount of time.
We tried cognito (bizarrely hard to use), Auth0 (mildly hard to use), and Userfront (easy to use) for authentication + rbac + multi-tenancy. We also looked at Warrant and Oso, and my takeaway was that they shine for more complex use cases, which wasn't our particular need.
Although personally i don't think its a great spec. Its a good enough spec (certainly better than saml, shudder) - "good" is not the same as works acceptably or popular.
After extensive experience with SAML and other specs, I don't think it's better than SAML in a fundamental way. It's certainly better in that it doesn't require a mind-numbingly verbose blob of XML, but strip away the XML and all that verbosity, and you basically end up with... kerberos.
Thank you for building it! I haven't kicked the tires yet, but as a node developer, this feels like the future: we can move fast with node when it makes sense, and get rust level performance when we need to. Best of both worlds!
Honestly, "not taking advantage of our DNS management" is a garbage response. We use AWS for our DNS management. If you offer a configuration, you should support it fully.
Our sites have been down for 3 hours now, and you're blaming someone else? We have 5 properties on Netlify now and will have 0 this time next week.
Yes, it is our fault for believing Netlify had contingency plans as hosting is their core business. We're fixing this mistake now so that our customers don't have the same experience.
Nobody is telling parent's customers how to feel. But the OP suggests that Netlify customers should be faulted for choosing the the wrong setup. Broken trust goes all the way down the chain, which is why the middle links have every reason to get ticked off.
The difference is that Netlify communicated the risks to its customers, something other parts of the chain apparently did not do, in addition to not evaluating the risks presented to them by Netlify.
Did you read the docs [1] before writing this? Putting a "(recommended)" on one branch of configuration instructions isn't the same as saying that the other option has a single point of failure. Also, people on both sides of a service don't have the same responsibilities - that's the whole point of the service.
Communicating about risks OR outages are both hard, and every company has both. I'm actually a happy (though impacted) Netlify customer. But it's completely bizarre to me to try to invalidate this customer's complaint.
Yes, I’ve visited that page before today. I admit my familiarity with these DNS setups may have made the tradeoff jump out at me. No problem invalidating the complaint.
I'm not sure your organization's setup with Netlify but isn't the whole point of Serverless to be... "serverless"? I could migrate twice the amount of properties you have to another provider in less than 3 hours...
I get your frustration but maybe cut some slack. If anything is mission critical, you should have had a backup plan if Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, or something else.
We use(d) Netlify for the frontend. I agree, our mistake was believing Netlify could be used for more than toy websites and took care of backup plans for us. Clearly they do not.
It's not just migrating the front-end if they're also using other functionalities like Netlify functions, forms, authentications etc. Netlify is not just static file hosting.
