I never used doordash and yet they own 50% market share. How? That's incredible... In big cities I always hear of people Uber-ing food, and never once I heard people doing a door dash? Is dashing a verb?
In the article it highlights how airbnb-ing is part of our vocab. For example you say "I am just gonna airbnb it", so that really tells me that airbnb have done their marketing well...
Unlike doordash, "uber it" and "get it on uber eats" is commonly heard...so I wonder...playing in hard mode is great but only when you win. Who's truly winning?
Interesting! I’ve never used Uber Eats and friends do say “let’s just Doordash something”. Popularity around here seems to be Doordash > Caviar (acquired by Doordash) > GrubHub. My area of reference is SF & Oakland, California.
These things tend to be highly regional. I laughed when I read the “brand affinity” part of doordash’s S1. That’s completely in their own heads. These products are beyond commodity — the only brand that matters is the restaurant; no one cares what company brings it to you as long as it’s the cheapest/fastest, and MAYBE the most reliable.
We all live in a bubble. Your experience isn't invalid, but lots of other people have very different experiences, so it's difficult to draw conclusions from what you hear about in your daily life.
I'm also surprised because in my experience Ubereats is always cheaper and lets you wait to tip until afterwards. Horrid Door Dash drivers wore my generosity thin real fast, but with Ubereats it can actually be performance based as it should be. It reflects in how unprofessional and entitled some Door Dash employees are. I wrote simple steps for getting tto my door and they'd tend to not read it, with one even saying something like "wah wah I'm not reading this huge paragraph" (it was maybe 15 words total). I should've been able to leave a negative tip for that one. The most basic inklings of work ethic seem to be lost on this doomed generation, or at least whoever is in the range of 20 years old right now.
1. You sound like an asshole, who probably doesn't tip his waitstaff if they don't kiss your ass all night.
2. Door Dash drivers are not employees of Door Dash, and thus are working a precarious "job" with no health coverage. You should expect poorer service - you get what you pay for. As these gig companies continue to squeeze out more margin from their contractors expect service to get worse.
Yikes, attacking others like this will get you banned on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
To AlexandrB, I tip 20% unless the person does something outrageous like the guy who said it was too much effort to follow a delivery note I spent time writing.
And my apologies to jimmaswell. Something about that comment got under my skin, but I extrapolated an entire persona based on - effectively - a tweet's worth of text. I was wrong.
I can't remember which thread it was, but there was a lengthy discussion about what qualifies as a tech company and whether something like AirBnB was a "tech" company. It was a distinction I had also struggled with, but this article provided clarity for me. What these companies deliver for their customers may not necessarily be traditional tech (lodging, delivery, etc) but the way they accomplish this is definitely a technical achievement.
Yeah, as an engineer it's hard for me to think of anything that doesn't have motors or sensors or at least PCBs as "tech". But I've also been a programmer for 30 years so I can appreciate pure SW projects that are hidden from the end-user as technical achievements. So at first things like AirBnB or travel search engines don't seem very techy but once these apps or websites are past their initial clunky releases there's a lot of hard work in the background that makes for a pleasant user experience.
Smartphones are definitely hard mode and they were the focus of the major tech companies those years.
So the more important takeaway is that Google doesn’t really care about deliveries.
Looking at stock market charts and saying, oh so and so event affected price, oh here’s a “low price” as defined relative to now... is still drawing on charts with crayons.
Anyway, in terms of the substance of what is being said here - success is always obvious in hindsight.
Probably the focus of incumbents plays a much bigger role than anything in particular Facebook or Booking.com were doing. For example, for those years after the Facebook IPO and for the “crayon says low price” part of Booking’s chart, Google kept doubling down on Android, paying 12.5x more for Motorola than Facebook paid for Instagram. How many operating systems are there? They clearly won that market, even despite disasters like the Motorola acquisition. They have an ads business, and they also acquired ITA (a Booking competitor?) but mobile is where they put their big bucks. Just the Motorola purchase probably exceeded their combined spending on Google+ by 20x. Likewise Microsoft was spending on... again, mobile, with a Nokia acquisition. Amazon was... developing the Kindle Fire line.
And then, nowadays, when Microsoft paid $22b for LinkedIn when it could have bought Instagram for less. This analysis isn’t bulletproof either, it tells you what a giant company was interested in but not if it was a good decision.
Listen, I think it’s fine, drawing crayons on charts. But if you evaluate Facebook based on its acquisitions you should evaluate everything based on acquisitions. And the sort of obvious conclusions are that while big money was focusing on mobile and eliminating all other upstart competition, other upstarts had lucrative opportunities obviously underpriced by the markets.
LinkedIn is probably ripe for disruption. I am not sure what that is right now but the coming recession means it's probably needed. It would probably be something of a cross between a temp agency and LinkedIn.
Did DoorDash end up figuring out how to pay their drivers a normal wage without confiscating their tips? If so, how? Seems like it would have tremendous downward pressure on their profitability.
Yeah, DD and others figured out that customer acquisition is where the value-add is for restaurants so they take ~30% gross from each order as commission . Being the "first place" people look when they're hungry gives them pretty okay leverage.
In non-pandemic times this is actually a sweet deal for restaurants that don't want to do their own delivery because food and the marginal cost of labor is cheap and your goal is to reduce kitchen idle time as much as humanly possible and another source of orders is a positive. It cannibalizes take-out orders a little but opens up people who would do delivery but not take-out.
And CK will deliver themselves as leverage to entice a sweet deal from Lyft or Uber. They will edge out DD. To the point where pre-made items will be sitting in warmers at strategic locations (ML) or delivered on a recurring basis in bulk (like a newspapers or milk).
This doesn't mention the legal and regulatory issues involved. Airbnb, Uber, and the like benefited by basically ignoring the law. People were free to run hotels without any of the oversight or become cab drivers without having the proper insurance. If something went wrong, the financial and legal liability often rested with some other party besides these companies.
That is one of the primary differences between the easy and hard mode categories that were defined here. Booking.com only had so much inventory because it was operating within the legal definition of travel destinations. Airbnb invented new inventory by lowering the barrier to entry by giving people the freedom to ignore the law.
I am not even necessarily saying that is a bad thing or that these laws were just, but it is clear that lots of laws were broken in Airbnb's path to their eventual IPO.
In the context of the article, the contrast between easy and hard mode seems to be Google and Facebook vs Airbnb and Booking, not Airbnb vs Booking.
What you're talking about supports this: yes, Airbnb and Uber flouted the law. But the very fact that there was regulation they had to bypass implies they were playing in a harder game, from Ben's perspective. Airbnb had to choose whether to ask for permission or beg forgiveness and chose the latter. Google never had to think about this problem.
I disagree. He defines Booking (as well as both Google and Facebook) as easy mode. From the article:
>the biggest takeaway from my perspective is that Booking was drastically undervalued circa 2011...The truth is that, as I just explained, the company was playing in easy mode... Google, the Super-Aggregator, has been extracting an ever greater share of OTA margins. Indeed, that’s the downside to having a business built on easy mode: anyone else can play the game just as easily.
The key difference between easy and hard mode seems to be layering on top of an existing business, service, or relationship versus creating a new business role, service, or relationship.
Booking was simply a new middleman between consumers and old businesses. It was just a travel agent, but online. There was nothing unique about it or any type of moat to protect it once a bigger competitor like Google decided it wanted that market.
Airbnb was connecting consumers to new businesses that wouldn't have existed without Airbnb. This was done in large part through ignoring the law and it allowed Airbnb to ramp up a business that is much harder to usurp by the likes of Google or Facebook.
I thought that quote was in reference to Airbnb, which was also featured in the preceding tweet about margins. But your interpretation makes more sense, so it looks like Ben is actually characterizing this as Airbnb:hard mode::Booking:easy mode. I concede the point.
The distinction wasn't communicated in the most lucid way so I can certainly see how you could come away with that initial impression. And good on you for simply admitting your harmless mistake. Many people on the internet tend to get defensive and competitive in that position.
Google "never had to think about this (flouting the law) problem?"
If by that you mean Google's OTA business, sure, but
Google totally had to think about this problem in the context of their original core search engine business.
They did not ask for permission, they begged for forgiveness too, if you remember the early days.
They copied data from every website in existence to populate their search engine despite copyright laws, encouraged some sort of robots.txt opt-out mechanism while also ignoring the (AI-hard) need to parse legal terms of use on each website which may not have allowed their access.
Later on some laws were passed to justify what they did but it was not legally a settled matter when they (and other search engines) started. Copyright is not "opt-out" process; the RIAA doesn't publish a robots.txt with their content and if they forget you have a free pass for copying some song for yourself. Copying every single word on a webpage to make money is not so clearly "fair use".
I think it worked out OK, but Google totally thought a lot about this problem early on and they and other search engines tried hard to make everyone really comfortable with their approach.
The court ruled that players of the game weren't owners, merely license holders. By copying the game to ram, you were bound to the Terms of Use.
Replace game with website there and there is a pretty strong case for downloading, parsing (copying) and storing portions (or all of) said site, then displaying portions at a later date alongside advertisements constitutes a ToS violation, and willful infringement on Googles part.
In a parallel world where yahoo, lycos, etc rules until 2010 and google is getting started, I think they get into a lot of legal trouble.
> They copied data from every website in existence to populate their search engine despite copyright laws, encouraged some sort of robots.txt opt-out mechanism while also ignoring the (AI-hard) need to parse legal terms of use on each website which may not have allowed their access.
As did every other search engine, and a good thing too. In general the principle of “if you don’t want people to see something don’t post it publicly” is a good principle that predates computers.
As for robots.txt: don’t forget that it predated Google, even when g was just a grad school project. Nothing weird about it: we also specify how the http protocol works. Humans use “AI-hard” adaptive protocols and there’s no reason computers won’t in future, but they can’t yet and it’s not unreasonable to have to adapt to that.
There are many many reasons to criticize Google but I think your argument is not one of them.
GP is not criticizing Google, they are stating that Google also had to choose to flout the law and thus play in "hard mode" in the context of this article.
It is very hard to believe that the implied size of Door Dash's market (vis-à-vis their valuation) is realistic and/or sustainable given their business model.
Said another way, it seems improbable that there is a large market for unsubsidized food delivery given the very high level of unsubsidized costs/prices and the improbability of reducing the largest costs (the delivery person). And, of course, the subsidies will eventually end.
Then again, what do I know? Circa 2012, I was certain Facebook would eat Twitter's lunch.
The logical next step for Doordash is to transition from a food delivery company to a last mile logistics company for all kinds of packages. If that model proves out the market would be considerably larger.
>Circa 2012, I was certain Facebook would eat Twitter's lunch.
I think they serve different markets. Twitter is more public facing and basically ephemeral status updates. That and you can follow almost anyone and ignore the trolls, retweets.
Facebook has more personal information, pictures and friend relationships. You don't really want trolls spamming your FB visible to everyone. In fact that's what makes FB unattractive.
I love the concept of uber and yelp, I've used them a lot. But once I could price compare them via google maps they became un-investable to me because they can only compete in 2 areas, people and policy.
Once you lose control of the sales channel your business is commoditized and pricing pressure will remove all margin. Competing on price is a losers game if you want margin and growth. You can make a niche by having a better experience or better refund policies but the value competitor will drive the price down and steal marketshare.
Airlines and hotels are perfect examples, now ridesharing is little different.
If Airbnb can continue to control the experience then I think it is a great company to invest in. But if you can buy an airbnb on expedia and see the prices of nearby short term rentals from other competitors like vrbo then they are toast.
Aggregators are easy-mode tech, you are transferring wealth by taxing margin of other companies that have operational efficiencies or deficiencies.
> Amazon, in contrast, has played on a much higher difficulty setting from the beginning, selling and shipping physical items, with all of the marginal costs that entails. If anything the company has doubled down on the physical world, investing billions to deliver items in one day; I don’t think it is a coincidence it is Amazon that is Google’s true competitor.
I have believed that about Amazon being Google's true competitor for many years now, ever since it became clear that many people were starting their online shopping trips. Those shopping trips are far easier to monetize via search than search queries unrelated to items which can be purchased, which meant Google was being increasingly left with traffic that was hard to monetize.
I interviewed at Google for a PM job a few years ago and tried making this point to several of the interviewers when the conversation wandered towards dealing with potential Google competitors. All of them without exception looked at me as though as I was crazy. And I didn't get the job :-)
Outside of Google's walls (which can be full of navel-gazing or worse, competitive copycat-ism), your idea is something that's been talked about for a decade. Amazon today is the #1 search engine for product searches, not Google. And excluding YouTube, Amazon is the second largest search engine (all searches). Worldwide.
So, on the one hand, just about any common product that can be bought online, can be bought on Amazon. So, good for them.
However, given the horrendous search UX with Amazon, you'd think there would be more competition in this space. I'm always leery of buying big ticket items through them, for fear of counterfeits, or restocked items, and such.
Not that Google is any better. I occasionally do product search with Google, but it ends up showing me all kinds of crap only vaguely related to my search terms, apparently in an effort to be "helpful".
For anything computer related, I'm still using Newegg or Microcenter, just because I can filter results much more easily. Though even there, there is much that could be improved. Just like with price, I'd like to be able to set a specific range for weight, when searching for a laptop, for example.
It's not an easy problem for retailers and just about every issue you raised stems from the fact that these retailers (Amazon and you might as well include Best Buy, Instacart, Overstock, etc) are relying on data provided by the suppliers. That data is often not accurate and is definitely not standardized.
It's a million times easier for, say, Patagonia or another single-brand retailer to accurately and robustly catalog their own merchandise.
The multi-brand retailers that do it well invest huge amounts in their buying and merchandising teams, which allows them to do independent ratings of, e.g. the clothing fit, etc. I'm thinking of Nordstrom.
When you are an Amazon or a Walmart, not only is the number of SKUs you are dealing with magnitudes larger, but often you are a few degrees separated from what those SKUs even are, when you open up your platform to third-party sellers.
For sure. I definitely make no claim to originality here - indeed the disagreement I encountered about something I assumed was common knowledge was what left an impression on me.
Can someone explain what if any differentiators or advantages AirBnB has over its actual or potential competitors? What's their moat?
I recently rented a house for a weekend which was listed on both AirBnB and VRBO. I looked at both listings to get a more thorough feel for reviews etc. After a few days of contemplating whether to select this particular property, I ended up booking it on VRBO and I don't think there was even a reason why I picked one site over the other. If a butterfly had flapped its wings in China I'd have picked AirBnB.
I don't recall the user experience being much different on either site, and it seems like any property these days gets listed everywhere, so why is this particular market and AirBnB in particular such a darling?
The trust network? You have a rating history of the renters, not just the merchants. It wouldn't be the same if people starting renting at these properties via Booking. If you never rented before (I'm guessing this is true for you?), it's still the case that you will establish a history and that you would be incentivized to behave differently because of it.
I've always found this bizarre. In my anecdotal experience, and that of almost everyone I know, most people agree you cannot trust AirBnB and it's very obvious they have a financial motivation to lie to you. Their reviews have similar issues of misaligned incentives as Yelp, Glassdoor, Amazon, etcetera.
I agree there are reasons to not trust these reviews at face value, but to say you don't trust it all seems extreme. You're saying reviews have no value whatsoever?
On AirBnB I don't trust them at all. I've personally seen bad reviews removed, "good" reviews edited, and pressure tactics to increase "good" reviews. And unlike Amazon, Glassdoor, Yelp, there aren't enough reviews overall that I can try to figure out which ones are real and unedited.
Ratings are all worthless because they are not anonymous. Nearly every rating is 5-star; anything less makes the reviewer a target for harassment.
AirBnB won because they made a slicker website, advertised more with their VC money, ignored the law, and spammed Craigslist until they built up a larger network.
Airbnb has more places because Airbnb has more people because Airbnb has more places (and so on). It's basically the same moat as Facebook. It works better than Uber, I think, because Airbnb is much more travel-oriented so it's hard to have a local competitor (who wants to install an app for every city you visit?)
VRBO can theoretically compete by being cheaper but comparison shopping between apps is a pain (there's no kayak or google maps aggregator).
I was looking into this as well. The main difference between the two is user acquisition. Airbnb is doing no marketing right now and vrbo is doing lots. Also 46% more of their users go directly to Airbnb.com versus Vrbo. So you can run the exact same business but if one doesn't need to advertise and the other does it can make huge differences to the financials.
It’s the same moat that Coca Cola has over a Panda Cola, Virgin Cola and supermarket colas. It’s everywhere, it has name recognition and for many people they have used it and it worked for them, so why risk using another option?
Also even though I know Airbnb isn’t perfect, I understand at least some of its weaknesses and how I can mitigate some of the risks. With a new service I’d be starting from scratch.
> If a butterfly had flapped its wings in China I'd have picked AirBnB.
Some theories think that sequence of events and experiences that led to your decision, along with all states of all butterflies in the wold at the moment, that sequence was predetermined at the moment of the big bang (and likely before it too), just like position of billiard balls after the strike is predetermined before the strike if all forces and angles of the strike are known.
I wasn't sure what the point is here.. the classic race seems to be:
1. easy mode first-to-market => lock in monoply (network effects, ...) + use warchest + continued high margins to stay ahead of competitors (e.g., FB can buy upstarts)
2. invest in hard stuff others can't/won't do => benefit as in #1. Either start on this part (sweat equity, VC), or after war chest from 1 (ex: Google -> Waymo)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread2. Door Dash drivers are not employees of Door Dash, and thus are working a precarious "job" with no health coverage. You should expect poorer service - you get what you pay for. As these gig companies continue to squeeze out more margin from their contractors expect service to get worse.
And my apologies to jimmaswell. Something about that comment got under my skin, but I extrapolated an entire persona based on - effectively - a tweet's worth of text. I was wrong.
So the more important takeaway is that Google doesn’t really care about deliveries.
Looking at stock market charts and saying, oh so and so event affected price, oh here’s a “low price” as defined relative to now... is still drawing on charts with crayons.
Anyway, in terms of the substance of what is being said here - success is always obvious in hindsight.
Probably the focus of incumbents plays a much bigger role than anything in particular Facebook or Booking.com were doing. For example, for those years after the Facebook IPO and for the “crayon says low price” part of Booking’s chart, Google kept doubling down on Android, paying 12.5x more for Motorola than Facebook paid for Instagram. How many operating systems are there? They clearly won that market, even despite disasters like the Motorola acquisition. They have an ads business, and they also acquired ITA (a Booking competitor?) but mobile is where they put their big bucks. Just the Motorola purchase probably exceeded their combined spending on Google+ by 20x. Likewise Microsoft was spending on... again, mobile, with a Nokia acquisition. Amazon was... developing the Kindle Fire line.
And then, nowadays, when Microsoft paid $22b for LinkedIn when it could have bought Instagram for less. This analysis isn’t bulletproof either, it tells you what a giant company was interested in but not if it was a good decision.
Listen, I think it’s fine, drawing crayons on charts. But if you evaluate Facebook based on its acquisitions you should evaluate everything based on acquisitions. And the sort of obvious conclusions are that while big money was focusing on mobile and eliminating all other upstart competition, other upstarts had lucrative opportunities obviously underpriced by the markets.
In non-pandemic times this is actually a sweet deal for restaurants that don't want to do their own delivery because food and the marginal cost of labor is cheap and your goal is to reduce kitchen idle time as much as humanly possible and another source of orders is a positive. It cannibalizes take-out orders a little but opens up people who would do delivery but not take-out.
That is one of the primary differences between the easy and hard mode categories that were defined here. Booking.com only had so much inventory because it was operating within the legal definition of travel destinations. Airbnb invented new inventory by lowering the barrier to entry by giving people the freedom to ignore the law.
I am not even necessarily saying that is a bad thing or that these laws were just, but it is clear that lots of laws were broken in Airbnb's path to their eventual IPO.
What you're talking about supports this: yes, Airbnb and Uber flouted the law. But the very fact that there was regulation they had to bypass implies they were playing in a harder game, from Ben's perspective. Airbnb had to choose whether to ask for permission or beg forgiveness and chose the latter. Google never had to think about this problem.
>the biggest takeaway from my perspective is that Booking was drastically undervalued circa 2011...The truth is that, as I just explained, the company was playing in easy mode... Google, the Super-Aggregator, has been extracting an ever greater share of OTA margins. Indeed, that’s the downside to having a business built on easy mode: anyone else can play the game just as easily.
The key difference between easy and hard mode seems to be layering on top of an existing business, service, or relationship versus creating a new business role, service, or relationship.
Booking was simply a new middleman between consumers and old businesses. It was just a travel agent, but online. There was nothing unique about it or any type of moat to protect it once a bigger competitor like Google decided it wanted that market.
Airbnb was connecting consumers to new businesses that wouldn't have existed without Airbnb. This was done in large part through ignoring the law and it allowed Airbnb to ramp up a business that is much harder to usurp by the likes of Google or Facebook.
If by that you mean Google's OTA business, sure, but Google totally had to think about this problem in the context of their original core search engine business.
They did not ask for permission, they begged for forgiveness too, if you remember the early days.
They copied data from every website in existence to populate their search engine despite copyright laws, encouraged some sort of robots.txt opt-out mechanism while also ignoring the (AI-hard) need to parse legal terms of use on each website which may not have allowed their access.
Later on some laws were passed to justify what they did but it was not legally a settled matter when they (and other search engines) started. Copyright is not "opt-out" process; the RIAA doesn't publish a robots.txt with their content and if they forget you have a free pass for copying some song for yourself. Copying every single word on a webpage to make money is not so clearly "fair use".
I think it worked out OK, but Google totally thought a lot about this problem early on and they and other search engines tried hard to make everyone really comfortable with their approach.
The court ruled that players of the game weren't owners, merely license holders. By copying the game to ram, you were bound to the Terms of Use.
Replace game with website there and there is a pretty strong case for downloading, parsing (copying) and storing portions (or all of) said site, then displaying portions at a later date alongside advertisements constitutes a ToS violation, and willful infringement on Googles part.
In a parallel world where yahoo, lycos, etc rules until 2010 and google is getting started, I think they get into a lot of legal trouble.
As did every other search engine, and a good thing too. In general the principle of “if you don’t want people to see something don’t post it publicly” is a good principle that predates computers.
As for robots.txt: don’t forget that it predated Google, even when g was just a grad school project. Nothing weird about it: we also specify how the http protocol works. Humans use “AI-hard” adaptive protocols and there’s no reason computers won’t in future, but they can’t yet and it’s not unreasonable to have to adapt to that.
There are many many reasons to criticize Google but I think your argument is not one of them.
Said another way, it seems improbable that there is a large market for unsubsidized food delivery given the very high level of unsubsidized costs/prices and the improbability of reducing the largest costs (the delivery person). And, of course, the subsidies will eventually end.
Then again, what do I know? Circa 2012, I was certain Facebook would eat Twitter's lunch.
I think they serve different markets. Twitter is more public facing and basically ephemeral status updates. That and you can follow almost anyone and ignore the trolls, retweets.
Facebook has more personal information, pictures and friend relationships. You don't really want trolls spamming your FB visible to everyone. In fact that's what makes FB unattractive.
Once you lose control of the sales channel your business is commoditized and pricing pressure will remove all margin. Competing on price is a losers game if you want margin and growth. You can make a niche by having a better experience or better refund policies but the value competitor will drive the price down and steal marketshare.
Airlines and hotels are perfect examples, now ridesharing is little different.
If Airbnb can continue to control the experience then I think it is a great company to invest in. But if you can buy an airbnb on expedia and see the prices of nearby short term rentals from other competitors like vrbo then they are toast.
Aggregators are easy-mode tech, you are transferring wealth by taxing margin of other companies that have operational efficiencies or deficiencies.
I have believed that about Amazon being Google's true competitor for many years now, ever since it became clear that many people were starting their online shopping trips. Those shopping trips are far easier to monetize via search than search queries unrelated to items which can be purchased, which meant Google was being increasingly left with traffic that was hard to monetize.
I interviewed at Google for a PM job a few years ago and tried making this point to several of the interviewers when the conversation wandered towards dealing with potential Google competitors. All of them without exception looked at me as though as I was crazy. And I didn't get the job :-)
However, given the horrendous search UX with Amazon, you'd think there would be more competition in this space. I'm always leery of buying big ticket items through them, for fear of counterfeits, or restocked items, and such.
Not that Google is any better. I occasionally do product search with Google, but it ends up showing me all kinds of crap only vaguely related to my search terms, apparently in an effort to be "helpful".
For anything computer related, I'm still using Newegg or Microcenter, just because I can filter results much more easily. Though even there, there is much that could be improved. Just like with price, I'd like to be able to set a specific range for weight, when searching for a laptop, for example.
It's a million times easier for, say, Patagonia or another single-brand retailer to accurately and robustly catalog their own merchandise.
The multi-brand retailers that do it well invest huge amounts in their buying and merchandising teams, which allows them to do independent ratings of, e.g. the clothing fit, etc. I'm thinking of Nordstrom.
When you are an Amazon or a Walmart, not only is the number of SKUs you are dealing with magnitudes larger, but often you are a few degrees separated from what those SKUs even are, when you open up your platform to third-party sellers.
Unfortunately for them.
I recently rented a house for a weekend which was listed on both AirBnB and VRBO. I looked at both listings to get a more thorough feel for reviews etc. After a few days of contemplating whether to select this particular property, I ended up booking it on VRBO and I don't think there was even a reason why I picked one site over the other. If a butterfly had flapped its wings in China I'd have picked AirBnB.
I don't recall the user experience being much different on either site, and it seems like any property these days gets listed everywhere, so why is this particular market and AirBnB in particular such a darling?
https://qz.com/410264/you-should-never-trust-an-airbnb-revie...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-host-...
As a product I prefer everything about AirBnB to hotels except for the fact that I don't trust AirBnB at all, so I never use AirBnB unless I have to.
AirBnB won because they made a slicker website, advertised more with their VC money, ignored the law, and spammed Craigslist until they built up a larger network.
VRBO can theoretically compete by being cheaper but comparison shopping between apps is a pain (there's no kayak or google maps aggregator).
Also even though I know Airbnb isn’t perfect, I understand at least some of its weaknesses and how I can mitigate some of the risks. With a new service I’d be starting from scratch.
Some theories think that sequence of events and experiences that led to your decision, along with all states of all butterflies in the wold at the moment, that sequence was predetermined at the moment of the big bang (and likely before it too), just like position of billiard balls after the strike is predetermined before the strike if all forces and angles of the strike are known.
1. easy mode first-to-market => lock in monoply (network effects, ...) + use warchest + continued high margins to stay ahead of competitors (e.g., FB can buy upstarts)
2. invest in hard stuff others can't/won't do => benefit as in #1. Either start on this part (sweat equity, VC), or after war chest from 1 (ex: Google -> Waymo)
Barring the unexpected, the network effects of AirBnB are going to be soul-crushing for competitors for the foreseeable future.
The DoorDash analysis though seems rushed.
I'm not convinced DoorDash has a maintainable moat. They've taken a unique angle, but easily repeatable with adequate funding.