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Comment by gotocake | Hacker News Reader

It’s such a bad business model, it has nasty externalities, but people still leap to defend it because they don’t like cars. I think we need to be optimistic about this and accept that a lot of the last few years and probably a few more are all an incredibly expensive lesson as to why regulation exists, burdensome nature and all. Five years ago everything was “Uber for X” and “disruption” and Crytpocurrency. Now... not so much except for the true believers and the sunk costers.

So yes, it’s out of hand, it’s inherently unprofitable and cheap Chinese scooters are probably not a net environmental benefit. It’s still one of those things that millions of people apparently need to figure out the hard way.

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Spoke to a (well known) VC who saw the Bird deal and passed... the gaps in the model would have been fairly obvious to any suitably critical person. Namely that Bird and Lime dont unite catchment areas thus the coefficient of the network effect is tiny compared to Uber.

Or you could have just looked at—-you know—-actual bike and scooter rental companies. They’re small mom and pop shops. No Hertz for scooters. There’s a reason.

I agree that the economics of scooter sharing are probably fucked but your last argument is like saying "look at cab companies, they're small mom and pop shops, this Uber thing will never take off"

Is Uber making money yet?

In major metros, yes.

Cab companies weren't mom and pop shops, though (at least not in the sense you're getting at). In fact, obtaining a medallion was a substantial investment ($1M+ in some cases[1]). It's not particularly difficult to make the argument that scooters are a niche market at best.

[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/files/2011/10/1021-met...

That's in New York. In most areas, cabs were relatively marginal, little used services. Uber didn't take their market, it created a whole new market.

The rest of the country ain’t New York City.

No, I don’t mean to say that at all. The beauty of Uber is that it stitches together multiple markets on both the supply side of the marketplace and the demand side. For both small, medium, and large distances, riders know they will have a car and drivers know they will have a fare.

Bird investors failed to consider that this isn’t true for scooters. Each catchment area is isolated from the next.

Yes, I agree with your argument here. But comparing Bird to mom and pop bike rentals is wrong for the same reason that comparing Uber to traditional taxi companies (or comparing Cragslist to traditional classifieds, etc) is wrong.

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