Companies of that type should be cooperatives.
Maybe way in the future once automated delivery is much more mature (and cheaper), could a co-op be possible. But we're talking decades later. And also talking about a completely different world by then.
I have the feeling, many the co-ops are formed "because" regular company wouldn't survive.
Certainly a decentralized federation of co-ops would work just as well as many small regional companies, or even franchises.
we have partners in around 50 cities in US, CA, COL, MEX, AU and NZ.
hmu support@twinjet.co if you want to discuss.
I would have guessed that a co-op of many delivery workers would be a way to gather enough money to create such a SaaS.
As far as gathering enough funds to create their own saas, they could but mine is cheaper! The real money is in that 30% slice of the sales of the food. The couriers aren't the marketers or the customer service staff, both are necessary to get the sale.
No reason a VC couldn't invest in a co-op. Or if they feel they aren't getting the unicorn returns they want, then instead of a co-op it could be organized as an employee owned and operated entity.
I think that is the future, and the disruption SV needs at this point...stop the madness of centralizing the wealth among founders and investors, and distribute it to the workers.
They’re not investing their own money, they have investors (things like pension funds) that they have to answer to. And honestly, the majority of VC funds don’t do very well, even taking the large stakes they do. It’s a hits driven business, and if you don’t get those one or two breakout successes, you probably don’t make back your fund.
Why would you think the investors would get any less returns if the entity (say uber) was driver owned?
They wouldn't everything remains the same, except instead of a concentration of ownership in a small group of founders, that same percentage of ownership would be distributed among a larger group of workers.
So the real question is why are investors so adverse to employee owned enterprises and invest in small groups of founders.
This seemed to imply that the investors would take less of a stake.
Are they adverse to funding employee owned enterprises? I've never looked into it.
Maybe they think that companies with dictatorial management are more effective at competing?
For the record, having been a founder, I agree that equity tends to be overly concentrated with the founders.
Because it is by definition not a co-op as soon as it takes VC money. A co-op is a business where every worker owns an equal share.
For example, I am certain YC accepts non-profits which have gone on to attain VC investment... and non-profits don't have any ownership.
Is it getting it to have enough people at once that it isn't "Nobody uses it because it is empty?" Since apparently even with high fees relative to the product and poorly paid workers it still loses a lot of money.
A lot of those two-way market companies appear to have "waiting for drones to reduce the effective labor cost" as their implicit business model.
But in Germany there is one big player in the long distance bus market and they operate their busses with self-employed contractors too. At least such companies would have to rely on humans for delivery in the forseeable future.
Some companies in the delivery space even got bought out by bigger players in the last 12 months here. One only offered a website/app for purchases and no own delivery people, the restaurants had to own their stuff, but somehow this didn't work out. Maybe a cooperative between all the restaurants could have saved this.