Bill Gurley's response to this: https://twitter.com/bgurley/status/1252701838496825345
Is he right that aggregating demand is the one and only key to a successful marketplace?
Is he right that aggregating demand is the one and only key to a successful marketplace?
The two must be interlinked but one person has an idea of a product that doesn’t yet exist, and the creation of the product creates demand. The other has the idea that demand causes suppliers to produce.
Build it and they will come. Another aphorism. Not generally true.
Car sharing is a great idea. The economics are difficult to convey to customers. Keeping enough vehicles in enough places to make it a reasonable facility is difficult, but required to make people see the value. It’s also very hard to convince people to go carless in their current life.
The substantive conjecture behind his tautology is about the economics and business model of SDC-as-ridesharing. Seems like a moot point to me. A working SDC will be enormously profitable regardless of whether the company that builds it gets to own the platform. Plus, the big auto cos might be able to afford to not win the SDC race, but they certainly can't afford to not even play the game. A lot of the money spent on SDCs is seen as hedging, not as serious plays.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
Very interested in reading AMAZON CTO's opinions.
The transport sector does not scale in the way a digital product does, for a multitude of very obvious reasons. Simply put, it's mostly not really a technological product.