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Comment by TheKarateKid | Hacker News Reader

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.

This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.

Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.

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> This is the problem with most VC funded startups.

At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem.

But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much better spent on developing, using and promoting open source distributed solutions that can stand the test of time.

On the other hand they’re paying us handsomely to tilt at these particular windmills.

Yeah true. Being laid off sucks, but let's just say a few friends I had at Twitter are taking a very nice vacation with no rush to start re-applying. Can't be said about most non-tech jobs experiencing layoffs.

> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No.

To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.

I interviewed at doordash, they really pride themselves on being able to optimize when a driver gets to the place to get the order to maximize everyone's time and not have useless waiting. It's NOT an easy problem and they had a huge prediction engine per store/item.

Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.

> Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction?

While I agree with the sentiment, it is worth noting that the 30% helps cover the delivery-person’s cut. Ideally, there should be a fixed cost courier charge, but that’s tangential to the point here.

In general I would agree but the hardest part of any success is getting the word out there.

Especially for double-sided markets like food delivery where you have a chicken and egg problem - why providers sign up when there aren’t users and why would users sign up when there aren’t any providers.

That’s a human problem, not a technical one, and is the expensive bit.

> You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees.

You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”

That is repeatedly said about twitter and reddit

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