Hacker News Reader

I genuinely thought that was the baseline assumption in that statement.

Uber only exists because it ignored taxi regulations long enough to be too big to kill, right?

And by the clever move of pitching itself as ride sharing between casual users, don't forget. If they were offering "call a taxi" from the start, the outcome may have been very different. People still say "call an Uber" and not "call a taxi with Uber".

Airbnb did the same thing: Lie that their business was merely about providing a few bucks to people with a spare sofa in their house, rather than what it really was: Enabling setting up illegal hotel businesses.

Didn't Spotify also start by streaming a whole bunch of pirated music?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com