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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

Yelp is a "pure play" company that does not involve a real physical component. So are AirBnB and Uber/Lyft: they merely annotate the psychical world. Delivery and shipping is a whole another matter.

What I found interesting is how Sequoia degenerated from funding AMD/silicon to funding food delivery and calling it "tech".

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One could argue that Yelp, AirBnB and Uber all fall into the "marketplace" category of defensibility rationale. At first glance, this doesn't seem (to me) to apply to delivery, as restaurants can always opt-out and build their own delivery operation. This is also a significant source of cost for them, so unlike Uber, where users might be willing to pay a few dollars more for a slick experience, they will likely try to skimp on costs.

Doordash brings delivery + demand (beyond technical chops). That's a lot for a small local restaurant.

Uber wants to expand into logistics.

"The new service [UberRUSH] signals the company's expansion beyond local transportation and into the much larger world of urban logistics. And it's a savvy play for several reasons: The same back-end technology that Uber has built to track drivers and connect them to riders can easily be used to order and follow deliveries."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/08/w...

Sequoia, like all VCs, is funding startups, and startups are defined by growth.

If these guys are growing at such a speed that they are selling $10M worth of food in 10 months, they are growing freaking fast.

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