Square Acquires Food Delivery Service Caviar (YC S11) | Hacker News Reader

Square Acquires Food Delivery Service Caviar (YC S11)

techcrunch.com

79 pointskposehn20 comments

Congrats to the Caviar team! My wife broke her leg two months ago and Caviar was a lifesaver to help us avoid the boredom and monotony of pizza and Chinese food every night.

I used Caviar the other night (just moved to SF - no idea where to eat) and it was fantastic. I left a good review and someone from the company wrote me a very personalized email thanking me.

Pretty neat stuff - but that delivery fee is mighty expensive compared to something like Postmates. Excited to see what Square does with it.

    The difference is most other food-delivery services tap into an already built-in delivery infrastructure.

Is this true? Seems like every modern food delivery company (DoorDash, et al) does this.

Seamless and GrubHub operate like that, they just bring an online interface (and easy management) to the store's pre-existing delivery employees.

In some cases they connect 3rd-party delivery services with the store as well.

AFAIK, Postmates and Caviar are the only two companies going with the two-party model, but employing their own delivery drivers/couriers.

Doordash does too I believe.

There are a lot of others like fluc and non bay-area ones like orderup, favor, WunWun, kanga

Hm, interesting. Hadn't heard of either of these. On the one hand, they're playing a huge uphill battle and would need to employ thousands of couriers if they want to serve just America's major cities. On the other hand, they could completely rewire the food delivery business. I'm not sure it can work. Restaurants can hire minimum wage or below family members or illegals to deliver as an essentially free service. They live off of tips. Caviar would have to charge a significant premium to stay in business.

> Restaurants can hire minimum wage or below family members or illegals to deliver as an essentially free service. They live off of tips.

Do you live in New York? The "free" delivery with tips model is how things work in New York, but i've never seen it elsewhere.

In SF takeout places only rarely offer delivery.

I wonder is it just me or google search for "Caviar" returns their website at the first position, above the Wiki article for actual "caviar"?

For me, the Wiki article comes up first in both my logged in and incognito results.

The trycaviar link comes up first for me.

Incognito: http://i.imgur.com/yvmBMde.png

Incognito can still capture your location which will affect the ranking: http://imgur.com/7O04wwl

2nd result on DDG: https://i.imgur.com/zAnFtDp.png

Is that unusual? Depending on the size of the business, more people could be looking for the company than for Wikipedia information on caviar.

"Depending on the size of the business" is the key thing here. No way it's big enough. But in this case it's just Google's personalised results.

I believe that PageRank works off of an index of all webpages and ranking is primarily based on the number of links to a particular url. It seems likely that given the number of articles released in the last year about the fundraising efforts of the company, compared to the likely small number of webpages that need to link to the wiki page for caviar (lol), it gets ranked higher, accordingly.

However, I suppose if I am to google caviar then maybe case sensitivity should be included in Google's rankings.

Amazing work Jason!

Awesome news for the Caviar team!

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