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I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
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Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
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For some reason I have always liked talking to taxi drivers about their business. Maybe it’s because my dad was a NYC taxi driver back in the 70s, or maybe it’s because driving a taxi is such a classic immigrant path to building a life here. And it’s certainly because of the amount of tech and business model innovation in the transportation space.
Last night I took an Uber home from the airport, and was talking to the driver about his experience with it. He loves Uber — in the past 2 years, he switched from being a Boston city cab driver to being an Uber driver — and in the process traded $4000 / month in cab lease fees (what you pay a garage as a base rate to drive the cab — regardless of how much you earn) for a $700 / month car payment and $400 / month in insurance. And he gets to have a vastly improved quality of work (managing his own business & time, driving in a nicer car, etc).
Of course there are tradeoffs — if the Uber business slows down, he’s still on the hook for that car payment. And it’s possible that the number of Uber drivers will continue to increase (unconstrained by medallion restrictions, which in NYC cap taxis at 13,000), increasing competition and bringing down his margins.
But overall, he said that Uber changed his life (for the better). Not everyone feels this way, but it’s one story.
Anyway, the most interesting thing he said was not about the business, but the impact on neighborhoods. He said that Uber has radically increased the taxi / car service business in the city’s tough neighborhoods. This comes across as sounding counter-intuitive since most tech-driven transportation platforms (like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar — but especially Uber) are derided as “
For some reason I have always liked talking to taxi drivers about their business. Maybe it’s because my dad was a NYC taxi driver back in the 70s, or maybe it’s because driving a taxi is such a classic immigrant path to building a life here. And it’s certainly because of the amount of tech and business model innovation in the transportation space.
Last night I took an Uber home from the airport, and was talking to the driver about his experience with it. He loves Uber — in the past 2 years, he switched from being a Boston city cab driver to being an Uber driver — and in the process traded $4000 / month in cab lease fees (what you pay a garage as a base rate to drive the cab — regardless of how much you earn) for a $700 / month car payment and $400 / month in insurance. And he gets to have a vastly improved quality of work (managing his own business & time, driving in a nicer car, etc).
Of course there are tradeoffs — if the Uber business slows down, he’s still on the hook for that car payment. And it’s possible that the number of Uber drivers will continue to increase (unconstrained by medallion restrictions, which in NYC cap taxis at 13,000), increasing competition and bringing down his margins.
But overall, he said that Uber changed his life (for the better). Not everyone feels this way, but it’s one story.
Anyway, the most interesting thing he said was not about the business, but the impact on neighborhoods. He said that Uber has radically increased the taxi / car service business in the city’s tough neighborhoods. This comes across as sounding counter-intuitive since most tech-driven transportation platforms (like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar — but especially Uber) are derided as “
Subscribe to The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
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So whereas a traditional taxi would hesitate to pick up fares in tough parts of town, because you never know who’s going to get in, Uber drivers can do this with much more confidence, since there is personal identity (and therefore accountability) built into the system.
This makes perfect sense in theory, and I’d be really interested to explore data that could test this out. Especially as NYC gears up to offer mobile payments in traditional taxis.
This is a perfect example of Regulation 2.0 — using real-time / mobile accessible data to build trust and safety into a networked system. And it points out the limitations of “1.0” regulation schemes (in this case taxi licensing), that don’t have access to such data and can hence only solve for part of the problem (in this case, protecting passengers from bad drivers). And it’s a really great example of some of the unexpected benefits of allowing new, networked models to emerge.
So whereas a traditional taxi would hesitate to pick up fares in tough parts of town, because you never know who’s going to get in, Uber drivers can do this with much more confidence, since there is personal identity (and therefore accountability) built into the system.
This makes perfect sense in theory, and I’d be really interested to explore data that could test this out. Especially as NYC gears up to offer mobile payments in traditional taxis.
This is a perfect example of Regulation 2.0 — using real-time / mobile accessible data to build trust and safety into a networked system. And it points out the limitations of “1.0” regulation schemes (in this case taxi licensing), that don’t have access to such data and can hence only solve for part of the problem (in this case, protecting passengers from bad drivers). And it’s a really great example of some of the unexpected benefits of allowing new, networked models to emerge.
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