Comment by CodingJeebus
7 hours ago
> To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.
All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.
And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
Your story makes the point that the nonprofit app only worked under new government regulations and could not survive in the free market?
I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
Americans when foreign goverment does literally anything: "no free market"
Americans when their government blasts their companies full of money for random unnecessary defense projects: "so free, much market, wow"
Enforcing laws, like requiring background checks, makes the market MORE free
The nonprofit app worked because the existing players didn't want to do required background checks on drivers and exited the market to make the local government look bad. When that tactic failed, they came back and used some of their VC billions to recapture the market by artificially lowering the price of their services. That's not at all "free market", that's buying your way to a monopoly (or more technically an oligopoly in this case)
It wasn't a free market, it was an anticompetitive market
A ride sharing app is ridiculously easy to create.
Most of the work is in network effects so you have a large pool of drivers willing to work below minimum wage and a large pool of riders interested in paying you a lot more than that.