Thread

DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why

349 points · 189 comments · vrganj

toomuchtodo · 1790194803 · focus · HN ↗
More evidence Big Tech valuations are driven primarily by worker exploitation. Keep 'em coming.
1. Ekaros · 1790195007 · focus · HN ↗
  It is not like they aren't exploiting businesses either... Looking at Amazon(retail) and almost all SaaS services...
  1. toomuchtodo · 1790195248 · focus · HN ↗
    You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This bite was good, lots more bites to go.
    I realized what most of sibling comments refer to as soon as Mamdani quoted DoorDash's CEO on the "Greedy Algorithm," which I had not heard of before.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
    <a href="https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/FortuneMagazine/status/2084806653472358752
    > “I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
    "Ahh, they're all paperclip maximizers building the torment nexus for valuations and shareholder returns at the cost of everyone else." This is the lens through which I see these enterprises now until proven otherwise. I wish it wasn't so, but we must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be. It's such a shame most of this is turning out to be equal parts capital market grift and worker exploitation in some fashion. The tech and code is just the cover as progress and innovation, "ignore the man behind the curtain."
2. SoftTalker · 1790195290 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. toomuchtodo · 1790195366 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm unwilling to argue with "It is a free choice to be exploited." I understand some will argue for this, and will hold the mental model, I am simply unwilling to entertain it from a time and effort perspective.
    If the business cannot exist without exploitation, the business should not exist. I also understand this is an argument at the political process level at its core. Not much progress to be made in the argument over the US being an economic exploitation engine. Some are for, some are against. We choose, through policy, whether someone must make the choice to be exploited because we give them no other choice. We can make better choices, I argue. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members."
    SoftTalker · 1790195572 · focus · HN ↗
    I recognize that there is a power imbalance in play, but I would rather see activism towards educating would-be DoorDashers that the numbers don't work in their favor, rather than regulating DoorDash out of existence.
    And in some cases, if you just need some money to pay a bill and you have a few hours available, maybe doing a few DoorDash deliveries closes that gap for you, even if it's not a good long term job. But, that can also work as a trap if you're not very deliberate about it.
    [deleted] · 1790195651 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    throwaway27448 · 1790248400 · focus · HN ↗
    I suspect the doordashers are aware they're poor. In fact, I suspect the average doordasher is probably more financially literate as a result. The alternative is homelessness or worse.
    Anyway, doing nothing and blindly hoping for the best didn't work the last thousand times. Why would it work this time?
  2. bob778 · 1790195386 · focus · HN ↗
    They have to do exactly this in Australia and a burger is still $20-22 all up.
  3. Forgeties79 · 1790195451 · focus · HN ↗
    > your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible.
    Tough luck? Businesses aren’t entitled to exist. If it’s a bad model it’s a bad model. We can’t just throw our hands up and ignore bad business practices for that reason. It’s not our job to protect DoorDash’s unsustainable business model that only works if they behave particularly unethically. That is squarely their issue
    SoftTalker · 1790197509 · focus · HN ↗
    You conveniently trimmed what I wrote to argue against a point I didn't make.
  4. ahoy · 1790195563 · focus · HN ↗
    The fact that you think NYC doordash delivery workers are driving is a good indication that you're out of your depth on this topic.
  5. [deleted] · 1790195578 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  6. throwaway27448 · 1790195624 · focus · HN ↗
    The treatlerites strike again. All hail the burger reich!
  7. jmull · 1790195688 · focus · HN ↗
    > nobody is forced to work for DoorDash
    It doesn’t matter who you work for, they still can’t underpay you or pay you late.
  8. tredre3 · 1790195713 · focus · HN ↗
    > your burger and fries would probably cost $40 delivered, making the whole business model infeasible
    Pizza places, chinese food places, many diners, they've all been making deliveries work for decades without inflating the prices to absurd levels. It's almost as if it can be done when you don't have to pay the middle man who has a billion dollar of venture debts.
    It's so wild to see you, someone who seems to be older than gen z, so unaware that the food delivery model existed before delivery apps, and was highly successful without charging delivery charge + service fee + tip + 30% of the food price.
  9. schnevets · 1790196387 · focus · HN ↗
    "Private chauffeur for your burrito" is proving to be too costly. Time for New Yorkers to rise up and side with the BurritoBus™
    Place your order 6 hours in advance and our hyperadvanced algorithm will place your burrito on a hyperefficient route alongside other orders within your neighborhood. Estimated arrival times remain hyperaccurate (15 minute window) and your neighborhood FoodBusser is paid an hourly wage with hyperbenefits.
3. ausbah · 1790195432 · focus · HN ↗
  the common unifying theme of most tech companies over the past 15 years has been rent extraction. whether posing as middlemen who VC’d their way to monopoly power ruining both sides of their target market, or taking a common good without attribution (attention, knowledge) tech hasn’t been much a game changer beyond digitizing something and charging everyone more for it
  1. shadowgovt · 1790196083 · focus · HN ↗
    And they mostly keep getting away with it because digital makes things preposterously more convenient.
    I missed the bus by 1 minute today, putting me in a place to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
    Lyfted to the office in 10 minutes. Cost $10. That $10 was worth 30 minutes of my day.
    krispyfi · 1790197563 · focus · HN ↗
    It's surprising to me that you would need to wait 30 minutes for a bus. Are you in a very rural area? Was it outside of normal commute hours? Or is your city's public transportation network wildly underfunded?
    saturn8601 · 1790198569 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you European or American? To a lot of America, that is considered a good numbers. Its worse in many parts of this vastly large country. The country has chosen to invest heavily in road networks. It appears that you can have one or the other but not both without great expense and reform.
    I like to remind my European friends that this is what the US looks like placed on top of Europe: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/HkRZfKd.png
    Its not a perfect illustration but it drives home the point.
    mfost · 1790203116 · focus · HN ↗
    That surface area map is a seriously bad argument: We are talking about bus lines here. Local transit just requires local lines. This isn't about train lines crossing through the whole country.
    And how come China does a much better job than the US while they have the same surface area? Why aren't you overlapping those two maps?
    shadowgovt · 1790346767 · focus · HN ↗
    In our city, what happened was a demographic shift that the bus network never adapted to. The city had a "hub and spoke" model where the vast bulk of buses went into and out of downtown; it's optimized to get suburbanites to their jobs and back home.
    But as the city transitioned from a manufacturing / industry / banking to a service economy, the jobs spread out. If your primary business need is an office park to answer phones or crunch numbers or move lightweight product, property in the suburbs is cheaper. So now you have a situation where someone lives in the two o'clock suburb and their job is in the three o'clock suburb... And there's no bus from here to there, there's a bus from two o'clock to the center and back out to three.
    ... or they could use a car (carpool or owned), which will cut the travel time by a third.
    Retooling to the modern needs is going to really goose the cost (especially since nobody wants to tear down the current model at the same time; the people who rely on it do rely on it to get to their jobs and back, still; their job isn't heavy industry anymore, but people still work downtown!).
    scun · 1790204029 · focus · HN ↗
    imgur is geoblocked for some of Europe
    shadowgovt · 1790199262 · focus · HN ↗
    Wildly underfunded? I don't think so.
    America underfunded? Yes.
    There are three buses that go from the main depot to my office. They all arrived in a line back to back to back, picked up zero passengers, and went their merry way.
    I watched this happen from one block over, waiting for the stoplight to change so I could cross the street and catch any of them. Unfortunately, since they were all moving in a blob, the next blob was going to be around in 30 minutes instead of the average 10 minutes one might expect from a non-blob arrangement.
    But that part of the story was anecdote. The more relevant part was that in the event of disruption of the infrastructure solution, modern cellular radio and digital technology let us ad hoc book a one-off service solution on the fly, and that is so convenient that the people who facilitate it can get away with some massive wealth extraction as a result.
4. throwaway27448 · 1790195482 · focus · HN ↗
  Of course! that's always what "disruption" referred to.
5. usaar333 · 1790197481 · focus · HN ↗
  Since when did doordash count as big tech?
  1. toomuchtodo · 1790197579 · focus · HN ↗
    They're not FAANG or MANGA, but they're certainly at the top of <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies with 8600 employees and an $82B market cap (as of this comment, ticker DASH). Is "Big Tech" reserved only for the "FAANG MANGA"? If so, my apologies.
    usaar333 · 1790201723 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah that's not big tech. $1 trillion market cap is big tech or 30k+ employees.
    This is upper end of mid sized.
    No yc alum counts as big tech
    jackb4040 · 1790204397 · focus · HN ↗
    Boy I could not disagree more
6. saturn8601 · 1790198157 · focus · HN ↗
  Valuation yes, but if we take a step back, there must be value there. The idea of Uber really provided benefits to many groups. Example: minorities who were discriminated against by regular taxis, declining service level due to Taxi monopolies, etc. (Similar issues that Doordash solved as well.)
  How can we separate the valuation from the real value generated by the tech? Would it be possible to allow Uber/Doordash to go bankrupt and instead a smaller worker owned or nonprofit cooperative take its place, replicate the tech stack and then allow the value to then be maximized to the employees + users with little middleman in between?
  Obviously this idea has lots of issues to be resolved:
  1. How do you you deal with government or other middlemen that wish to insert themselves?
  2. Can we really copy Uber/Doordash or are those engineers/managers/middlemen really providing so much additional differentiating value that justifies the cost and thus the required valuation?
  3. Worker cooperatives seem to move slower than their SV cohorts. For a company selling groceries, or door Windows (as a famous Bernie Sanders example talks about) its not an issue. But in the fast moving world of tech would it eventually kill the cooperative due to the inability to move as fast as the SV competitors?
  I dont know the answers but I do think about it more and more as I traverse the world and see so much poor quality(enshittification) and expense. All of that is stolen value that is extracted from workers + customers to line the pockets of the owner class.

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