David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. It's such a good point. And to flash back to the previous era of businesses working really well now but failed previously—look at Instacart, you look at Webvan—aside from there just weren’t enough people on the internet yet, there are definitely weren't people doing this on mobile phones yet. Frankly, the technology stack wasn't sophisticated enough in that Web 1.0-era to facilitate all this real timeliness and keeping everyone in sync at the same time. As we're talking here, David, it hit me that not only of course do you have to split the money one additional way in food delivery because in addition to the Dasher, the person ordering the food, and the company facilitating the transaction, you have the restaurant involved, which is different than ridesharing. Money has to flow out of one pocket then to three others instead of out of one pocket then to two others. There's also an unbelievably operationally complex component here where the timing has to be perfect. You're heating food. There's a very narrow window where you can get there too early or too late. That'll be okay just in the kitchen, let alone rather than having it sit out for a while, than having the right amount of time that it takes the driver to get to a person's house. Everyone's very familiar with thinking through this problem from a consumer perspective but just thinking through the technology infrastructure is really crazy. Yeah. I was talking about this with some friends—in the research for this episode—who are former Uber employees. The thing is Uber, Lyft, and ridesharing, either canonically everybody found, like hey, once you get the wait times down to 5, maybe 10 minutes, that's fine, it's all good. But to your point, with food, it's not all good. The degree of diminishing returns is much, much higher for food delivery because I want it fast but it also needs to be high quality and still good. If it's fast but it's only half-way cooked, I'll never use your service again. The far more forgiving side is it took too long. The food can stay warm-ish under a heat lamp for a while, but I think everybody knows when they've gotten food that's been sitting under a heat lamp for too long.…

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