Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I agree. I think the biggest reason for that I think is structural—we're talking about a minute ago in terms of vehicle types—the depreciation on ridesharing, on the vehicles is a huge in cost that the laborers bear and of course depending on what vehicle you're driving with for DoorDash, you're probably also incurring depreciation but potentially way less. And a lot of them are leases which are built into the cost of the lease. I think the bigger case is that there's value destruction happening for the world just on the restaurant's side. As much as DoorDash wants to sell a story around how we empower local businesses, I would hate to live in a world where those businesses didn't thrive, and people only bought stuff through us, and we're not the merchant, our merchants are the merchants and we're just the platform. I just don't think that's where this business is really going. I think that's a wolf in sheep's clothing or fox in the henhouse or whatever you want to say, especially now that they have the market cap that they do and they're publicly traded and they have the shareholders that they do. I just don't see a world where what they're actually doing 10 years from now is empowering local businesses. It's interesting. It's funny. I think I would maybe push back on that a little bit in the now in the short term in that yes, there's a lot of sentiment among restaurateurs and often justifiably so that DoorDash and other platforms take way too much of the order, is eating their cost, their restaurant's cost structures are not sustainable, profit margins have went sailing on these platforms, they can't make things work. I think there probably is some truth to that. On the other hand, I think there are also plenty of businesses and restaurants that have figured out how to make it work and it's incredibly additive to them being able to have this new delivery channel that honestly they can't operate this network themselves as we've talked about in the whole episode I think yesterday. I do think that in the future, the point you made is going to become more salient as cloud kitchens, ghost kitchens, and other food-related businesses get built that are going to be more of-scale business as opposed to local restaurants.…

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