Tag: startup

Serious Eats

In 2006, when the biggest names on the internet still included MySpace and Geocities, a new site burst onto the scene that promised to be bookmarked by food nerds across cyberspace: Ed Levine — perhaps the ultimate food nerd — and his team of happy-go-lucky writers unleashed Serious Eats, and it was, in many ways, the “food blogger” trope made manifest. It didn’t take long before the site became a one-stop destination for the original deep-dive into In-n-Out’s secret menu; an exhaustive guide to Sri Lankan food on Staten Island; a column in which Levine grappled with dieting for 182 weeks; and 5000 words on perfecting chocolate chip cookies. (I interned, for free, and then freelanced for the website, though I try not to think about how little I was paid.) Now, Levine has released a new memoir and, to celebrate the site’s 12 (frequently cash-strapped) years in business, Grub Street talked to the culinary obsessives who toiled away in the site’s dumpling-strewn content mines during its earliest years.

Google to Grab

As for me, I am personally privileged to be Head of Engineering for Data Insights: Our Ads business, Personalization and Segmentation Platforms, User Data Platform, and all of Grab’s online databases and operational data stores… which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that the Ads engineering department consists of Scott. Heya, Scott. I kid, I kid; there are others but you get the idea; we’re still a startup, and everyone is doing so much with so little. It keeps us from getting complacent. I’ve got teams in Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Singapore and Seattle, and the company has placed so much faith in us that we move heaven and earth to get things done. It’s not easy. Grab definitely isn’t for everyone in the US. In Seattle we’re 16 timezones removed from Singapore, so their mornings are our evenings and we have to sacrifice a lot in order to be effective. Many of us basically live in Singapore time, and we’re often in conference calls until midnight to 2am. But it’s worth it. Being at Grab is a privilege. After meeting Siti I know that more than ever before. What is happening here is a phenomenal, generational, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I am forever grateful and humbled to be a part of this incredible team, helping change the lives of 650 million wonderful people. It’s on us to make it happen.

Brave

Brave will give users a 70% cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style “cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for $, but Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.

Uber Bundles

The biggest payoff, though, comes from effectively bundling opportunities for drivers. The problem for any standalone restaurant delivery app is that the vast majority of orders come at lunch and dinner, but the driver may wish to work at other times of the day as well. With Uber that is easy: just pick up riders (Uber drivers can drive for just Uber, just Uber Eats, or both). In other words, Uber has more and more ways to monopolize a driver’s time, to the driver’s benefit personally and Uber’s benefit competitively.

Procter & Gamble church

Named the fastest-growing church in America in 2015, Crossroads has been described by the Cincinnati Business Courier as both an entrepreneurial church and a church for entrepreneurs. Indeed, it was originally a startup—or more accurately an unofficial spinoff from Procter & Gamble Co., the $65B conglomerate based downtown, a few freeway exits south of the main church. In 1990, Brian Wells, a brand manager for Clearasil, started a singles Bible study with a P&G power couple, Vivienne Lee Bechtold, then a brand manager in beauty care, and Jim Bechtold, a marketing executive. The group, which met at the Bechtolds’ home, quickly grew to more than 100 people. Eventually the singles started marrying and having children, and Jim Bechtold asked Wells 1 morning, while the 2 carpooled to work, whether it made sense to start a church.

Robot delivery

Amazon, which currently charges a $99 annual fee for 2-day deliveries under its “Prime” service, will eventually offer 2-tier pricing for delivery services. One will be a “Gold Prime” membership costing $199 to $249 a year that covers next-day deliveries, the other a platinum membership for $399 a year that includes same-day deliveries.

2019-08-20: Starship Technologies

The company has made over 100K commercial deliveries. The total funding has reached $85M. Parcels, groceries and food are directly delivered from stores, at the time that the customer requests via a mobile app. Once ordered the robots’ entire journey and location can be monitored on a smartphone. Starship delivery bots use machine learning to detect objects and do not use expensive LIDAR. Starship robots mostly drive on sidewalks and cross streets when they need to. This poses a different set of challenges compared to self-driving cars. Traffic on car roads is more structured and predictable.

2021-01-27: 1m now:

Starship reports that while its operation has not been flawless and its robots are always learning, any potential issues with the robot have not resulted in any injuries due to the low speed on the sidewalk. In addition to sidewalks, the robots are also doing 50K street crossings per day.

This might seem mundane, but both sidewalks and bike lanes are a huge opportunity. Even Amazon realized this, and is using both for last km delivery.

Opendoor

There is a deeper reason why I am excited about Opendoor, and it too is related to how the company’s approach differs from Zillow’s and Redfin’s. While Zillow makes it easier to look for new houses, and Redfin promises to save sellers a few bucks, making it trivial to sell a house has the potential to fundamentally impact our economy at a time we desperately need exactly that. Many, including myself, have written about how globalization and technology are upending the job market; one particular challenge is that often new jobs are created in different geographic areas than where job seekers are located.

To that end the potential for Opendoor to dramatically increase liquidity in the housing market by buying direct from sellers is not just a business opportunity, but one with the potential to increase dynamism in the job market. Granted, it will take a long time for Opendoor to move into the towns where this sort of service is most needed, but the idea is very much a move in the right direction.