multi level narketing

Well, when you're in the business of selling a dollar for eighty cents, all the money probably got flushed down the toilet.

Earlier investors. Ever hear of pump and dump? After you sell you’re insulated from future performance as long as you don’t commit actual fraud etc.

The 7.5 billion? To the company that previously owned Grubhub. I believe that's how much Just Eat paid for it.

Where did the valuation go? Doordash and Uber Eats managed to eat them alive.

>Where did all the money go?

all of it, including its future, was valued at $7 billion, but there was never $7 billion in cash. Maybe it was $700 million in cash paid for 10% of it, which would value the whole thing at $7 billion. If that totally-made-up 10% number happens to be the right number, then it hasn't lost much at all overall, but the investor who paid that has to share the sale price with a bunch of other shareholders who paid less. So, this owner lost money, but the firm did not necessarily.

(I'm not saying this is what happened, and maybe a quick google would get us closer to the actual numbers, I'm just saying you have to pay attention to the wording of what is being claimed; media likes to exaggerate.)

what has disappeared is "belief in the future prospects of this company to bring in profits worth $7B" which was why the last investors invested, and why the early investors set up the kitchens and other frameworks to support those hopes. And it's not that the opportunity wasn't a good one, perhaps a competitor "won", or perhaps there are too many competitors trying to share the $7B pie.

This is a winner takes all market. They spend it on becoming the US leader.

Every country has one platform that wins, everyone else loses the billions. There's no second place.

Where it always goes, to the top.

Lowered expectations.

FAANG salaries and freebies.

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I recently saw a new burger joint pop up on Uber Eats with an address not far from my home. It turned out to be the address of the last remaining Ruby Tuesday restaurant in my area, but the burger place did not advertise any connection to Ruby Tuesday. Seemed very sketchy to me.

I suppose these career options have relatively much higher chances of making good money:

1. Become a corporate lawyer, charge by the hour - win or lose, lawyers get paid

2. Run a soulless media company - rake in the ad dollars from both parties (during elections) and other soulless companies spending VC money on advertising (all the time)

3. Be early investor, pump and dump

I think that future loosening of the credit markets due to political factors is also playing a roll. By the time the runway is spent they may expect to be in a very different market so buying scale now is the move.

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Uber Eats in the USA, yes, it's more hands off in terms of gig workers. In the UK and Germany and many other countries though, there have been many court rulings to essentially ban gig-working and enforce employee protections.

I was in Bloomington for college and ordered from ClusterTruck multiple times. I did think the food was notably more fresh than other delivery services.

There are a bunch of "restaurants" in our town that are just different menus serviced at the same ghost/cloud/dark kitchen. The quality is generally not good. I wonder about the quality at Wonder -- the broader the menu, the harder it is for the preparers to get good at it.

Yeah, it's a cloud kitchen with a eating area.

I don't think anyone thinks this is "innovation"... it's just a slightly different take on Uber Eats / Spoonrocket / food courts / cloud kitchens / etc.

And if there is an "innovation", it's the vertical integration... it's a business "innovation," not a tech one.

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Because an enterprising businessperson has no idea how to run a kitchen.

Recipes are in many ways the least important part of what a chef provides. They're not secrets. If there's a "secret ingredient" it's that they're using more butter and salt than you'd use at home.

What a chef provides is a process. They get the ingredients ordered, at the quality level they want for a price they're willing to pay. They ensure that the ingredients show up, in the amounts needed, without waste and without falling short -- and have backup plans. They staff the kitchen, and ensure that they have all prepared their stations before service begins. They train the expediter to ensure that all of the food comes out together, without things waiting under the warmer.

The chef also provides a menu, which is more important than the recipes. It has something for every guest, and every item can be finished before the guest gets impatient.

It's not impossible for a business guy to hire a top-notch executive chef to do that work, but the business guy cannot do it. It requires years in the kitchen to know what factors are important. It requires a deep understanding of the culture of kitchen workers, and how to get the best out of them. It would require an enormous staff to do that properly, and training them extremely well.

You can see this at work at a place like The Cheesecake Factory. It's hardly great food, but it's reliably good. The menu is enormous, on par with a dozen restaurants at once. It can be done. You're just not going to do it Silicon Valley style, learning as you go.

Microsoft cafeterias manage it by just contracting out most of the stations to local restaurants. They provide the trained staff and get a consistent revenue stream in return. They’ve even got a local celebrity chef branded restaurant in the executive building (34) with a 3 course fixed price menu. It’s not a single kitchen per se, but the equivalent is commercial kitchens that are all over the place with multiple clients sharing the space simultaneously. This just adds online ordering and centralized management.

Ahhh a slice line

I mean, they're all like that, adding on 40% to the actual meal total.

Looks like it's "Fred's Meat and Bread" which is different than the Meet & Bread chain in Vancouver, Calgary, and Austin.

Sometimes I miss when delivery meant either Chinese or pizza, and the businesses were specialized in that kind of work. Which meant it didn't cost an arm and a leg, and the whole system was vertically integrated in a way that gave your food a fighting chance of still being hot by the time it arrived.

Also the restaurants got a chance to teach their delivery staff how to properly handle the food. Which meant that the Chinese restaurants, for example, could get away with using oyster pails instead of having to resort to the "maximum packaging waste" option.

Restaurant business is so risky anyhow, managing a co-op too sounds like a big extra load to take on.

I thought the tips go to the delivery person, not the restaurant?

> Both companies are private, so neither has a "market cap"

Private companies have shares. Given a per-share price, you can get a market cap. For a company with debt, like GrubHub, enterprise value is a better metric.

Does that say dupe? Just flagging it properly

In the UK and EU they certainly are.

In they U.S. they are often converted shipping containers or poorly regulated rental kitchens

And there's nothing wrong with that. IHOP has a well equipped kitchen and great cooks. And making a quesadilla isn't exactly rocket science.

Most of the legacy chain restaurants do this. Outback Steakhouse has a chicken tender ghost kitchen, Denny's has a grilled cheese / melt brand, etc

1990s app buzz: discover and distribute music 100,000% more efficiently than brick and mortar!

2020s app buzz: eat food at least as expensive as brick-and-mortar that is no worse in quality!

The point still stands, at least you get table service and hot food if you go into the restaurant

This really seems like exaggeration. Two hours? How many people are we talking about here?

Also, nothing you've mentioned really solves your issues. Even with DoorDash, you'll need to pick a restaurant. And DoorDash doesn't solve the problem of someone changing their mind as they are ordering.

And then you still have to wait for the food to be prepared and delivered. And there's no guarantee on when it will arrive. So it winds up being a wash.

Also, there's a reason places that don't do delivery don't do it. The cost doesn't justify it. Then there's the whole "meet me where I am" attitude. They're the ones with the service you want. You have some obligation to meet them yourself.

And if you don't want to, that's fine. We used to manage all of this well enough before

We used to order lunch for an office of 15 people just fine over the phone. We had a drawer stuffed with local takeout menus. The hardest part was deciding where to order from but that's the same with Doordash.

Ah, but there's the catch. Resturants aren't meeting you there, Grubhub workers are. Resturaunts largely just optimize for takeout, and whether or not your food arrives warm is less of their problem and more of the Grubhub worker's issue. And as delivery drivers quit over low pay and their businesses go bankrupt, I really see no way for restaurants to support this behavior.

Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.

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I just call them, it's not like the phone company takes a cut when you order on the phone.

Local grocery stores have basically been extinct for decades- and realistically that isn't that surprising given they mostly sell commodity products. We don't need to let restaurants suffer the same fate.

What point are you trying to make? Seems like a failure of government to enforce monopolization laws than individual consumers.

no, we don't. if we're not mindless little drones we stopped shopping there a long time ago, don't lump us in with yourself