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There seems to be a general collapse of hypercapitalized things that scaled good ideas way too fast, pretending to learn at a rate consistent with rate of expected returns. Blitzscaling = dumbscaling?
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uber in nyc has become hilariously shitty lately
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Why experiment with a couple of dozen scooters in a handful of neighborhoods in 2 cities when you can experiment with thousands of scooters in half a dozen cities at once because capital is cheap? Overleveraged learning plan. Double down before you win etc.
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An idea that’s at least 10x better than taxis and complementary to public transit now looks half as good and needlessly hostile to public transit
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Yes, and it’s not just learning in the context of those smaller deployments. It’s also the structures that allow effective management of a much larger organization. Intuitively, it feels like things should scale linearly, when in reality it’s a complete difference in kind.
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Most small businesses that grow organically reach a dangerous period where they need whole new processes, logistics, etc. to operate effectively at the new scale. For example, brewing beer as a small micro brewery is different than managing a factory to produce beer at scale.
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Yeah, it (is/was) kind of a problem with the amount of capital available. If you want to try it out and find the right way to do it, you will lose to a competitor that floods the market, does it wrong, then adopts your learnings, but already has a huge footprint.
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Yes, exactly. I was employee #30-ish at Lambda School, I taught there 2018–21. “Double down before you win” / “Overleveraged learning plan” is a good description of why we failed.
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