this is similar to our experience in commercial properties as well, which removes the emotionally charged aspects of "taking advantage of poor people" - landscaping, interior finishings, painting, etc are all large costs in nice retail properties, and non existent in functional light industrial or trades-oriented buildings, yet rents are generally higher for the later.
Well if you work in any sort of specialized field or at a level beyond entry, you've got some obvious bias in your sample.
If a degree or formal education has been used as a barrier to restrict access for any time only the strongest and most driven of the degree-less are going to persevere and make it.
This reads like a variation on the "many successful products started off looking like toys" post I've seen repeatedly over the years. The problem with this theme is extrapolating that all toy markets/products will grow into sustaining ecosystems.
You can and should consider toy "beachheads" into larger and growing markets, but the idea of targeting a small/limited market is flawed IMO.
The examples presented are successful in what where HUGE markets with limiting factors. No one debated the size of the retail book business when Amazon started, the challenge was how to pay for things over the internet. Ebay provided market-making for individuals to sell stuff - anyone remember classified ads and the buy & sell? That was big business for newspapers.
I feel like there's a lot of selection bias and revisionist history in this post.
"the idea of targeting a small/limited market is flawed IMO."
Why? If the market is not 'interesting', the less likely it is to enter the killzone of the large incumbents. Getting a large share of small market is still real business. A relatively small market does not mean the market could not sustain a business or two...
McDonalds is a great example of this. Minimum wage is headed to $15/hr and they've replaced 80% of the front counter staff with self-order kiosks. Grocery stores can have one person running 4+ self-checkout counters at teh grocery store, and the "gig economy" is just companies skirting minimum wage and benefits via contractors. It's like my childhood paper route for 50 cents an hour all over again...
> McDonald's is planning to replace all the cashiers in their restaurants with robots by the end of 2020
>WHAT'S TRUE
>McDonald's announced plans to install self-order kiosks in eight or nine thousand stores in the next few years.
>WHAT'S FALSE
>McDonald's is not replacing cashiers with "robots," the chain is not eliminating all cashiers, self-serve kiosks are not a response to a proposed higher minimum wage.
You must have grown up on the coast or the island, because I grew up in the interior and they never had trees like that outside of the temperate zones. The majority of the province has logging but it is not giant, old-growth ancients and never was.
That is because almost all of the giant Redwood and Giant Sequoia trees in the Pacific Northwest were destroyed by logging by the start of the 1920s. Darius and Tabitha May Kinsey's Kinsey, Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives is a book of Darius Kinsey's photographs of logging camps in Washington and Oregon in the 19th century. The camps were inland and there are many photographs of the giant trees growing in the mountains. The giant tree forests did not stop at the US border, and BC had the same logging boom in the 19th century. It is disingenuous to claim that new growth coniferous and Boreal forest is the only thing BC has ever had, when most of the BC giant tree forests were destroyed only a few generations ago.
No, the person that you're responding to is correct.
When someone from British Columbia says "interior" they mean anything past the coast mountain range. This is a semi-arid climate that didn't readily support any of BC's large tree species, namely red cedar, douglas fir, and sitka spruce.
It doesn't matter how many pictures from a century ago that you have of big trees inland, or on the west side of the first mountain range. That's not the interior, and isn't relevant.
and please grab your complementary juicero and blood test robot on your way out. Point being... if VCs can't filter these out then why have a filter at all?
>> I'm not sure how the vetting process adds any value
What? The entire point of vetting is to increase the quality of the remaining pool. You can argue how successful they are at doing this, but the intent of the process is pretty clear.
>> The way I see it, the vetting is more or less random.
Don't let YC or anybody else define you, but if you'd got in initially I bet you'd take it as a positive signal data point.
It probably works but the cost (and scalability) can restrict how fast/far it can be applied...