Here, bike and scooter sharing is a cautionary tale. Both bike and scooter sharing and ultrafast delivery are capital-intensive industries with no customer loyalty, low switching costs, and limited network effects. The unit economics are unproven, and while optically high, growth could be short-lived.

Private companies in the last 5+ years have had every incentive to forgo profitability for a different metric: growth.

The strategy is largely out of the same playbook as other on-demand apps—capture customers, consolidate control over a high-frequency behavior, expand and cross-sell to other higher-margin categories. But their challenges are significant as well, from spoilage rates on grocery to hard-to-predict inventory requirements and building relationships wit... See more

For resilience in the future, restaurants are going to need to master takeout and delivery. The problem is those delivery startups like DoorDash, Grubhub, and Skip the Dishes take up to 25% of a restaurant's revenue. Restaurant profit margins are already razor-thin (3%-5% is normal). It's predatory for venture-backed delivery companies to be taking... See more