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From Commune To Sharing Economy Startup
gthuang88 writes: Willy Schlacks grew up in a conservative commune in Missouri without technology like phones or computers. At age 27, he and his brother left and started a construction business. That led to their founding a Web startup called EquipmentShare that helps contractors rent and share construction machinery. The startup went through the Y Combinator program and just raised $2 million from venture capitalists. The Schlacks worldview, coming from a communal society where they never owned property, fits in an interesting way with the digital sharing economy of Uber and Airbnb that's seeping into other industries. But there's one big difference. "I appreciate capitalism," Schlacks says. "I definitely prefer it."
"I appreciate capitalism," Schlacks says. "I definitely prefer it."
He learns what it is like for the millions of others.
When you're on top. Let's see how you feel once the patent trolls come after you.
As nice as communism sounds, there's an inherent problem with rentals.
Anyone who's been a landlord knows that people don't take care stuff they don't own. Rental cars are abused, apartments are damaged and left uncleaned, taxis are smelly, public toilets are filthy and broken down.
I can't think of any rental system off the top that consistently presents clean and well-maintained equipment without enormous amounts of time and effort.
There's a thing in economics called "unequal knowledge" which explains why used cars have little value. The seller knows whether the vehicle is robust, but the buyer has no realistic way to tell. You can't tell whether the transmission needs replacing or the engine oil was ever changed or if other expensive repairs are needed. Because the buyer can't verify whether the vehicle is good, he will only pay "average" price. Because buyers will only pay average price, sellers won't sell vehicles which have above-average value. This in turn drives down the average price and eventually the expectation drops to zero.
Rentals are the same. You can never know whether someone damaged the rental until it's too late, and renters have no incentive to tell.
Construction equipment costs upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't see someone renting out a bulldozer and taking a chance that the renter didn't run it without oil for a weekend.
But there's one big difference. "I appreciate capitalism," Schlacks says. "I definitely prefer it."
Of course you do, capitalism appeals to basic human nature, communal sharing does not.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
However Corporatism has eaten capitalism because in capitalism there is no such thing as "Too Big To Fail".
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
dirtpile.com
they failed big time
but hey capitalism is all about cutting yourself fat paychecks until the startup cash runs out
I wish more people lived in them and not for the reason some might think.
See, people have very unrealistic notions of communism and communal living. You don't appreciate property rights, the free market, etc until it is gone. Look at eastern europe and generally you see populations that are more fanatically anti communist than pretty much any societies on earth including the US. And that is because they lived through it.
And no, I'm not saying that all communist systems must be oppressive autocratic regimes that trample on people's rights. However, I am saying that there are a lot of aspects of that sort of system that are no advertised on the box and you don't really understand what you're buying into until you've lived in it for awhile.
Which is why I think communes are fantastic because they give people a good first hand practical knowledge of how that system works without forcing people that don't want to live in it to join or giving said systems authority over people in a non-consensual way.
I also think the kibbutz system is quite excellent and I really think we should try them out as an alternative to the current urban welfare systems. That is, rather than just give people EBT cards and government housing, you instead plop them in an urban commune. The concept would be that they'd self organize, have some productive businesses that they collectively ran, and generally look after each other in a supportive and helpful environment. Look at the gangs... THAT is the community self organizing to the extent it is able under those conditions. You have young men standing up saying they want to be part of something, that they want respect in their community, that they want some agency in the community... and how can they possibly get that besides going to the gangs? Sure, they could study in school and run for city council or something but that is very much divorced from the culture of those communities. And while you'll point out that the gangs are often seen in a negative light, they are respected, they do generally look after their own members, and they do give their members a sense of purpose in life.
So the kibbutz system or some other commune system should be tried as an alternative. And you could even subsidize them to some extent with government funds. It can't be more expensive than the EBT, welfare, medicaid, etc costs.
I am an arch capitalist radical libertarian. That is where I stand. However, above all I believe in people being able to choose how they want to live. And it seems like a lot of people want to live a more communistic life style and I'm going to practice what I preach by saying that if that is what people want... they should get it. I would say they should be limited to what they can obtain through consent. That is, you shouldn't be able to force people to join, keep people from leaving, or otherwise force people to do things. However, so long as you can get people to consent to your commune, I'm perfectly happy with it.
Something I'd like to try for example would be giving labor unions abandoned factories. The "rust belt" is littered with abandoned industrial infrastructure and dying unemployed factory labor unions that are increasingly on federal welfare. Well, what if we took some of that welfare money and just bought the factories and then gave them to the labor unions? Doubtless they'd need to renovate and buy new equipment etc... but we could raise the money for that rather easily if it were understood that in the process we'd be taking thousands of people off the welfare rolls.
As funny thing about Marxists is that they don't seem to understand what Marx was all about. He was about german, hard working, factory workers owning the "means of production"... the factories. He didn't envision pseudo intellectual never employed hipsters demanding government cheese so they could spend all day posting mean tweats. And he didn't envision generations of welfare families basically raising their children on the government dole to live on the government
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And, to use a quaint old phrase, 'there is more than one way to do it'. In fact in the US there are three general categories of corporations; non-profit, mutual benefit, and for profits. Mutual benefit corporations are organizations such as co-ops and credit unions, owned, and run for the benefit of their members. But within each of those categories exactly how you organize the corporation pretty free form. The corporation does not have to be public and can be employee owned.
For profit corporations with centralized control and central planning was dominant only for about the last 150 years. And now the pendulum is starting to shift away thanks to better communications. I predict more employee owned and private corporations in the future as people realize how dysfunctional public corporations get. For example there was Google 'do no evil' mantra. It went out the window shortly after the IPO. If you want to destroy a good company, turn it into a publicly traded company.
Oh, and you do not have to be publicly traded to sell stock. You can sell partial ownership and even bonds directly to others; e.g. employees or customers; without having to be publicly traded.
Once again, there is more than one way to do it. I just depends on you goals and your social structure.
How do I know this? I have freelanced and looked at various business structures. Reading the model corporation laws and investigating various businesses I was interested in has been enlightening. If I go back to freelancing I'll probably use an LLC.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Your argument is true quite often, but not always. But still, it is why this Airbnb failure happened, and why it will again and again: Specifically Damages could hit $150,000 in Calgary home trashed by Airbnb renters
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I guess it's worked well on you
Humans share because our DNA has programmed us to share, just like it programs other animals to share
Do animals share food because they "expect a return"??? How bizarre. They share because it is in their genetic programming.
We invented the concepts of "return" and "wealth" as ways of rationalizing our impulses to share
equipment in your possession means you pay for maintenance and insurance and storage you provide the skilled operator
far better to simply contract the service of earth moving to professionals
AirBnB and Uber aren't capitalist?
capitalism appeals to basic human nature,
"basic human nature" evolved to its present state without capitalism
capitalism appeals to the powerful who want more power
"basic human nature" wants human DNA to sustain and survive, all else is programming and brainwashing
communism works great for every living species except human beings
all other life manages to figure out how to feed their young and build their future without relying on currency
but humans starve to death en masse when they fail to maintain the illusion of "value" in their currency
humans are pretty stupid and frail, aren't they?
you have passed the Phoenix University course in business administration. please forward your tuition and we will send along the next lesson on how to manage a lemonade stand
This EXACT business model was attempted by dirtpile.com 20 years ago
Any patents on this sort of thing have expired long ago
It's a CRAPPY business model, that's what to be afraid of. People don't want to rent equipment, they want to pay for the service that the equipment provides. Joe the scumbag real estate developer doesn't want to rent a bulldozer to level his lot, he wants to contract with an earth moving company to get the dirt moved. He doesn't want to hire a grunt to drive the bulldozer. He doesn't want to deal with topping off the oil and the hydraulic fluid. He wants a flat piece of land so he can call in the next set of contractors to build houses made out of ticky-tacky.
I could have sworn that the collapse and utter disaster of communist countries proved this. If you have no reason to learn things then get a good job and work hard, you're not going to. People are lazy as hell. If everyone's even and shares everything, nobody tries and your country sucks.
Seriously. You are so incredibly stupid I'm not even going to waste the time picking your post apart.
You know why Denmark is considered on of the happiest places in the world? Because it's looked down on culturally when you don't say your happy.
Tell us more about how these people are happy because they are oppressed into saying they are happy! I don't know about you but I would be unhappy if I were forced to be happy. But of course this is all BULLSHIT
The real reason the danes are happy is because they have good genes:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2696136/Why-people-Denmark-happy-Study-claims-Danish-DNA-king-pursuit-happiness.html
you can pretend that they have brainwashed each other into happiness but that is probably a result of your brainwashing
responses like yours prove my point, the brainwashing of today's society prevents you from seeing the most basic of truths,
the human species is fundamentally doomed unless it can figure out that its own survival is the most important thing,
every other species thinks this way, but not humans
your anonymity provides great cover for your inability to articulate,
Wow, I'm shocked!
The concept of private property appears to be something quite important to human society. I went to a lecture many years ago (will try to find the guy's name) by a person who was implementing market based irrigation solutions in Africa. Basically he had visited a bunch of World Vision type projects where they would fly in and dig a water bore and setup a community pump. He said everyone would celebrate and think they were doing a wonderful thing, but in a year or two they would go back to the village and find the pump broken. When they inquired as to why nobody had bothered to fix it, each person would say it wasn't their responsibility, or blame someone else for breaking it.
What he had come up with is the idea of selling small irrigation pumps to individual small block farmers. He had calculated that the pumps would increase the crop yields in a way that the cost of the pump would be paid back quite quickly, and still be affordable to an African farmer. This he thought was much more successful with people understanding the value of the property and taking care of it better.
Personally I don't think capitalism is evil. On the contrary, I think it allows the most freedom of expression of human nature. And there-in lies the problem - people are inherently a bit nasty, and capitalism does little to prevent the expression of that. In a way communism is similar (i.e. it could work if humans were nice) but I seriously doubt Marx was right that it would form naturally, and Lenin's idea of forcing it upon people just ended in the same sort of power hungry dictatorships you get from most other suppression based political systems. In other words, I don't think capitalism has lots of problems because of the system, I think it has lots of problems because of the nature of people. Now whether it is better to modify the system to attempt to suppress the worst parts of people's nature, or whether we should instead appeal to people's morality and sense of community, I haven't figure out yet. I would favour the latter, but I don't know if that is even possible any more in our highly individualistic western societies.
that the target demographic isn't harry home owner, its other contractors, probably smaller 1 truck operations, who have the skills to run the equipment themselves, but not the umpteen thousands of dollars to buy each piece? this would be a form of contractor share, in order to save money against say, renting from United Rental or Hertz equip. Joe the plumber isn't going to hire an "earth moving" company when he can rent a trencher and do that himself for far less than paying another contractor to cut into his bottom line.
How is Uber considered sharing?
GP didn't say Danes are happy.
He said Danes claim to be happy because it's a social stigma for them to say otherwise.
I've rented a couple of different apartments over the years; always paid the rent on time and kept the place clean and in good repair. My ex-landlords have been happy to give me a good reference - which meant I never had trouble renting somewhere else when I needed to. I also rent cars a few times a years, the customer service rep knows me and gives me the nicest car available.
If you rent to any John Q. Public you will have problems, and if a renter abuses the property he or she will have problems renting again. The business has to benefit both parties.
These guys think they invented the equipment rental business in 2010?
Seriously, contractors have been renting and trading equipment since, forever.
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