How did we get to a place where billions of dollars are exchanged in millions of business transactions but there are no winners? My co-host Can and my restaurant friend both defaulted to the notion “delivery is a shitty margin business” when discussing this post. But I don’t think that’s sufficient here. Delivery can work. Just look at a Domino’s... See more

Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance. Maybe the right model is a wholly-owned supply chain like Domino’s. Maybe it’s some ghost kitchen / delivery platform hybrid. Maybe it’s just small networks of... See more

Grubhub was early to the food delivery game and unlike its VC-backed competitors, it was consistently profitable. That its business model worked should have given Grubhub a leg up, but what it actually meant was that the company was playing a different game from competitors bloated with venture capital and untethered to things like profit and unit... See more