[sperling75]

Sonder's sales channel was and is primarily airbnb itself which could easily turn it off if they determined them to be a threat. So it's a business highly dependent on future competitive partners (see Airbnb plus). Their company was called Flatbook but the service and reviews were so terrible and so full or irate customers who had been scammed that they had to try and erase it from the internet and reimagine themselves as Sonder. You can still find a few places with flatbook review if you search ex. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sonder/@45.5198842,-73.587... . Anyhow miles of bad service, scams, and very serious negative reviews. Since they used Airbnb as the primary sales channel on a grand scale they would just wipe property listings once the reviews were negative and replace with new fresh listings. I do believe they have professionalized their service recently however I am surprised they were trusted with a large investment and shows you the poor judgement of VC. Their product message was cloned rather than originated, they have a history of scam level of service, their revenue channel is largely dependent on competition, not to mention their business is neither innovative nor defensible, the product is not great for cities and community. Really SV at its worst.

[smartbettor]

Might want to mention you work for a competitor before calling it a scam.

https://angel.co/sam-sperling

[ptolts]

I used to work at Flatbook. It was a chaotic time, but never ever a scam.

[neya]

Ethics are super important, especially in this era of scandals and exposés. If they think changing their branding strategy alone without addressing the core issue of trust and honesty would get them far, that $135M will dry up real fast..

[justinjlynn]

If the VCs continue to invest in poorly conceived and doomed ventures then they will lose money and eventually fail once they've lost investor confidence. There's evolutionary pressure at play here. VCs are incentivised to take risky investments with potentially high returns; but there is a limit. In a very real way we're exposed to the outliest out the outliers here in SV. It should eventually get better. However, nobody said that evolution, or capitalism for that matter, was efficient; so it may be quite a long time.

[yayana]

It's true that VCs that invest in utter nonsense will eventually be eliminated, but I think most VCs who never invest in a success invest in enough doomed models that survive until IPO, (often with built-in failures like a model of exploitation that requires obscurity.)

The highs and lows of tech average together well enough to satisfy Wall Street and then have huge profits for some that VCs that find and hold good investments, and more VCs that feed off a constant influx of sucker investors.