[mabbo]

> There's no "kitchen sharing" where you can sell food straight from your private kitchen, "infirmary sharing" where you can pretend you're a doctor or a hospital room, or "legal office sharing" where you can pretend to be a lawyer without meeting all the requirements imposed on those sectors

I definitely remember someone trying the kitchen one. Forgetting the name of that startup now, but it's been tried.

And given how badly America treats health care and law, I suspect the other two are in stealth mode right now.

[buran77]

I'm sure startups will try anything if they think they can make some money out of it. So do investors. The problem is such an endeavor just has to make more money that you put into it, not necessarily be a sustainable or above board business. They're not disrupting the sector they operate in, they're disrupting the way they can operate outside of the law and be agile enough to not get pinned down by it.

They'll try something, squeeze as much money as they can from wherever they can, see if "the cost of doing business" is low enough that they can even pursue the shady business model as a standard operating procedure, or else at least survive and grow until they can go semi-legit. They will rely on the fact that authorities have inertia so it takes time until someone catches up to their shenanigans, investigates them, comes with a decision, then they can fight for a while, delay the inevitable until they they're cornered, restructure their operations a bit, and the chase starts again. Companies like Uber are still shady businesses that in many countries operated outside the law for more time than they operated within its boundaries. But they gave deep pockets and where there's money, there's a way.

Not that much different from organized crime businesses that start off as being one stop shops for anything regardless of law and regulation, and may eventually be spun out into semi-legitimate businesses with more or less above board practices.

[mtnGoat]

I think it is being tried by the guy that started Uber.

CloudKitchens is the one Kalanick started, there are probably others.

[mabbo]

The one I'm remembering had people "host a dinner" that you had to pay to get into. And somehow that made it not a restaurant, so you didn't need to have a commercial kitchen (hint: this isn't legal).

Kalanick's recruiters reached out to me about CloudKitchens and I straight up said that no, I do not want to work for that guy.

[buran77]

It appears that CloudKitchens explicitly caters (no pun intended) to restaurants and commercial kitchens. So establishments already ostensibly having all the required authorizations according to existing regulation. There's no part that seems to encourage private individuals to start delivering food from their personal kitchen.

Uber for a long time did exactly that. Saying "we're just a tech company" is like ThePirateBay, YouTube, or The Silk Road saying "we just store and transfer blobs of unidentified data between completely anonymous users". You are responsible for what happens on your platform especially if you are encouraging people to break the law by giving them tools explicitly for this and paying them. They could have easily asked "upload evidence of x, y, z which allows you to provide the service in this particular geofenced region".