Some of the most successful YC companies are: Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Gusto, Reddit, and Gitlab.
I guess DoorDash and Instacart are accused of participating in the exploitative gig economy. Airbnb is accused of circumventing hotel laws (is that exploitation?)
The other 7 on my list are pretty okay though, right?
There's always ways of looking at things negatively:
Stripe = Eat the gift economy and replace it with monetized capitalism.
Cruise = Mass unemployment for truckdrivers, plus inevitable computer-controlled accidents.
DropBox = Oh noes, your files belong to a company and you don't have physical possession of them anymore.
Gusto = [...I'm having a hard time here, people still need to get paid and ADP sucks.] Maybe "encouraging people to start businesses who would be better off in stable employment".
Gitlab = Think of all the potential copyright infringement!
The question is - which negative things do you want to believe? And how do they compare to the positive things the company does? It takes a minimum amount of effort to dream up something bad about a company's core value proposition, but that's not the whole company, unless you put blinders on.
Most of the people I know here (in Iran, no AirBnB clone yet) rent personal houses when they travel. Some people (including myself) have enough money (and an aversion to risk) that we prefer hotels, but the vast majority don’t need what extra hotels offer and don’t want to pay for them. The extra expenses (here at least) are not explained by taxes (similar hotel offerings are around 5x the price).
I guess DoorDash and Instacart are accused of participating in the exploitative gig economy. Airbnb is accused of circumventing hotel laws (is that exploitation?)
The other 7 on my list are pretty okay though, right?