(Kidding, and congrats on the child)

I completely agree with you that being the parent to a human child is harder, more work, more stressful, and that the stakes are way higher. I can absolutely understand feeling belittled and upset if someone tries to argue that raising a child is anything like taking care of a pet. It's not.

I don't think that this is the argument that most people who refer to themselves as "pet parents" are trying to make, but certainly some of them might be doing so. I think that that's silly and easily refutable.

However...

This whole thing seems too similar to the religious conservative argument that referring to gay unions as marriages was degrading the sanctity of their own marriages because of a word. That argument has always seemed pretty pathetic to me. The weightiness of a concept isn't diminished when people decide to recycle a word [1]. The sanctity of someone's marriage isn't defined by use of the word marriage. Similarly, the sanctity of human parenthood has nothing to do with how dog owners want to refer to themselves.

Language evolves, and it's usually pointless to fight this process. Sure, ambiguities that are introduced may be annoying, and you may get frustrated that you now have to clarify something when previously you didn't, but there's no reason for you to have the right to dictate how other people decide to see themselves. Trying to fight this with outrage and offense seems to me like shouting at a rain cloud for getting you wet.

If people want to refer to themselves as pet parents because they don't currently have or aren't planning to have children ("No, I'm not a real parent, but I am a pet parent"), leave them be. If they seriously want to make the argument that taking care of a dog is anything like raising a kid for 20 years, shake your head in smug amusement and leave them be. They're obviously wrong, and you know it. Hell, I even know actual parents to human children who also have a dog or two, and who consider themselves both parents and pet parents. They're clearly just trying to be cute rather than equating the two. Enjoy it if you think it's cute, or don't, and then leave them be, because at the end of the day, it doesn't affect you. It'll only affect you if you let yourself get upset by it, and that's just a really poor use of your time and energy.

[1] Obviously a lot more was/is at stake for the LGBTQ community, and I don't mean to belittle actual LGBTQ struggles for equality and acceptance by comparing them to the plight of people who want to be cute by referring to themselves as pet parents (there, I guess even I need to clarify).

If you want to consider yourself a "pet owner" -- that's fine with me. If you'd rather be a "pet parent" -- more power to you.

But to take offense at someone else choosing either one of those for themselves?

Fuck off! What the hell do you care? If it hurts your sensibilities then do it differently yourself, but leave other people alone!

Now, if they had sampled ~20,000 people then sure you can slice and dice like that. But slicing data always increases the risk of sampling bias as would anything that targets 30-39 year olds specifically.

Just because you think walking a dog is trivial doesn't mean that there isn't a huge need for a service like this.

A marketplace that can capture a majority of the marketshare in the US in the dog walking category will be minting money. Some of the back of the envelope calculations posted here easily show this.

Analogies from 1999 are no longer useful and haven't been for some time now. Just because Pets.com didn't succeed in 1999 doesn't mean Pets.com can't succeed today. Timing matters. Some of the early dot coms were just too early. The internet as a whole didn't have enough penetration for those kinds of businesses to work out the economics so early on.

Your perspective seems outdated.

There are around 80 million pet dogs in the United States. Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market -- 8 million dogs in need of walking every day or two or three. Let's say they can take in $5/month in revenue from 10-30 walks (it's probably more than this).

That's almost half a billion in revenue per year.

$600M in VC money is $2/US citizen. If half of households have a dog, that's ~$8/dog-house. If 10% of them want a dog-walker (the biggest "if"), that's ~$80/customer. At $30/walk, $600M in investment doesn't seem entirely crazy.

First, it seems like another instance of very wealthy people in big tech cities living in a bubble. Sure, many people who live in these cities can afford high prices for dog walkers. But that doesn't scale to anywhere beyond these hubs of uber-rich. No-one in middle America, let alone anywhere else outside hyper-wealthy cities, is going to be spending $30/day (I'm talking this number from another comment, I don't know where they got it) to have their dog walked. Assuming that's every weekday, that's at least $600/month. That scales if you ("you" being the founders/investors, not actually you) believe solipsistically that being able to do so is somehow common or even desirable to most people. It's a very yuppie thing to get a dog just to pay someone else to walk it. Even only having a dog walker a fraction of that time would be a huge expense to most people. So it's a service for the already-pampered tech/finance class. Hence, my comparison to the dumpster fire that was Juicero.

Secondly, the investment of $600 million in companies that basically exist to leech off dogwalkers shows me how far some parts of the startup world have veered from "disruptive innovation" towards rent-seeking and middlemanning. Not that this is particularly surprising - I've not particularly enjoyed watching the industry become more cancerous over time. But I guess I still like to think of the industry as if the old idea that startups were going to make the world a better place were true.

Thirdly, even ignoring all that - there seem to be a lot of flaws with the business model. I mean, what's to stop someone just hiring the dogwalker direct after the first time? Why would I trust a complete stranger from a big-brand company to walk my dog, compared to speaking to someone independent? If there's a PR crisis (like, say someone's dog being lost or killed while being walked like in the linked article) that damaged reputation is going to affect every dogwalker under the company umbrella.

I guess overall it seems like $600 million going towards making the world a worse (or more realistically, simply not-better) place.

Now, to answer your actual comments:

> How big of a market do you think staying in a stranger's spare room is? Your answer a few years ago likely wouldn't have been more than $1 billion globally.

It isn't. AirBnB is basically just a independent-contractor villa rental chain now. What % of AirBnB places (or more importantly, AirBnB revenue) are actually people's spare rooms? It seems they've just centralised the market for renting an apartment or house for travel and provided a more visible alternative to staying in a hotel.

> The internet is not yet done transforming how we live and work. The world you live in 10 years from now will look very different. Economic priorities will look different. The way people behave will be different. And it will all happen faster than at any other point in history.

If paying other people to spend time with your dog is the internet revolution we've been working towards, count me out. I thought we were going to be making the world more efficient, scaling up towards closer integration so we could all make smarter decisions and lead better lives. There's some cool stuff going on in that space for sure, but all the money seems to be getting dumped into turning Silicon Valley into assisted living for rich young adults. And that's coming from a rich young adult (though I don't live in one of these cities).

They're only starting in NY and Cali, which I estimated to be about 7 million dogs that needed walking. Additionally, Uber and Lyft combine to do $8 billion in revenue per year, operating at much larger scale with much larger demand and averagr sale price.

So I think $500M a year is optimistic. I would expect this type of startup to do more like $50M a year in revenue with a modest loss, and the users are then sold peripheral pet services.