The founders I know who worked with them before said "They may actually be able to pull this off."

And there it was, right out front on Demo Day.

Wishing them and everyone else the best of luck over the coming months, rounds, and decades

Years ago, I would be amazed at all the cool startups and tools people were building. Now, my reaction is more.. "OK, so what? You build AirBnb for X... so what?"

This is more like your favorite author writing books on a lot more subjects, than just putting out a longer more rambling book.

Imagine if the article broke things down by industry and/or tech category and you could expend just the ones you're most interested in and see 3-5 companies in each group.

I recognize there are different safety concerns for men and women, but I do have a problem with companies like these. At least with safr, their advertised safety benefits for women come down to:

1) App/Tech features that would be beneficial for either gender (like extra monitoring by safr through the phone app, and "thorough" vetting/background checks of drivers).

2) Marketing relies heavily on "It's safer because your driver is a woman." which seems to be part of van go's pitch as well, and as a man i find particularly offensive that i'm being deemed unsafe around children/women simply because i'm a man.

That being said, I'm obviously not the target audience. And I believe it's legal because they don't discriminate against men who apply to be drivers/riders, they simply only target women in their marketing, so the people end up being almost entirely women. I would guess this is what vango will end up doing/saying about the gender split as well.

I doubt VanGo can do that. But they are not big enough to get sued yet. Also as another poster pointed out they cater to women but don't specifically screen out male drivers?

It's probably not legal for them to use sex as a hiring criteria, but it's legal for “all women” to be the outcome if the actual criteria are both facially neutral and sufficiently narrowly linked to job functions. Judging from VanGo’s website, they require 3+ years of childcare experience, with references and clean background check; the childcare experience filter alone, given how female-dominated that field is, is likely to result in an overwhelmingly female potential employer pool, a d their may be further bias in who chooses to apply to VanGo.

Pushing the 85% moms thing (which VanGo does, unlike the all women thing, on their webpage) is potentially problematic ; if they are advertising it, they are likely inclined to favor it, which is illegal (even if it was parents, not “moms").

So my complete seat-of-the-pants, duffer-on-the-bench guess is that they have a CO2 capture process (or use CO2 from a nearby industrial combustion process), use the CO2 in their process to separate gasoline in place of a traditional distillation process, then remove the CO2 from the gasoline by precipitating it as ammonium carbonate, which can be sequestered somehow.

Does the $3/gallon include both?

Kinda like the texting groups friends often have these days. That's market that could potentially use some optimizaiton as texting isn't a great format to communicate with ~5-10 people.

> Straight sexism.

Oddly, while the TC page has the “85% are moms” and the “all of them are women”, VanGo itself has the same “85% are moms” but “all of them are...prescreened with 3+ years childcare experience, reference checked, fingerprinted & clean background check”.

1) Uber - random dude (most likely)

2) Another mom or at least a pre-screened woman

Not many moms will choose the uber for fear of appearing sexist.

If scooters really do become a thing, then this is basically a kind of financing plan for them. They might tweak and pivot to the point wherein the price makes sense.

It's also an option on the 'right' financing model for scooters, as maybe the 'daily/hourly' thing actually doesn't make sense at all, i.e. scooters left all around.

It's possible the daily/hourly scooter businesses may be losing money and so will fall flat.

It's risky but it's a finger in the pie of a big craze, and new trends tend to be where the money is.

So it's not entirely irrational. If scooters become a thing, it will be a big market, room for all sorts of players.

Source: work at an FR startup

The other bento started out trying to make the meals themselves but couldnt make them cheap enough. They were losing money on every one sold. Eventually, if I remember right, they tried to pivot to a service like this that got meals from restaurants, but didnt fair much better. They were doing last mile delivery though if I recall.

[1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/kitchen-confidential-sea...

If they essentially do "MealPal, but delivered," then I could see it working. Noticeable price point difference from other delivery options, but maintaining a range of restaurant meal options for people to choose from.

But yeah, they look like sink or swim based largely on what price they can offer consumers