初创公司帮你忙，总有一款适合你
美国硅谷面向高薪IT人士的创新服务初创公司层出不穷。
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经历了疲惫漫长的一天或者一周之后，我最不想干的就是家务活了。于是乎，家里的脏盘子、脏衣服堆积如山，地板也没清洁。每次发生这种情况，我都会花更多的时间在家里爬上爬下，披着睡衣苦思冥想——其实有这些琢磨的时间，我早就可以动手干家务了——不过我琢磨的是自己到底想做什么：是刷浴缸呢，还是雇人替我干活？ 但凡不想做的事情，无论哪种，几乎都可以在硅谷找到一家初创公司为你代劳。懒得打扫房间？那就试试Exec或者Homejoy公司的服务吧。忙得没空置办食品和日用品？Instacart公司的湾区私人代购团队为你解忧。Hasty公司把健康美味的大餐送到你家里。Prim公司上门取件，洗涤衣物，还打包送回。Medicast能让用户联系可以出诊的大夫。有了Uber、Lyft等流行智能手机应用，大家再也不需要在雨中的街角傻站着招呼出租车了。从表面上看，提供“有求必应”类服务的初创公司每周都在增加。然而，这种商业模式还很简单：企业要做的无非是给客户提供所需的外包服务，迅速完成任务，然后就由此带来的便利收取额外的费用。 很多湾区的上班族的上班时间并不是朝九晚五。玛丽莎•梅耶就是一个典型的例子。入职谷歌（Google）的前五年里，她每周要工作130个小时——平均每天达到了令人难以置信的18.5个小时。科技人才在创业早期要么不给自己开工资，要么只靠少量的一点工资勉强度日。除了这种特殊情况，科技人才的薪资水平大多远远高于美国普通民众。就业网站运营商戴斯控股（Dice Holdings）的数据显示，2012年，科技人才的平均薪水达到了101,278美元。 工作时间长，薪水丰厚，还有湾区俯拾皆是的服务类初创公司催生了一些有趣的应用案例。TaskRabbit无疑是个典型的例子。这家初创公司的业务是筛选自由职业者来完成组装宜家家具、退货等短期散工。这些工作任务本身也很特殊。一名高薪的软件工程师坦言，为了在iPhone 5公开发售的第一天就买到这款新手机，他曾经在TaskRabbit上请人，替他在当地的Apple苹果专卖店外排了几个小时的队。罗伊•巴哈特是IGN娱乐公司的前总裁，同时也是掌管着7,500万美元的Bloomberg Beta风险基金的一把手。他表示，自己在TaskRabbit雇佣了一名司机，载着他整天在各个会场四处奔忙，而他则安心地坐在后座上拨打工作电话。 这两年，我一直在使用Uber，有时是为了工作，有时只是纯粹图个乐子。Uber不仅可以叫车，还可以查询出租车与乘车者之间的精确距离，因此可以说是物超所值。如果一座城市的出租车异常难打，令人恼火，而乘车者又恰好赶着赴约，这时候的Uber就显得尤其重要。（有了Uber X等较新的Uber版本，乘车者还可以“召唤出”公司核准的业余司机，这样就不需要乘坐出租车了。而且实际上，它比传统的出租车还便宜10%。）我还体验过Instacart的服务，这家网店在送达价格公道的货品时附加了一小笔不固定的配送费。这样一来，我就省下了一大笔时间，不需要辛辛苦苦跑到Safeway、Trader Joe's、全食（Whole Foods）、好士多（Costco）等超市去采购了。
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After a long day or week, the last thing I want to do is house chores. So plates and laundry stack up. The floors don't get Swiffered. When that happens, I'll spend more time clambering around, pajama-clad, and deliberating -- time I could have used to actually perform these chores -- wondering which I'd prefer: scrubbing the tub or paying someone to do it for me? Here in Silicon Valley, there's a startup offering to do almost anything. Too lazy to clean the house? Hit up Exec or Homejoy. Too busy for groceries? Instacart's platoon of Bay Area personal shoppers do it for you. Hasty brings healthy, gourmet cooked meals to your door; Primpicks up, does, and drops off laundry; Medicast connects users with doctors who make house calls. And popular smartphone apps like Uber and Lyft mean never having to stand on a rainy street corner hailing a cab ever again. The number of startups in this space of "on-demand" services grows seemingly by the week. Yet the business model remains simple: build a service fulfilling tasks people wish they could outsource, do it swiftly, and charge extra for sheer convenience. Many Bay Area tech employees don't work 9-to-5 schedules. Marissa Mayer, obviously an outlier, worked 130 hours a week during her first five years with Google (GOOG) -- an incredible average of 18.5 hours a day. And with the exception of early-stage startup founders who routinely pay themselves nil or just enough to get by, many of these same techies make significantly more than the average American: $101,278 in 2012, according to career sites provider Dice Holdings. Long days, high salaries and the widespread availability of service startups in the Bay Area make for some interesting use cases. That's certainly the case for TaskRabbit, a startup that screens freelancers to do short-term errands and projects including IKEA furniture assembly or store returns. Tasks also verge on the idiosyncratic. One highly paid software engineer admitted he hired a TaskRabbit to stand in line for hours outside the local Apple (AAPL) store to pick up his iPhone 5 on launch day. Roy Bahat, former IGN Entertainment president and head of the $75 million Bloomberg Beta venture fund, admits he hires a TaskRabbit to drive his car from meeting to meeting all day, while he sits in the passenger seat making work calls. For two years, I've used Uber for work and fun. Being able to summon a car and know exactly how far away it was still makes paying extra worthwhile, especially in a city where cabs can be infuriatingly elusive and I'm rushing to an appointment. (Newer Uber options like Uber X conjure up company-approved citizen drivers in lieu of black cars, but actually charges 10% cheaperthan traditional taxis.) I've also used Instacart, which tacks a small variable delivery fee on top of reasonably priced produce. In that case, it saves me the time-suck of hoofing it among Safeway (SWY), Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and Costco (COST). |
