Guys, InstantCab founder here. We did really get a cease and desist from the SFO airport. In the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, we re-imagined how the letter would look if they wrote it as it would befit public officials in the most innovative place on earth. And (of course) we put up the actual C&D on rapgenius: http://rapgenius.com/The-bureaucrats-cease-and-desist-instan...
Amusing post. The links on the left side of your page seem to overlap the text, not sure if that's intentional. http://imgur.com/Kg4rCpI on Mountain Lion + Chrome.
I like InstantCab and I really do hope that sanity will come to bear around community ride-sharing, but at this point isn't it disingenuous to be surprised that their are repercussions from ignoring the rules around the highly-regulated driving-other-people-around industry?
If I'm in charge of SFO operations, InstantCab is at least the third entity to enable third parties to engage in unregulated cash-for-ride transactions, and is doing so without asking me how best to go about it. At this point, I would be much more annoyed than curious (fool me once, etc)
For the founders:
Do you believe the burden of mediation here lies with SFO (status quo) or with you (new entrant)?
Have you at any point before receiving this communication contacted SFO regarding what you were doing with the community drivers at the airport?
Do you think it's fair to your non-community taxi drivers that you're cannibalizing a market that they have to pay regulatory fees to participate in (the right to pick up at SFO)?
The underlying issue is that too many people who are setting out to "disrupt" an industry come off as arrogant when faced with _any_ resistance to their fantastic new business model. IMO, interacting with people who are skeptical of your new ideas and winning them over is a critical (and underrated) skill amongst engineers/technologists/etc
As I mentioned in my previous comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476668) I think regulators have a necessary job to do, and it's perfectly ok for regulators to ask us to come to the table. We are happy to.
Indeed we have met with and had detailed discussions with SFO (and other regulators).
I don't see how re-imagining the letter we got from SFO as one written with a positive tone and poking some fun at cease and desist letters in general, on April 1st no less, is arrogant.
Except they didn't ask you to come to the table. They told you to stop doing potentially illegal things. In my mind, it is correct for the burden to be on the business to comply and advocate, not break regulations first and ask for new ones later.
I totally see how "re-imagining" an official letter to can be construed as arrogant. It makes it seem like you think the rules doen't apply to you. That's the impression I got when reading your post. When authority tells you to stop, deflecting the response into humor doesn't seem very mature. I remember being a kid and making fun of my dad who was getting angry at something I did, but it only happened once due to the consequences.
FWIW, I also support peer-to-peer driving arrangements, and more transparent access to regulated markets, but I also don't think kicking the hornet's nest and laughing about it will work.
Is anyone aware of cases where the government - whether local, state or federal - has reached out positively to a small company in violation of laws or statutes? The 'Progress & Persist' notice should actually be a thing, especially in a city with as much innovation as San Francisco.
I would also be curious to find out which areas of the world have governmental bodies that actively try to seek and promote innovation.
A small business bought $200,000 of Segways for tourists to ride around the local lake. The road authorities discovered Segways were classed as vehicles but could not meet the roadworthy requirements so the use had to be banned. The government granted an exemption to the road laws allowing such a use of Segways only in tourist areas (where there are no blind intersections) and only at low speeds http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-11/canberra-segway-ban-li...http://www.legislation.act.gov.au/es/db_45369/default.asp
Generally governments are more apt to seek and promote innovation within the law. There is, in fact, more to innovation than violating municipal etc. codes.
The law, almost by definition, cannot be written to foresee all innovation. So it is a given that by definition many, if not most, innovations will fall outside laws. This is why laws have to be rewritten.
Historically, the process has often worked like this:
- Innovation violates existing law because the law couldn't foresee it.
- Authorities send cease and desist notice to innovators
- Negotiations, public outcry etc result in compromise
If the final goal is compromise, why not start with a positive outlook?
By the way this applies to startups as much as regulators. A lot of startups take the attitude that regulators are evil, corrupt and should be completely ignored. At least one startup in our industry currently comes to mind.
I (and we at InstantCab) disagree with this outlook. Obviously regulators have a job to do, and generally it is for good reason. Disagreements are bound to happen, but discussion should happen in an agreeable fashion.
"The law, almost by definition, cannot be written to foresee all innovation. So it is a given that by definition many, if not most, innovations will fall outside laws."
That very much fails to be the case. Suppose for instance we had a law that said "no new way of doing X is legal." That law would, in fact, foresee (not de re, but de dicto) all innovation in the realm of doing X, and it would exclude it from the law---that would actually be its intention! That might be a bad or stupid law, but that's not the point; no innovation in the realm of doing X falls outside it. You presumably mean that something falls outside the law in the sense of falling outside what's legal, which is very different, because something can only be illegal if it's within the scope of the law. (My choice of rye bread over whole wheat falls outside the law; the law is silent on it.) It's of course also possible that something very new comes along and it's just unclear* where it stands vis-a-vis the old laws, in which case, sure, the laws don't foresee that (unless some innovative (!) legal argument is brought to bear to show how the new phenomenon falls under the old laws after all).
* (this is actually material for support for the claim that many innovations fall outside the law, though not support that's very helpful to you. My innovations in the preparation of toast, for instance, are likely to fall outside the law, as beneath the law's notice. My innovations in murdering my enemies may also fall outside the law as such, that is, it may not be a legal matter that I killed them precisely this way.)
It also, of course, isn't the case that---as often seems to be assumed on HN---the innovative is the good. (Trivia: when Catullus in the first Catilinarian says that someone was a revolutionary, he describes that person as "novis rebus studentem"---pursuing "new things". Not every revolution is a positive one.) Thus the final goal may well not be compromise, and a good thing, too. Nor is it obvious that if the final goal is compromise or something like it---and compromise, in itself, is an exceptionally stupid thing to have as a goal, just about as stupid as having novelty, in itself, as one's goal---the onus is on the government to move first. Why doesn't the company in question start by making overtures to the government, you know, making a positive first step, instead of starting off by transgressing the law? A friend's summary of Tom Slee's complaint about Über et al. seems apt: "He's a social democrat; I suspect when he looks at these companies, he sees a bunch of venture capitalists deciding that they're going to unilaterally reshape the licensure frameworks that dozens of separate localities have democratically enacted over decades of contestation, and that seems a clear affront to a number of (legitimate) values." If you're going to speak the language of compromise, i.e., deny that you're after a unilateral reshaping, then why do you start off with a transgression designed to accustom people to your service before you've cleared it with the relevant authorities?
Anyway, and this is really to the parent of my comment above: the government sponsors an incredible amount of innovation. The National Science Foundation, for instance, gives out a lot of money to scientists; I'm sure not all of the work is ground-breakingly transformative, but that's the nature of the beast. The NEH, the CDC, the NIH, all public universities, the NEA, lots of non-national governmental grant-making or study-sponsoring agencies---all of these things support innovation of one sort or another.
Whether what they support is as innovative and rad-i-kool as yet another unlicensed car service, I admit I don't know.
We agree. At the end of the day, the SFO (and all regulatory authorities) have a valid job to do. It is reasonable for them to ask us to come to the table. But doing so in a positive way would be so much better. If it is possible anywhere, it is possible in the valley!
The only real progress and persist notice I recall reading about -- and perhaps it even was on HN -- was when a private company's trademark lawyers sent a note saying, in response to a fairly cutting parody, "You aren't allowed to use our trademark without permission -- so we hereby grant you permission."
At least, that was the general idea. Obviously, I've forgotten the details. Included was some self-congratulation about a company-wide sense of humor.
