Now imagine you live in one of the other 190 countries of the world who do not or no longer have significant players in the industry because they were crushed by those five foreign companies. It's not competition when the wealth and power is so disproportionately held by the same people in the same places.
China (basically) only has didi. Not much the USA can say here.
Southeast has Grab, and within each country there are at least 2 local competitors (Be, GoJek, Bolt, Line Man, Bluebird, etc). I believe Doordash just bought Deliveroo, making it the only American competitor in SEA.
In Europe, the main players are local food panda / Delivery hero and Just Eat.
India's winning food delivery is Swiggy.
What countries have both the talent to build a food delivery app and the USA is the dominant player?
Every country has the talent, software development isn't some esoteric knowledge. But even if you imagine that only people in developed countries are capable of writing software, there is Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Taiwan for starters.
I don't think it makes sense to focus on the US when three of the five companies in the article are from Germany, Netherlands and China. The problem is not America per se, it's the pattern of large and often (but not always) foreign companies extracting wealth from what used to be hyper-local operations.
> What countries have both the talent to build a food delivery app
It's not about "talent" these are utterly pedestrian apps that anyone mediocre team can fart out in a quick amount of time. It's about capital for massive scale, massive advertising, literal VC-subsidised dumping, takeovers of the competition, etc.
Sure, go to each country and check what food delivery companies operate in them, get a list of companies operating in the market that are not controlled by the big 5 mentioned in the article.
In Europe there were a few companies operating in the sector which were taken over by these global companies. I recall the Glovo takeover by Delivery Hero. You mention Foodpanda but you seem to be unaware this is a brand from Delivery Hero, and Just Eat is a Prosus company too.
> What countries have both the talent to build a food delivery app and the USA is the dominant player?
I'm baffled by your comment. Do you believe only the US has "the talent" to put together a food delivery business? Because even if you ignore the fact that 2 out of the 5 dominant players are not US companies, you need to be way out of touch with the reality of both the technology side and business side.
I work at Grab (and ex-Yelp). I am very familiar with FoodPanda and their owners as they are a direct competitor to my employer. I literally work for one of the non-American "local" food delivery services. But within out region, there are reasons we don't have technology offices in every country we operate in and we have tech offices in countries we don't operate in.
There are also reasons that we continue to exist while our competition pulls out of the region. There are also many reasons why hyper-local delivery services aren't able to compete with global or regional winners: Talent, access to capital, and TAM are big parts of that equation.
If someone that works for a non-american food delivery service provider is out of touch, I wonder what your credentials are that puts you in touch.
Also, in the blog, 2 of the 5 players ARE American (Doordash and Uber). The other 3 are European and Chinese.
As a software engineer in the US, I like that the US sucks up money from the rest of the world, that’s why my dollar goes so far when I travel and why I can retire in a non-reserve-currency country for cheap
Do you not feel as though that's incredibly anti-social? It's a very zero-sum "I'd prefer if things were better for me in direct proportion to how much worse they'll be for '_others_'"
