从巴士到眼镜：非科技类初创公司走红硅谷

从巴士到眼镜：非科技类初创公司走红硅谷

在硅谷，越来越多聚焦于传统行业的初创公司受到了风险资本家的青睐。这些非科技类初创公司并不依赖于先进的科技，但却把早已为人所熟知的传统领域玩出了新花样，它们扩展了人们对“初创公司”的定义。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

deluxe豪华的，高级的[də'lʌks]

berth停泊处，卧铺[bɜːθ]

disruptive破坏性的，制造混乱的[dɪs'rʌptɪv]

venture风险，投机['ventʃə(r)]

mattress床垫['mætrəs]

optimize使……完美，使……完善['ɑːptɪmaɪz]

tardiness缓慢['tɑːdinəs]

lounge休闲室，长沙发[laʊndʒ]

differentiating识别，使差异[ˌdɪfə'renʃieɪt]

From buses to glasses: Silicon Valley's love of non-tech start-ups（765 words）

By Leslie Hook

I recently sat down with two bright-eyed entrepreneurs in San Francisco. They had just raised funding for their new start-up, Cabin, from some of the Valley's best-known investors. They had the kind of ambitious faces that light up when discussing “the future of cities” or “self-driving cars”.

So what is their multimillion-dollar start-up idea? It is a bus. This “technology” start-up will operate a deluxe overnight bus with sleeping berths, carrying passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The concept of an overnight bus will be familiar to any gap-year backpacker but is still considered somewhat novel on the West Coast, land of the passenger car and jet plane.

The 400-mile trip between San Francisco and LA has been a source of frustration for many techies. Elon Musk proposed boring an underground tunnel between the two cities, while others are working on a high-speed “hyperloop” system that would move pods of people through low-pressure tubes.

Useful as it may be to travel overnight in comfort at a relatively affordable cost (Cabin says it will charge $115 for the trip), it still begs the question: why are some of the Valley's finest minds trying to operate a bus company? Why is this a venture-backed start-up rather than just a regular company that sells bus tickets?

When I put this to Tom Currier and Gaetano Crupi, Cabin's founders, they point out that there are plenty of other start-ups focused on non-tech areas. “There is a new category of companies that are able to be well capitalised even though they are operating in more traditional industries,” says Crupi. In other words, tech start-ups can be disruptive to non-tech industries.

Some might argue that these start-ups — from mattress makers to eyeglass stores, juice companies to coffee roasters — strain the limits of what it means to be “tech” or a “start-up”. However, venture capital firms have been happy to support the trend. Take Casper, a mattress company that raised more than $100m from investors in May on the premise that it was revolutionising sleep (it sells foam mattresses, which are delivered in boxes). The company targets millennials with its advertising, and throws parties featuring lots of beds. There is also Warby Parker, which sells cheap eyeglasses online and raised more than $200m from investors.

Venture backers even tried to disrupt the grilled-cheese sandwich market, with the funding a few years ago of The Melt, a restaurant chain whose backers included Sequoia. Its founder was legendary entrepreneur Jonathan Kaplan, maker of the Flip video camera. But even he could not innovate the toastie, and was replaced as chief executive last year. (The Melt still has some 19 outlets.)

Part of the reason for the trend is that the role of venture capital in US business has changed dramatically. During the second half of the 20th century, venture funding helped to finance research-heavy tech companies — semiconductor manufacturers, for example. Today, it has become an alternative to bank loans for small, high-risk businesses whose strategy for “disruption” relies on access to cheap capital.

The areas where these businesses can do best are those where the incumbents have been slow to adapt. Take the mattress industry, where bricks-and-mortar stores have a vested interest in preventing people from buying mattresses online. Or the taxi industry in the US, which has been thoroughly disrupted by Uber and Lyft.

The founders of Cabin are hoping they can do the same thing for long-distance travel. Incumbents such as Greyhound have optimised for cost, resulting in a bare-bones service that is not quite enough to lure people away from the comfort of their cars. America's trains, after decades of under-investment, are nearly unusable because of their slowness and tardiness.

Cabin doesn't see itself as a bus company. “The first thing we need to do is have people not think about it as a bus,” Crupi insists. He calls it a “hotel on wheels”, with pressed sheets in its berths, an attendant and a lounge.

The pitch is that once cars and buses start driving themselves, the company will be well placed to offer the hospitality that will become a differentiating factor between competing autonomous transport providers, with passengers choosing their service based on the experience, as they would a hotel.

“Autonomous is going to be commoditised,” says Crupi. “People will pay for the guest experience.”

Autonomous cars and buses are not here yet, and it will be years before they are commonplace. But until then, Silicon Valley workers can try a deluxe version of a technology more than a century old, courtesy of the venture capitalists.