I love food delivery apps. It’s incredibly convenient to have a single consistent app that provides me with so many options in one place. I’m also not blind to the fact that this convenience comes at a huge and invisible cost: it’s being used as a cudgel to literally beat the snot out of my local restaurants, quite possibly resulting in many of the best ones going out of business. The power of this small and apparently harmless gatekeeping effect is one of the most unfortunate aspects of capitalism as practiced by real human beings —- and that inefficiency is precisely why so much VC capital is being invested in capturing the customer interface to various industries, rather than in new productive applications.