dordal

I thought the article had some reasonable points, but in some ways felt like a hit piece on JS. The way that Collin et. al. did the research, including via this FT thread, sort of lends some credence toward that. The thing that I don't think the authors did a good job of explaining is that almost all startups go through business model changes, and JS is no exception. Anybody who has enough money to join is (hopefully) business savvy enough to know that they're losing money on the current model, so it either changes or they go out of business. For the most part, changes happen when you renew (e.g. helicopters) and sometimes not even then ( e.g. old smart members aren't being forced to pay for > 3hr shuttles when they renew ). Occasionally, changes happen mid-stream; e.g. food no longer being free.

I'm surprised by the $28K number, although per the article it supposedly came from JS. I suspect they're playing with statistics here, using average and not median. I've heard rumors of $500K charters, so if you add a few of those in and take the average, it could be $28K, while the median is probably less than $10K. That means the revenue number ( $232M ) is probably right, but it misrepresents what the 'typical' user is paying per year.

JS isn't helping itself with stuff like the non-disparagement clause, which they should just remove. The good news is that while they have that in the TOC, to my knowledge they've never used it on anyone. The guys the article cites that were kicked off were doing dumb sh*t that nobody wants to hear about, like talking about their latest female exploits.