Moving the core of its listings from restaurants to logistics (2020)

What changed was the industry, not the way work was handed over

To summarise this as changing direction quickly in a crisis is to miss its core. What changed was the industry, not the way work was handed over. Delete the résumé and the interview, give a short unit of work to someone with no experience, pay the wage that same day — because the business was defined by that process, the closure of the restaurants that supplied 60% of listings did not stop Timee from carrying the same mechanism over to warehouses. Washing dishes and sorting parcels were, from the handoff side, indistinguishable.

A general-purpose design does not, however, create somewhere to go. As Ogawa himself noted, listings were falling in virtually every industry and only logistics was rising: the external condition of warehouses short of hands amid stay-at-home demand was what made the transfer work at all. And the ordinary loss in the year after the shift was wider than the year before it; profitability had to wait until the year to October 2022. What to hold fixed and what to leave variable — that choice of definition set the range of moves available in the middle of the crisis.