With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, plus the goods and services at reduced cost through Alfred’s hookups. Alfred won first place in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference last year.

Can I just point out how hilarious it is that a Kelly Girls app won TCD? I mean, we had Kelly do this for us for my grandpa.

In New Mexico.

In '88.

'cuz that's really what we're talking about: wrApping traditional services so that smartphone symbiotes can staff their life. I've got a GrubHub account and an Eat24 account and I use neither of them bloody much because they charge $4 to deliver from restaurants that cost more anyway. The good restaurants around me don't use them for delivery (I think they get a cut?) while the bad restaurants deliver much further than otherwise... but yeah, if you lock yourself into that GrubHub economy it sure is easy to instagram your food when it shows up, I guess.

I dunno. This feels like half of a good article. There aren't a lot of apartment buildings where you can pay $5k/mo for a 1BR. There also aren't a lot of people willing to pay it (never mind "able"). It makes sense when you're single, less sense when you're a couple, and no sense at all once you have a kid... which exposes the entire self-feeding startup ecosystem. Grubhub made $6m on $70m revenue. Eat24 was bought by Yelp, which operates in the red, by the way. They're bringing food to Uber employees, Square employees, Twitter employees... in other words, the whole fever-dream economy is stock investors who somehow think this is a sustainable model.

I knew a bunch of MicroSerfs backintheday. The '99ers were my buds. And they all worked hard and they all flaunted their options and some did okay and some didn't... but one thing they all have in common is they got a life. And when you get a life, you get friends, and you get experiences, and you don't have to use an app to find someone to clean your house when your mother-in-law comes to visit anymore, you ask a buddy and you get a nice toothless lady with a towering work ethic for half the price.