Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Five Bananas Won’t Pay the Rent

Bilt

A helpful rule of thumb is: “You always find product market fit when your product is giving away money.” We talked last month about “the MoviePass economy,” the glorious period in the 2010s when venture capitalists subsidized money-losing consumer businesses so they could grow as fast as possible. The theory was that if a company — Uber or WeWork or even MoviePass — could sell its product below cost, a lot of people would use it and it would quickly become popular. And then one of four things would happen:

1. The company’s costs would go down, because of economies ...