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why can't they just stop the burn rate, most drivers won't jump ship and they can have a skeleton crew? or does this prevent them paying back investors?
by jlebrech 9y ago
why can't they just stop the burn rate, most drivers won't jump ship and they can have a skeleton crew? or does this prevent them paying back investors?
- cthulha 9y agoYou'd need to know what the burn rate is composed of: their engineering organisation might be less expensive than the marketing budget in a single major market. If they cut ad spend and raise costs, then their growth story stops and other competitors have a window to move. The go-to reading (at least a few years ago) for handling the difficulties of burn rate at a high-growth company is 'Mastering the Rockefeller Habits' by Verne Harnish, the chapter on cashflow. I think 'The hard thing about hard things' also talks about how this situation can kill your company if you're unlucky or unprepared
- dagw 9y agoBeing a glorified taxi dispatcher probably isn't Uber's idea of a successful endgame. They desperately want to be a big player in the future of autonomous transportation and are clearly willing to bet the success of their taxi dispatching company to do so. Cutting their burn rate to a skeleton crew means giving up on that ambition and spending the rest of their 'life' as a reasonably successful company, with perhaps some modest profits, dispatching taxis via a phone app, and neither they nor their investors seem to want that.