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I honestly think the original vision was something similar to Amazon: bleed money when they are an online bookstore, make it all back when they swing for the fe

I honestly think the original vision was something similar to Amazon: bleed money when they are an online bookstore, make it all back when they swing for the fences and go for replacing all of retail. Likewise, Uber might lose money as a taxi service, but the idea would be to make it back in self-driving tech that replaces all transportation with 5 lanes of self-driving Ubers zipping about in all directions. The problem is that 2017 seems like a major hiccup in this vision. The original visionary is gone. There's been some issues with self-driving technology. Lyft wasn't a huge problem when they were small and had no self-driving tech, now they are much bigger and have a viable self-driving tech partner in Ford... and so on. It'll be interesting to see if this is actually the case, and, if they are off track enough, how they might change the way they operate.

aetherson 9y ago
That was absolutely not the original vision. The original vision was that they would somehow be a profitable concern as a taxi company despite the total lack of barrier to entry because, um, reasons. That they could create an app that was hard to compete with. In all fairness, it wasn't super clear seven or so years ago that there would be so relatively little innovation in the app after the core business of hailing happened. Then, they would expand into being a logistics company. They used to talk about this all the time. Taxi -> logistics, Uber for things. Uber Eats was supposed to be part of this, and they did a bike courier service in NYC that was supposed to be part of it and several other experiments. Then, when self-driving tech came along, and they were probably thinking like mid-2020's (hardly anyone in 2010-2011 believed that self-driving would go as fast as it did), their vast profitable concern would be well-positioned to get even bigger. That was the original narrative. It wasn't hidden, they talked about it a lot. As little as about two years ago, their redesign was heavily concerned with positioning themselves as a logistics company. But what happened is: 1. They've never been more than razor-thin profitable in certain very favorable markets as a taxi company, and obviously overall are grossly unprofitable as a taxi company. 2. Nobody in the entire world wants their logistics business. The only company who would be even remotely interested in it is Amazon, and Amazon laughed and said, "Nothing about your taxi business makes you well-suited to do logistics, we'll just build our own version kthx." 3. So now they spun up a self-driving car program out of nothing a couple of years ago and have desperately pumped cash into it. Hoping that they can somehow catch up with companies that are both substantially better-resourced than they are and who have multi-year head-starts on them, or, more cynically, that they can play some kind of pixie dust story into an IPO and dump their losses on dumb money.
xorcist 9y ago
It doesn't make sense. If the endgame for Uber is self driving cars they'd have much longer runway if they were a startup doing only that, instead of bleeding money on both ends. They were originally an app company from the time when an app gave you easy access to capital. It's more likely the self driving thing was something they had to do to keep the high valuation as a tech company. It was probably an easy pick since it's something in vogue not too far from their normal business.
- fpisfun 9y ago
  It's also something that would potentially kill their initial business so they had no choice I think but to go into it

aetherson 9y ago

That was absolutely not the original vision. The original vision was that they would somehow be a profitable concern as a taxi company despite the total lack of barrier to entry because, um, reasons. That they could create an app that was hard to compete with. In all fairness, it wasn't super clear seven or so years ago that there would be so relatively little innovation in the app after the core business of hailing happened. Then, they would expand into being a logistics company. They used to talk about this all the time. Taxi -> logistics, Uber for things. Uber Eats was supposed to be part of this, and they did a bike courier service in NYC that was supposed to be part of it and several other experiments. Then, when self-driving tech came along, and they were probably thinking like mid-2020's (hardly anyone in 2010-2011 believed that self-driving would go as fast as it did), their vast profitable concern would be well-positioned to get even bigger. That was the original narrative. It wasn't hidden, they talked about it a lot. As little as about two years ago, their redesign was heavily concerned with positioning themselves as a logistics company. But what happened is: 1. They've never been more than razor-thin profitable in certain very favorable markets as a taxi company, and obviously overall are grossly unprofitable as a taxi company. 2. Nobody in the entire world wants their logistics business. The only company who would be even remotely interested in it is Amazon, and Amazon laughed and said, "Nothing about your taxi business makes you well-suited to do logistics, we'll just build our own version kthx." 3. So now they spun up a self-driving car program out of nothing a couple of years ago and have desperately pumped cash into it. Hoping that they can somehow catch up with companies that are both substantially better-resourced than they are and who have multi-year head-starts on them, or, more cynically, that they can play some kind of pixie dust story into an IPO and dump their losses on dumb money.

xorcist 9y ago

It doesn't make sense. If the endgame for Uber is self driving cars they'd have much longer runway if they were a startup doing only that, instead of bleeding money on both ends. They were originally an app company from the time when an app gave you easy access to capital. It's more likely the self driving thing was something they had to do to keep the high valuation as a tech company. It was probably an easy pick since it's something in vogue not too far from their normal business.

fpisfun 9y ago
It's also something that would potentially kill their initial business so they had no choice I think but to go into it