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As Uber Prepares to Go Public, Its Lead Lawyer Races to Clean It Up
- keyle 8y agoI have this pet theory that every company that becomes publicly traded on financial markets becomes "evil" because the focus is taken away from customers, and towards keeping shareholders happy. Let's hope I'm not proved wrong, again.
- tyingq 8y agoThey've already done some pretty shady stuff. This is a case where going public might actually work the other direction.
- adharmad 8y agoGoing public, they can get better at respecting local laws and regulations, and still sacrifice their customers (and of course employees) at the altar of their shareholders. (At least that is what I read the Op is saying).
- bunderbunder 8y agoUber already has a pretty strong track record of doing poorly by its emplo-- er, sorry, "independent contractors."
- fosk 8y agoI keep hearing this argument, but well guess what? Nobody is forcing anybody to become an Uber driver. If Uber treats their contractors so poorly, they are always free to go around and explore other options. We live in a capitalistic society, after all.
- tyingq 8y agoOne argument is that it may not be actually legal to treat them as contractors. See https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contractor-designation https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...
- fosk 8y agoThe point I am making is that no driver would ever want to work for Uber if Uber really was that bad. Turns out, drivers evaluated the pros and cons, and decided that regardless of their current treatment it is still better to be an Uber driver rather than going to work for somebody else. I will leave the matter of discussing the legality of how they treat their contractors to our courts. But it's a fact that thousands of drivers still think it's worth driving for Uber regardless of any legal controversy that may (or may not) exist.
- rhizome 8y agoMy counter-theory is that that's exactly why they go public.
- cm2012 8y agoOn the contrary IMO. You have to be so transparent about so many things when you go public - it eliminates a lot of room for shadiness.
- mruts 8y agoHow is that “evil”? Isn’t that the crystallization of the teleological purpose of a company? The ideal company works to maximize shareholder value. And not just short-term value, but the amortized value of the company in perpuitity. This in turn maximizes employee value and customer value. Let’s take a company that has great products and gives away everything for free. In the short-term, this might look like maximizing customer value, but soon, the conpany will go out of business. You could construct a similar example in which employee wages were maximized. The ideal situation is that the company pays employees as little as possible and charges customers as much as possible. In this way, the company is on the efficient frontier. Companies then compete on employee wages and product cost. This creates a Nash equilibrium in which no party can benefit from doing anything differently. This is the highest and most noble calling of the markets and creates the abundent and efficient markets of today (unless of course, the government steps in to fuck everything up). PS: I know I am going to get downvoted, but I would appreciate a comment instead of a downvote.
- bunderbunder 8y agoOne criticism, from a philosophical angle, would be that you have foundered on the is-ought problem.
- repsilat 8y ago"Ought" came up in two places: > maximizes employee value and customer value and > the abundent and efficient markets of today I suspect the GP believes it a little more strongly than I do, but I think their point is that we should consider outcomes (i.e. "plenty") rather than stated intentions ("maximum profit"), though their examples mostly illustrated the point in the other direction. Criticising Uber for trying to maximise their profits could be construed as criticising them for delivering customer value. Bit of a stretch, though :-).
- ximeng 8y agoThe government (or sufficiently powerful corporations, which effectively take on some aspects of public governance) sets up the framework that the market operates in. Corporations operate in a society which may break down if sufficient pressure is applied to people (e.g. employees, customers). Down vote baiting is discouraged by the site guidelines.
- ac29 8y agoIs keeping shareholders happy so much worse than keeping venture capitalists happy?
- plink 8y agoPrecisely because Uber's trajectory is unswervingly evil, they will eventually arrive at good upon traversing the universe's hypertorus.
- rhizome 8y agoThey still hire bad drivers.
- escapecharacter 8y agoI do wonder in the new age of increasingly automated employer-contractor relations, if “hire” is the right word.
- marcrosoft 8y agoThe brand is already tarnished. I know many people that use lyft over Uber for this reason alone.
- asafira 8y agoThis might be the silicon valley bubble here though.
- biesnecker 8y agoTotally. I use Lyft wherever I can but I can virtually always use Uber whereas Lyft is spotty.
- lettergram 8y agoWhere do you go that doesn't have Lyft, but has Uber? I travel regularly and it is very rare not to have Lyft available. Virtually any city with >250k has both from my experience, although that could just be where I travel, I don't know.
- Xeago 8y agoI've yet to find Lyft in Europe but there's a lot of cities there with Uber available.
- nickwegner 8y agoKansas City, MO has both, but wait times have been much higher for Lyft when compared to Uber. At least that’s been my experience. I only try to use Lyft.
- V-2 8y ago> Where do you go that doesn't have Lyft, but has Uber? Everywhere other than the US and Canada?
- dagw 8y agoWhere do you go that doesn't have Lyft, but has Uber? Lyft is US/Canada only, while Uber is much more global.
- jeswin 8y agoUber has among the worst customer support policies I have seen - but alas they are a monopoly and there's no end in sight. I think they should be regulated. Recently, I raised an issue when I got billed twice for the same ride. In India, they have no phone support, just email. Instead of checking transactions on their end, they wrote back to me asking me to submit my bank statement so that they can verify. I was quite surprised that customer support could just ask for people's bank statements.
- saagarjha 8y ago> they are a monopoly In India, don't you have Ola?
- plinkplonk 8y agoyes, but the Ola app (last I checked) required access to all your emails and SMS messages and didn't function if these are not granted. When one of my friends contacted customer support he was told " but all your data is safe with us, why are you worried?" (this was some time ago, I don't know what the status is today)
- saagarjha 8y ago…I don't know what to say. How has nobody called them out for this yet?
- distant_hat 8y agoI use Android Pie and the only permissions they require to work is Location and Phone.
- radmuzom 8y agoThis is definitely not true in iOS for the last 2 years at least.
- aboutruby 8y agoAt the very beginning of Uber it was the inverse, their customer service was top notch. I would reply to a receipt saying the driver took a longer route for instance and they would reimburse me. Now their customer service is basically inexistent.
- bamboozled 8y agoI mean, what else would they do? They want to maximize their returns so the most important part of the mission will be to clean up public and financial image. I've been through this with other companies preparing for IPO.
- jsonne 8y agoI'm seriously considering dumping Uber after they charged me for a ride pass while my app was neither open nor was there even a ride pass available for purchase in my area at the time. Most of my friends are moving back to lyft at this point to be honest.
- imustbeevil 8y agoHey I just got a crazy Idea. Give me 18 billion dollars, and I'll pay people to drive other people around. "How will we make money?" What? This is Silicon Valley, nobody makes money, we just burn capital ($18B) from people who invested in one good thing 20 years ago until we can sell the remaining capital ($7B) to braindead retail investors for 10x it's value. The company only has a year and a half of runway left, so we have to move quick.
- xiphias2 8y agoTry it. I don't think you will be successful. I think you underestimate the amount of money it took Uber to get the network effect in each city to have enough drivers. At this point it's easy to keep it up.
- imustbeevil 8y ago> At this point it's easy to keep it up. Define "easy"; they lost $1.8 billion last year. My investors made more money and my company doesn't exist.