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I used to think that, but you really can go both ways. I think a lot of investors like Lyft because it's small relative to Uber and its primary footprint is Ame

I used to think that, but you really can go both ways. I think a lot of investors like Lyft because it's small relative to Uber and its primary footprint is America. Which means more opportunity to grow in a future international expansion, and you can make the argument that they're behaving like a smart franchise -- perfecting operations in America first before they do a worldwide expansion with even more variables. That being said, Lyft is losing a lot of money and they can't really increase prices too much or customers will bail and go to Uber. And they're both giving away tons of discounts to riders in the run-up to the IPOs, which doesn't seem like a great sign to me, because they are already fairly discounted from a taxi which is usually a sustainable business model that is not dependent on external funding.

ithinkinstereo 8y ago
Two things I find interesting about the Lyft story: 1) In their prospectus they claim that 44% of all rides start/end in low-income areas. [a] 2) One of the key arguments they make in their fight against recent NYC regulations to raise the minimum pay for drivers is that raising prices directly leads to a fall in revenue (demand). [b] So a large % of their users are price-sensitive, but raising prices cuts demand. A difficult path forward for reaching profitability indeed. [a] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1759509/000119312519091446/d721841d424b4.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1759509/000119312519... [b] https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2019/3/16/tlc-rules-impact-on-lyft-and-our-driver-community-1 https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2019/3/16/tlc-rules-impact-on-ly...