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On the other hand, they spent $0.5 billion on R&D in a year, and lost $5 billion in a quarter, so I don’t think the R&D is nearly as significant an issue as sub
by kn0where 7y ago
On the other hand, they spent $0.5 billion on R&D in a year, and lost $5 billion in a quarter, so I don’t think the R&D is nearly as significant an issue as subsidizing rides.
- kgwgk 7y agoThey booked an expense of $3.1bn in R&D last quarter. Even excluding the $2.6bn linked to stock-based compensation it’s $0.5bn per quarter. But of course that includes useful R&D and not just the flying-cars kind.
- paxys 7y ago"R&D" usually includes all engineering expenses on financial reports, which for a company like Uber is the vast majority of operating expenses.
- jonknee 7y agoBut in this case they clearly don't: Operations and support ($864m), Sales and marketing ($1.2b), General and administrative ($1.6b). They have bloated costs all over. Easy to do when you're the hottest VC backed company around, but the clock is ticking and they'll probably trim a lot of fat.
- paxys 7y agoYeah my point was people shouldn't look at it and think "self driving car research". Every engineer at Uber is paid out of that budget.
- kgwgk 7y agoThat’s why I said it included useful R&D.
- kgwgk 7y agoAnd last quarter was somewhat unusual due to the SBC charges allocated mostly to R&D. Looking at Q1: Cost of revenue $1.68bn Operations and support $434mn Sales and marketing $1.04bn Research and development $409mn General and administrative $423mn
- Udik 7y agoCan I ask something that will sound incredibly naive? How complicated needs to be an IT infrastructure that lets you book a taxi via an app and pay the driver? Is it really something to throw billions at each year? Sometimes I feel these companies are throwing billions in IT simply because they're expected to be disruptive technology companies, and not for real technical reasons.
- goatinaboat 7y agoIt doesn’t! You can read here on HN how their large IT staff spends most of its time migrating back and forth between MySQL and Postgres.
- paxys 7y agoUber as a product is very technologically complex, mainly because of the scale it operates at. You can read about some of their tech at https://eng.uber.com https://eng.uber.com.
- AdrianB1 7y agoOnly if you want to have a huge and complex system. If you have small and localized ones, it should be very cheap.
- rightbyte 7y agoYe, like one VM running per city or region. I feel they are just sinking money into software and administration of software.
- fh973 7y agoWhatsApp has shown that you can actually build large-scale system infrastructures very efficiently. And they had global service, Uber could profit from sharding as you suggest.
- conanbatt 7y agoApply for a job at Uber proposing a cut in engineering expenses with your plan and become instantly rich.