14 ms·

Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires

335 points by 0xffff2 7y ago

enraged_camel 7y ago
I have absolutely zero respect for tech companies who wantonly and shamelessly break the laws and abuse their workers in the name of "disruption". They give the industry a bad name. As such, I honestly cannot wait to see this company go out of business. If we're lucky, they will take a large swathe of the "gig economy" with them when they finally die.
- jsloss 7y ago
  You know there are a large number of people who rely on these platforms to earn enough to take care of their families...
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    And every one of them has been getting paid less and less each year Uber has existed to there point that some of them can't take care of their own families. I don't think anyone has a problem with the service, consumers are just getting tired of subsidizing the wealthy through taxation policies that advantage people who already have money and low wages across numerous verticals.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    You know that: - it doesn't matter how the wealth transfer ends as long as untold billions are burned on a dead end, those people will lose their jobs regardless - and if Uber does not go bust that means they've cracked the self driving problem in which case those people will be out of a job again - In the meantime Uber is happy to exploit those people by having them engage in a thinly veiled race to the bottom, one where Uber sets the rules and they walk off with the bulk of the gross which they then spend on their own inefficient machine. You really can't win with such actors in the market, Uber clearly isn't in it to be a 'good employer', in fact they've done everything they could to strip away what rights those people would have had as employees.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    So long as the employees are taken care of, fine. If they need to work more than standard hours to make a living wage after expenses, they are being taken advantage of. It’s as simple as that.
cj 7y ago
I'm curious, what other companies exist (or existed) with financials similar to Uber's?
- immichaelwang 7y ago
  Moviepass lol
- gorbachev 7y ago
  Any dot.com startup before the bust. Just obviously not at this scale.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, I’m starting to suspect Uber will be the Bear Sterns that goes under and kicks off our next recession. I’m not certain our economy & social safety nets could absorb the sudden unemployment of a large portion of the gig economy.
    - winfred 7y ago
      All those drivers would just start the next day driving for Lyft etc. Most drivers already drive for multiple platforms, so it would be a mostly seamless switch. Just losing one platform in the gig economy doesn't remove either the customer demand or the drivers.
      - pishpash 7y ago
        No, because the likely last straw would be over-onerous regulation, and that would end up killing all gig companies.
        winfred 7y ago
        I wish. But the reality is that if that regulation comes, it's going to be state regulation and not federal, so the effect would take years to unfold and be state by state and never reach 100%.
maxaf 7y ago
I’ve been conducting a thought experiment. Imagine an Uber competitor that keeps drivers as full time employees and charges customers a price that allows it to pay the drivers a fair wage while slicing a modest profit margin off the top. Let’s discuss if something like this can work.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  Isn't that called a "car service"?
  - maxaf 7y ago
    Perhaps, and there are plenty of those around. You're a fellow New Yorker, so you can readily conjure up the image: crummy Lincoln Town Car, leather seats that reek of stale tobacco, driver who talks on the phone while operating the vehicle, payment in cash (plus the tolls!), ordering process that involves speaking on the telephone... You know, the typical Brooklyn-based car service that dispatches cars via the radio from a storefront office. Uber's greatest contribution to the industry is the discovery that customers want a nice and smooth experience. Order using a smart phone, ride in a nice car (or perhaps a luxury one, or a larger one, or one with a child seat - you have options), and don't worry about payment and how much you owe in tolls. So, my pitch is that this convenience can probably be made to work as a business that doesn't abuse its employees and doesn't flood the roads with idle drivers. And also doesn't burn investor cash in order to conduct a price war. That's just bananas.
    - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
      It isn't 1982 anymore, taxi businesses and regions have apps now. Uber's value add is their pool of drivers' reach.
      - maxaf 7y ago
        I called out “Brooklyn car services” specifically because I still see such operations around town. I’m assuming they survive because there’s a group of users who are beyond the reach of new technology. I’m sure there are taxi services that offer conveniences similar to Uber, but none have enough name recognition for me to name even a single one off the top of my head. It’s possible that they need marketing help. It’s also possible that they aren’t looking to grow beyond whatever niche they serve now.
mandeepj 7y ago
How come Lyft is doing much better - comparatively? At one point, they were considering a selloff.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  > How come Lyft is doing much better - comparatively? At one point, they were considering a selloff. My guess: Lyft let Uber make all the mistakes, learned from them and only spent money on things that avoided the worst mistakes that Uber made.
  - mandeepj 7y ago
    > My guess: Lyft let Uber make all the mistakes, learned from them and only spent money on things that avoided the worst mistakes that Uber made. If Uber is serious then they should learn from that and become Uber 2.0
    - EForEndeavour 7y ago
      "Ubest"
  - wasdfff 7y ago
    You paint them as wise and restrained while they are actively in a price war with less money than uber. The candle is lit from both ends.
- syshum 7y ago
  My Guess would be 1. Lower Expenses, they seem to be just interested in being a Car Service, not developing Self Driving Tech 2. Better Service, almost everyone I know has stopped using Uber due to service issues, most people seem to like Lyft better 3. Less PR Controversies
  - a_t48 7y ago
    Lyft is interested in developing Self Driving, but not directly, only as investors/partners.
ZhuanXia 7y ago
I don't know what Uber thinks its end game is. Uber's "lets burn money to capture the market and own self driving" stratagem is economically absurd. In the limit of driverless cars, capital can be turned directly into labor so anyone with capital will deploy a fleet so long as it is profitable. Talk about a red ocean. The self-driving dream investors pin their hopes on is a siren. Ironically, Uber will only be able to maintain value in those futures where driverless cars don't work out. Commodities do not have network effects. In general, if you are replacing labor with capital (in the form of automation) you will not get the network effects of a two-sided market - which is basically a market failure caused by our previous inability to convert capital into labor in a manner that scales. If you are replacing a two-sided market with automation you are going to need another moat.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > I don't know what Uber thinks its end game is There is a massive, profitable courier business in most cities that Uber hasn't touched. And food delivery is already being explored. Beyond that, Uber's electronic-dispatch technology has the ability to optimize garbage pick-up and drop-off; police, fire and medical resource routing; small-vehicle fleet management for sundry specialized logistics companies; and all manner of other logistical processes presently centrally dispatched like taxis were a decade ago. Uber is burning too much cash. But real-time electronic dispatch of variously-placed resources to randomly-distributed tasks is nothing to sneeze at. It's a difficult problem due to its myriad of edge cases, and Uber seems to have reasonably solved it.
  - spac 7y ago
    For a while, in NYC at least, they tried the courier model, but that was a few years ago. Not really sure why it did not continue.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > For a while, in NYC at least, they tried the courier model, but that was a few years ago Courier services are high-risk operations sensitive to reliability. My guess is Uber's network wasn't optimized for reliability then. Food delivery has similar reliability requirements, but the stakes are lower. (Failed food deliveries produce complaints. Failed courier runs produce litigation.)
aresant 7y ago
The sentiment on UBER recently is that they are only surviving by subsidizing rides and are out of control / there's no future business there. But that is not an accurate portrayal, here's what's going on when you look at their un-editorialized results (1): - Headlines have portrayed UBER as losing $5b this quarter. This is the easy one to address as this article touches on - UBER paid out almost $4b in stock based compensation (one time, due to IPO) that inflated their loss number. The more accurate portrayal is that UBER burned ~$1.2b this quarter on operations. - Of their remaining $1.2b operating loss almost 50% of that is from UBER eats subsidies. They paid $544m more to drivers to deliver food than they took in. Why? (a) It is their fastest growing (by %) division (2) It's arguably the most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a "last mile" delivery network at scale. - Their core business - ridesharing - has improved their gross margin and unit economics quarter-over-quarter to the point that the discounting is almost non-material (less than $22m total worldwide this quarter, representing less than 1/2 a percent of total ride sharing revenue). - They have >25,000 employees and >50% of those are international in new markets that require heavy HR spending. Their move to clip 400 marketing employees (25% of entire division) last month implies the CEO has confidence that there is a lot of fat in employee base. - Add to that other losses in their "other bets" which is almost certainly their freight brokering network at -$50m, and the losses appear to be diminishing. (1) https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2019/Uber-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
- leannekim 7y ago
  Ok so there is a backstory behind each piece of bad news. Still, tons of bad news is still a ton of bad news. Most successful businesses should have a string of good news. Especially after being in business for a decade.
  - badfrog 7y ago
    > Still, tons of bad news is still a ton of bad news. I think the point is that it's not bad news. Losing money can be good for a company if it's being done in a way that leads to long-term growth. Amazon didn't have a profitable quarter for ~7 years after its IPO: https://www.theatlas.com/charts/BJjuqbWLz https://www.theatlas.com/charts/BJjuqbWLz
bluedino 7y ago
Is this internal engineering for software dev or does it include self-driving tech?
- pvarangot 7y ago
  I know of people waiting on offers that got the call about frozen hires in Backend Engineering, Data Engineer and Data Science.
- karlding 7y ago
  According to the article, Uber ATG (the self-driving division) isn't affected. > The freeze does not apply to Uber's autonomous vehicle and freight-shipping divisions.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Well, I'm glad they have made at least one major technology breakthrough. Are they planning to wake them up again in the future when complete self driving technology is more viable?
- chx 7y ago
  > Well, I'm glad they have made at least one major technology breakthrough which is what
  - skolsuper 7y ago
    It's a joke, punning on the headline and cryogenic freezing
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    They've developed this cool new car you can power by burning money. And the best bit, is it burns other people's money, not just your own.
woliveirajr 7y ago
I remember how Amazon, in the beginning, was also non-profitable, wouldn't succeed, only the core of selling books was becoming profitable after some time, and so on. Yes, there was a time when this was real.
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  This article explains why comparisons to Amazon are misguided: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-amazons-history-of-ipo-era-losses-means-little-for-todays-unprofitable-unicorns/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-amazons-history-of-ipo-... Among other things "Amazon, the patron saint of money-losing companies, lost a combined $2.8 billion over its first 17 quarters as a public company, roughly on par with what Uber lost in 2015 alone."
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >I remember how Amazon, in the beginning, was also non-profitable I laugh out loud every time someone points to a terrible business and someone else defends it with, "But Amazon was also unprofitable!" There are far more bankrupt companies than there are Amazons.
Renaud 7y ago
I'm not sure why they limit themselves to food deliveries with Uber Eats. They basically have a quasi-unlimited fleet of transportation vehicles at their disposal. How about delivering anything for people and businesses? The power of whomever cracks this would be in the software handling the logistics, but imagine that on top of passengers, you could also elect to transport some bags or (small) boxes for other stuff people may order, or for small businesses. You could easily increase the usage of your fleet during non-peak hours especially.
- bsimpson 7y ago
  "I love my FedEx guy, because he's a drug dealer, and he doesn't even know it." - Mitch Hedberg
- Marazan 7y ago
  Because how a taxi works is not how a courier works. Taxi's occasionally do courier work but there's a reason why courier services exist and it's not just all taxi firms.
- jpalomaki 7y ago
  When you are doing the courier stuff for companies, you likely want to get it right from the beginning. Maybe they are practicing and collecting data while delivering food. Things like time it takes it to deliver on certain route, which couriers are reliable, how many deliveries couriers can make, how much to pay them etc.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  I assume because its not very efficient at all. A 10 mile trip in LA in traffic will burn a $4 gallon of gas in everything but a brand new fuel efficient car. Most people willing to sit in traffic for hours after work to scrape a few more bucks are not in a brand new car. That’s potentially $4 a trip just from the gas alone. At that markup I’ll bike to the store and save the planet. Even amazon outsources their last mile delivery to contractors who absorb these costs somehow (probably by abusing employees and/or making them pee in bottles to make quota).
- abvdasker 7y ago
msvan 7y ago
Does this say something broader about the supply/demand of engineering talent, or is it mostly just a reflection of Uber's troubles?
svstolemykitten 7y ago
This thread is full of people who have invested in UBER and want to justify their sexism, unprofitability and hubris in order to gain profit at the expense of everything.
acd 7y ago
There will be a future market event when some of the money loosing unicorns will cards will be flushed. Or we keep zero interest rates forever which will be an interesting monetary move. The current economic system is not long term sustainable.
jokoon 7y ago
I think that it's is a new model for startups: Disrupt, grow quickly, wait until government start noticing, and liquidate everything before government and the competition start to adapt. It's also about the trend/new product effect. People start to use it massively, then realize it's actually a bad idea or it becomes too expensive or because they never realized how expensive it is, and that's also where there is a loss of users. Result? You have all those workers who have to do something else now, the competition's business is damaged and users want the benefits of the disruptive tech but it's not possible. It's a subtle cash grab by exploiting something that no law prevented. All in all, that describes perfectly the ineffectiveness of short term capitalism. Unless a system is properly regulated, I doubt that the silicon valley can really pretend it's "changing the world". The DARPA and chip designers did. The rest is unsupervised chaos with cool toy fantasies.
mortdeus 7y ago
Quick question. If uber and lyft continues to succeed in putting the existing taxi industry out of a having a job, and then they subsequently manage to also put themselves out of having a job, how do we get around in NYC and SF so everybody isn't put out of having a job???
- omni 7y ago
  Invest in those private Chinese cab / bus services around the chiantowns, I guess.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  Everyone is already scootering drunk with two people per. Chaos is the answer. But ideally your transit will capture more ridership and improve as rideshare withers, and your ebike will be your last mile solution.

335 points by 0xffff2 7y ago

I have absolutely zero respect for tech companies who wantonly and shamelessly break the laws and abuse their workers in the name of "disruption". They give the industry a bad name. As such, I honestly cannot wait to see this company go out of business. If we're lucky, they will take a large swathe of the "gig economy" with them when they finally die.

jsloss 7y ago
You know there are a large number of people who rely on these platforms to earn enough to take care of their families...
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  And every one of them has been getting paid less and less each year Uber has existed to there point that some of them can't take care of their own families. I don't think anyone has a problem with the service, consumers are just getting tired of subsidizing the wealthy through taxation policies that advantage people who already have money and low wages across numerous verticals.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  You know that: - it doesn't matter how the wealth transfer ends as long as untold billions are burned on a dead end, those people will lose their jobs regardless - and if Uber does not go bust that means they've cracked the self driving problem in which case those people will be out of a job again - In the meantime Uber is happy to exploit those people by having them engage in a thinly veiled race to the bottom, one where Uber sets the rules and they walk off with the bulk of the gross which they then spend on their own inefficient machine. You really can't win with such actors in the market, Uber clearly isn't in it to be a 'good employer', in fact they've done everything they could to strip away what rights those people would have had as employees.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  So long as the employees are taken care of, fine. If they need to work more than standard hours to make a living wage after expenses, they are being taken advantage of. It’s as simple as that.

cj 7y ago

I'm curious, what other companies exist (or existed) with financials similar to Uber's?

immichaelwang 7y ago
Moviepass lol
gorbachev 7y ago
Any dot.com startup before the bust. Just obviously not at this scale.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, I’m starting to suspect Uber will be the Bear Sterns that goes under and kicks off our next recession. I’m not certain our economy & social safety nets could absorb the sudden unemployment of a large portion of the gig economy.
  - winfred 7y ago
    All those drivers would just start the next day driving for Lyft etc. Most drivers already drive for multiple platforms, so it would be a mostly seamless switch. Just losing one platform in the gig economy doesn't remove either the customer demand or the drivers.
    - pishpash 7y ago
      No, because the likely last straw would be over-onerous regulation, and that would end up killing all gig companies.
      - winfred 7y ago
        I wish. But the reality is that if that regulation comes, it's going to be state regulation and not federal, so the effect would take years to unfold and be state by state and never reach 100%.

maxaf 7y ago

I’ve been conducting a thought experiment. Imagine an Uber competitor that keeps drivers as full time employees and charges customers a price that allows it to pay the drivers a fair wage while slicing a modest profit margin off the top. Let’s discuss if something like this can work.

pavel_lishin 7y ago
Isn't that called a "car service"?
- maxaf 7y ago
  Perhaps, and there are plenty of those around. You're a fellow New Yorker, so you can readily conjure up the image: crummy Lincoln Town Car, leather seats that reek of stale tobacco, driver who talks on the phone while operating the vehicle, payment in cash (plus the tolls!), ordering process that involves speaking on the telephone... You know, the typical Brooklyn-based car service that dispatches cars via the radio from a storefront office. Uber's greatest contribution to the industry is the discovery that customers want a nice and smooth experience. Order using a smart phone, ride in a nice car (or perhaps a luxury one, or a larger one, or one with a child seat - you have options), and don't worry about payment and how much you owe in tolls. So, my pitch is that this convenience can probably be made to work as a business that doesn't abuse its employees and doesn't flood the roads with idle drivers. And also doesn't burn investor cash in order to conduct a price war. That's just bananas.
  - fucking_tragedy 7y ago
    It isn't 1982 anymore, taxi businesses and regions have apps now. Uber's value add is their pool of drivers' reach.
    - maxaf 7y ago
      I called out “Brooklyn car services” specifically because I still see such operations around town. I’m assuming they survive because there’s a group of users who are beyond the reach of new technology. I’m sure there are taxi services that offer conveniences similar to Uber, but none have enough name recognition for me to name even a single one off the top of my head. It’s possible that they need marketing help. It’s also possible that they aren’t looking to grow beyond whatever niche they serve now.

mandeepj 7y ago

How come Lyft is doing much better - comparatively? At one point, they were considering a selloff.

alasdair_ 7y ago
> How come Lyft is doing much better - comparatively? At one point, they were considering a selloff. My guess: Lyft let Uber make all the mistakes, learned from them and only spent money on things that avoided the worst mistakes that Uber made.
- mandeepj 7y ago
  > My guess: Lyft let Uber make all the mistakes, learned from them and only spent money on things that avoided the worst mistakes that Uber made. If Uber is serious then they should learn from that and become Uber 2.0
  - EForEndeavour 7y ago
    "Ubest"
- wasdfff 7y ago
  You paint them as wise and restrained while they are actively in a price war with less money than uber. The candle is lit from both ends.
syshum 7y ago
My Guess would be 1. Lower Expenses, they seem to be just interested in being a Car Service, not developing Self Driving Tech 2. Better Service, almost everyone I know has stopped using Uber due to service issues, most people seem to like Lyft better 3. Less PR Controversies
- a_t48 7y ago
  Lyft is interested in developing Self Driving, but not directly, only as investors/partners.

ZhuanXia 7y ago

I don't know what Uber thinks its end game is. Uber's "lets burn money to capture the market and own self driving" stratagem is economically absurd. In the limit of driverless cars, capital can be turned directly into labor so anyone with capital will deploy a fleet so long as it is profitable. Talk about a red ocean. The self-driving dream investors pin their hopes on is a siren. Ironically, Uber will only be able to maintain value in those futures where driverless cars don't work out. Commodities do not have network effects. In general, if you are replacing labor with capital (in the form of automation) you will not get the network effects of a two-sided market - which is basically a market failure caused by our previous inability to convert capital into labor in a manner that scales. If you are replacing a two-sided market with automation you are going to need another moat.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> I don't know what Uber thinks its end game is There is a massive, profitable courier business in most cities that Uber hasn't touched. And food delivery is already being explored. Beyond that, Uber's electronic-dispatch technology has the ability to optimize garbage pick-up and drop-off; police, fire and medical resource routing; small-vehicle fleet management for sundry specialized logistics companies; and all manner of other logistical processes presently centrally dispatched like taxis were a decade ago. Uber is burning too much cash. But real-time electronic dispatch of variously-placed resources to randomly-distributed tasks is nothing to sneeze at. It's a difficult problem due to its myriad of edge cases, and Uber seems to have reasonably solved it.
- spac 7y ago
  For a while, in NYC at least, they tried the courier model, but that was a few years ago. Not really sure why it did not continue.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > For a while, in NYC at least, they tried the courier model, but that was a few years ago Courier services are high-risk operations sensitive to reliability. My guess is Uber's network wasn't optimized for reliability then. Food delivery has similar reliability requirements, but the stakes are lower. (Failed food deliveries produce complaints. Failed courier runs produce litigation.)

aresant 7y ago

The sentiment on UBER recently is that they are only surviving by subsidizing rides and are out of control / there's no future business there. But that is not an accurate portrayal, here's what's going on when you look at their un-editorialized results (1): - Headlines have portrayed UBER as losing $5b this quarter. This is the easy one to address as this article touches on - UBER paid out almost $4b in stock based compensation (one time, due to IPO) that inflated their loss number. The more accurate portrayal is that UBER burned ~$1.2b this quarter on operations. - Of their remaining $1.2b operating loss almost 50% of that is from UBER eats subsidies. They paid $544m more to drivers to deliver food than they took in. Why? (a) It is their fastest growing (by %) division (2) It's arguably the most valuable battleground in logistics - developing a "last mile" delivery network at scale. - Their core business - ridesharing - has improved their gross margin and unit economics quarter-over-quarter to the point that the discounting is almost non-material (less than $22m total worldwide this quarter, representing less than 1/2 a percent of total ride sharing revenue). - They have >25,000 employees and >50% of those are international in new markets that require heavy HR spending. Their move to clip 400 marketing employees (25% of entire division) last month implies the CEO has confidence that there is a lot of fat in employee base. - Add to that other losses in their "other bets" which is almost certainly their freight brokering network at -$50m, and the losses appear to be diminishing. (1) https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2019/Uber-Reports-Second-Quarter-2019-Results/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

leannekim 7y ago
Ok so there is a backstory behind each piece of bad news. Still, tons of bad news is still a ton of bad news. Most successful businesses should have a string of good news. Especially after being in business for a decade.
- badfrog 7y ago
  > Still, tons of bad news is still a ton of bad news. I think the point is that it's not bad news. Losing money can be good for a company if it's being done in a way that leads to long-term growth. Amazon didn't have a profitable quarter for ~7 years after its IPO: https://www.theatlas.com/charts/BJjuqbWLz https://www.theatlas.com/charts/BJjuqbWLz

bluedino 7y ago

Is this internal engineering for software dev or does it include self-driving tech?

pvarangot 7y ago
I know of people waiting on offers that got the call about frozen hires in Backend Engineering, Data Engineer and Data Science.
karlding 7y ago
According to the article, Uber ATG (the self-driving division) isn't affected. > The freeze does not apply to Uber's autonomous vehicle and freight-shipping divisions.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

Well, I'm glad they have made at least one major technology breakthrough. Are they planning to wake them up again in the future when complete self driving technology is more viable?

chx 7y ago
> Well, I'm glad they have made at least one major technology breakthrough which is what
- skolsuper 7y ago
  It's a joke, punning on the headline and cryogenic freezing
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  They've developed this cool new car you can power by burning money. And the best bit, is it burns other people's money, not just your own.

woliveirajr 7y ago

I remember how Amazon, in the beginning, was also non-profitable, wouldn't succeed, only the core of selling books was becoming profitable after some time, and so on. Yes, there was a time when this was real.

freddie_mercury 7y ago
This article explains why comparisons to Amazon are misguided: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-amazons-history-of-ipo-era-losses-means-little-for-todays-unprofitable-unicorns/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-amazons-history-of-ipo-... Among other things "Amazon, the patron saint of money-losing companies, lost a combined $2.8 billion over its first 17 quarters as a public company, roughly on par with what Uber lost in 2015 alone."
navigatesol 7y ago
>I remember how Amazon, in the beginning, was also non-profitable I laugh out loud every time someone points to a terrible business and someone else defends it with, "But Amazon was also unprofitable!" There are far more bankrupt companies than there are Amazons.

Renaud 7y ago

I'm not sure why they limit themselves to food deliveries with Uber Eats. They basically have a quasi-unlimited fleet of transportation vehicles at their disposal. How about delivering anything for people and businesses? The power of whomever cracks this would be in the software handling the logistics, but imagine that on top of passengers, you could also elect to transport some bags or (small) boxes for other stuff people may order, or for small businesses. You could easily increase the usage of your fleet during non-peak hours especially.

bsimpson 7y ago
"I love my FedEx guy, because he's a drug dealer, and he doesn't even know it." - Mitch Hedberg
Marazan 7y ago
Because how a taxi works is not how a courier works. Taxi's occasionally do courier work but there's a reason why courier services exist and it's not just all taxi firms.
jpalomaki 7y ago
When you are doing the courier stuff for companies, you likely want to get it right from the beginning. Maybe they are practicing and collecting data while delivering food. Things like time it takes it to deliver on certain route, which couriers are reliable, how many deliveries couriers can make, how much to pay them etc.
wasdfff 7y ago
I assume because its not very efficient at all. A 10 mile trip in LA in traffic will burn a $4 gallon of gas in everything but a brand new fuel efficient car. Most people willing to sit in traffic for hours after work to scrape a few more bucks are not in a brand new car. That’s potentially $4 a trip just from the gas alone. At that markup I’ll bike to the store and save the planet. Even amazon outsources their last mile delivery to contractors who absorb these costs somehow (probably by abusing employees and/or making them pee in bottles to make quota).
abvdasker 7y ago

msvan 7y ago

Does this say something broader about the supply/demand of engineering talent, or is it mostly just a reflection of Uber's troubles?

svstolemykitten 7y ago

This thread is full of people who have invested in UBER and want to justify their sexism, unprofitability and hubris in order to gain profit at the expense of everything.

acd 7y ago

There will be a future market event when some of the money loosing unicorns will cards will be flushed. Or we keep zero interest rates forever which will be an interesting monetary move. The current economic system is not long term sustainable.

jokoon 7y ago

I think that it's is a new model for startups: Disrupt, grow quickly, wait until government start noticing, and liquidate everything before government and the competition start to adapt. It's also about the trend/new product effect. People start to use it massively, then realize it's actually a bad idea or it becomes too expensive or because they never realized how expensive it is, and that's also where there is a loss of users. Result? You have all those workers who have to do something else now, the competition's business is damaged and users want the benefits of the disruptive tech but it's not possible. It's a subtle cash grab by exploiting something that no law prevented. All in all, that describes perfectly the ineffectiveness of short term capitalism. Unless a system is properly regulated, I doubt that the silicon valley can really pretend it's "changing the world". The DARPA and chip designers did. The rest is unsupervised chaos with cool toy fantasies.

mortdeus 7y ago

Quick question. If uber and lyft continues to succeed in putting the existing taxi industry out of a having a job, and then they subsequently manage to also put themselves out of having a job, how do we get around in NYC and SF so everybody isn't put out of having a job???

omni 7y ago
Invest in those private Chinese cab / bus services around the chiantowns, I guess.
wasdfff 7y ago
Everyone is already scootering drunk with two people per. Chaos is the answer. But ideally your transit will capture more ridership and improve as rideshare withers, and your ebike will be your last mile solution.