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When he puts it like that, it makes me think Uber has a much better business model than I thought. Taxi efficiency is very heavily dependent on information - i

When he puts it like that, it makes me think Uber has a much better business model than I thought. Taxi efficiency is very heavily dependent on information - if you know exactly where the customers are, where the drivers are, and then can run shortest-path algorithms in real-time to match them up, you can save huge amounts of driver time waiting and finding customers. Figure you save an hour a day * 200 workdays/year * 200K taxi drivers in the U.S. and that's 40 million hours saved in the U.S. a year. At a rate of $10/hour, that's $400M/year. Then add in economies of scale from knowing where all the drivers and customers are, and a better brand and better customer experience from reducing wait times and transaction costs to get a taxi. Is that worth $80B? I don't know, but I'd guess probably not. But it'd easily pay for a SF HQ and several thousand engineers.

MichaelZuo 5y ago
Yes informational efficiencies for transportation at scale could easily be $80 billion worth of value to the world. The real question is whether Uber can capture that amount of value. And whether competition will drive the margins to zero anyways.
dnautics 5y ago
Or at least several hundred engineers. Does Uber really need several thousand engineers? It's kinda nuts to me, WhatsApp scaled to a billion with 50, you figure an order of magnitude more to deal with the fact that a large part of Uber is turning legal compliance into code.
- refenestrator 5y ago
  When you read their stories about managing 10,000 microservices or whatever.. I don't want to trivialize their domain but it seems like a bit of empire building happened.
- ChefboyOG 5y ago
  Not arguing that there isn't probably a level of bloat at Uber, but the complexity of Uber's product is a lot more than other commenters are implying here. Their ML platform alone seems like a monster: https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/ https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/
  - xnx 5y ago
    I think they have their own ML platform because they hired a lot of engineers, not because the business necessitated one.

MichaelZuo 5y ago

Yes informational efficiencies for transportation at scale could easily be $80 billion worth of value to the world. The real question is whether Uber can capture that amount of value. And whether competition will drive the margins to zero anyways.

dnautics 5y ago

Or at least several hundred engineers. Does Uber really need several thousand engineers? It's kinda nuts to me, WhatsApp scaled to a billion with 50, you figure an order of magnitude more to deal with the fact that a large part of Uber is turning legal compliance into code.

refenestrator 5y ago
When you read their stories about managing 10,000 microservices or whatever.. I don't want to trivialize their domain but it seems like a bit of empire building happened.
ChefboyOG 5y ago
Not arguing that there isn't probably a level of bloat at Uber, but the complexity of Uber's product is a lot more than other commenters are implying here. Their ML platform alone seems like a monster: https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/ https://eng.uber.com/michelangelo-machine-learning-platform/
- xnx 5y ago
  I think they have their own ML platform because they hired a lot of engineers, not because the business necessitated one.