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A Case Study on the Uber Alumni Network
- juunpp 4y agoWell, in this case it was much closer to an actual mafia, given how "fucking illegal" they all were. CEO's words, not mine.
- ipython 4y agoDon’t forget that the secret formula also includes a certain, shall I say, moral flexibility: https://gizmodo.com/portland-says-uber-targeted-more-than-a-dozen-officials-1814080608 https://gizmodo.com/portland-says-uber-targeted-more-than-a-...
- roopawl 4y agoI think the moral flexibility of the diaspora and the people who encouraged it for $ would be a way more interesting article. From the linked article linked about 'Fast': Earlier this year, NPR reported on how CEO Holland had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup, Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” NPR’s article noted that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.”
- blaufast 4y agoI had lunch with an early Uber employee (male) who told me 'wokeness killed uber'. He said the famous cultural issues "weren't real", an if TK hadn't been ousted they'd have destroyed Lyft completely in a few months. A couple of months before the self driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona, a drunk engineer from that team told me 'everybody is lying on their human intervention reports to the state, that's just how the sausage is made' Late Uber produces seriously impressive technology and mature, reliable services. Early Uber was so errr.. problematic... that I'd be hesitant to wear that as a badge.
- jhatemyjob 4y agoSusan Fowler killed Uber.
- blindriver 4y agoEverything Susan Fowler said was verifiable true. Thuan Pham himself confirmed the details in an all-hands. She didn't kill Uber at all. The reaction to it killed Uber. The culture got gutted by incentive changes and turned it into a promo-chasing culture which killed the engineering excellence it once had.
- jonathankoren 4y ago> The reaction to it killed Uber. In other words, Uber killed Uber.
- jhatemyjob 4y agoLook at her Wikipedia page. She tried stirring the pot at Penn, Plaid, and PubNub. And then Uber was the jackpot for her. She is clearly one of those people who makes a career out of suing their employers. This type of person is common in California. You can make a lot of money by working for a company, suing them, moving onto the next company, suing them, etc.
- cafard 4y agoAnd yet it is still operating.
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- texmex123456 4y agoThe cultural issues were overblown out of proportion with a clear agenda to bring Uber down. The delete Uber campaign was also pre-meditated to malign the company by associating it with trump election.
- dnissley 4y agoTo be fair the laws those regulators were in charge of enforcing were unjust. A victory for modern day civil disobedience, even if it was to make a buck.
- myhrvold 4y agoA lot was also in a gray area. In fact France ending up (I think very unfairly, but ofc I worked at Uber) passing laws specifically against Uber to make it retroactively illegal. Which basically was a tacit admission that is was OK by the rules initially. Obviously the idea of being able to "hail" a ride -- specific to you -- in near real-time was not really considered around the world when a lot of taxi rules and regulations were done. So you ended up having insanity, like the necessity for even a black car service to "return to their base" after a ride, for time periods up to 1.5 hrs. Basically trying to nix the notion of efficiency in ridesharing. We all know that nowadays most of those rules were battled back. But the taxi industry and regulators had some very crooked ways which were really to the detriment of broader society trying to get places without having their own car.
- illiarian 4y agoOn the other end you have Uber who passed all the costs onto the driver, subsidized drives through unlimited investor money to crush any potential competition etc. There has to be a middle ground.
- indus 4y agoIsn’t mafiadom a representation of a clique? Closed network for the benefits of its members. Not undermining the success of entrepreneurs but curious about tech’s obsession with mafia.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoPeople want to be in the “in” group and desire status.
- postsantum 4y agoThis, add money and lack of self-reflection to get this special kind of "mafias" and "fraternities"
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- indus 4y agoIncidentally, my LinkedIn feed shows this TC article[1] where investors are looking for non-network deal flow. Aside, retargeting works! [1]https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/05/venture-capital-using-data-investing/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/05/venture-capital-using-data...
- mi_lk 4y agoNot to undermine the good effort to put those data together. But for reasons the author didn't mention she's ex-Uber who founded Fast which was a disaster to put it lightly https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/fast-shuts-doors-after-slow-growth-high-burn-precluded-fundraising-options https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/fast-shuts-doors-after-slo...
- juunpp 4y agoHey, but at least she's getting claps on Substack.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoNormally I wouldn’t fault someone for trying at a startup and failing, but Fast was an extraordinarily bad situation. They relentlessly hyped the company across social media while it was a disaster behind the scenes. The employees of Fast got screwed the most. Remember that. They were misled into believing the company was successful when it was famously almost completely devoid of revenue. The founders lied to them. The data may stand on its own, but I’d be very suspicious of any narratives being pushed by these people. Fast was a disaster, and the money they raised on those lies is included in those graphs.
- Closi 4y agoIt's hard - the fast product really required them getting a network-effect and that required a lot of hype. I don't think it's necessarily a bad pitch, but clearly it was a business that was only ever going to either be wildly-successful or a complete disaster, and nothing in the middle. Also they were probably way-too-late and stripe were much better positioned. (And I'm not suggesting that those two scenarios are equally likely - it had probably a 5% payoff chance!).
- roopawl 4y agoAnother commenter mentions the 'moral flexibility' of Uber. From the featured photo this appears to be another attribute of the diaspora. The business model of Arrived is frankly disgusting. I highly recommend "Poverty, By America" if you'd like the background for my comment. https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-America-Matthew-Desmond/dp/0593239911/ref=asc_df_0593239911/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=611935779797&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15483529103327058128&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032132&hvtargid=pla-1729291995526&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-America-Matthew-Desmond/dp/05...
- guynamedloren 4y ago> The business model of Arrived is frankly disgusting. Interested in learning more about this. Tagged the book for a future read, but in the meantime, can you enlighten us on the business model of Arrived?
- subpixel 4y agoWhen all the single family residential homes are owned by investors, more people are forced into long term rental life who might traditionally be prepared to buy. But the investor speculation drives prices well beyond what working and some middle class earners can afford. Rents increase bc a return has to be made, and there is no escape. The poor stay poor. The rich get richer. Disgusting is a matter of opinion but it does seem a zero sun game with a lot of losers.
- circles_for-day 4y agoIt pushes up housing prices and decreases supply for low income people and transfers that wealth to already well off people. As long as the wealthy can keep housing out of reach they can influence the distort the entire market and charge as much as they like. This is why housing is such a ‘good investment’. It’s reverse Robin Hood.
- Fomite 4y agoI'd like to know how many of these companies actually made money.
- BhavdeepSethi 4y agoRaising money in a low interest market seems to be the metric of being influential here. It'll be nice to see how these companies are still alive in the next 3-4 years. We can then measure the impact of these companies vs the paypal mafia.
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoAfter looking at the excel spreadsheet of companies, to even speak of the two in the same sentence is kind of a joke.
- medellin 4y agoAs someone who worked at Uber at this time and a fair amount after it is really funny reading the comment sections on threads like these. I wish we were as comically “morally flexible” (also seems to mean evil for a lot of you) as you think. It would make for a good book.
- blairbeckwith 4y agoIs this a sarcastic comment, given a pretty good book was written about exactly that?
- Insanity 4y agowhich one?
- lhorie 4y agoSuperpumped, by Mike Isaac. Mind you, he was a journalist working off of leaks, presumably from disgruntled employees (of which there were many in the high attrition era), and he obviously had a journalitically oriented profit motive of his own. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
- jonathankoren 4y agoI love how people always try to run unpaid damage control for a documented shitstorm of ethical and professional misconduct. Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities? How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations. How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report? How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology. How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests. How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India? But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.
- bumblewax 4y agoDon’t meant to diminish anyone’s hard work in any way, but am I the only one fascinated by that excel sheet and how all those companies are managing to get funding? At least based on that short description of what they do.
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- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoTravis Kalanick was the real secret sauce behind Uber. He is an absolute legend. I do not think there was and will be another operator as skilled as him, knowing exactly how much gas to put in the demand and supply side to get a two sided marketplace off the ground so fast and so furiously, while being absolutely at ease in the chaos.
- wslh 4y agoDo you have specific information that is available about your assertion on Trevis?
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- mdorazio 4y agoGood job by the author assembling all this data, but starting out with statements like >Uber succeeded by hiring Really Smart People all over the world who were not afraid to tackle big challenges and who wanted to win. Does not instill confidence in the author’s take. Uber succeeded by willfully ignoring laws, massively subsidizing actual costs with VC money, and frequently doing morally questionable things. Yes, they scaled well and worked hard, too, but so do many startups that fail.
- sklargh 4y agoI’ve always perceived mid-tens Uber as a regulatory arbitrage and gov’t subsidy play (GPS, regulatory incompetence as subsidy) masquerading as a tech startup, with a sideline in loss-leader pricing (thx SoftBank). I don’t want to diminish the work of the technologists, I’m sure operating at this scale is very complex.
- myhrvold 4y agoYeah I think that's in part because so much of the cultural zeitgeist around Uber was on the policy implications, and the effect on consumer behavior etcetera. There were a ton of technical challenges in scaling. Uber was also one of the earliest corporate deployers of Node back in 2010 and ended up having one of the largest in the world arguably (have no idea to what extent they've replaced in the last few years). Uber's open source projects have led to spinout companies that have raised a lot of money successfully like Chronosphere and Tecton.ai . Halloween and then New Year's were huge traffic challenges and the Uber app (both driver and rider) really pushed the bounds of what was possible in the 2010s with respect to a two-side real-time marketplace for ridesharing and food delivery. (I worked at Uber 2014-2019 in engineering.)
- KyeRussell 4y agoYeah. This really sounds like she drank the kool-aid, and is probably a bit, or very, self-congratulatory seeing as she worked there. Uber only had the opportunity to prove its engineering prowess because nobody else had pockets that deep, and that much disdain for the law.
- andrewmutz 4y agoA list of fund raisings is not impressive. All it says is they are good at raising funds. The IPOs matter and exits matter. Revenue matters if it's sustainable. The list has two IPOs, which is great. But one is down 90% from it's IPO (aurora) and the other is down 98% from its IPO (bird scooters). Bird is only worth 75M today.
- HWR_14 4y agoBeing down from your IPO in percentage terms seems irrelevant. If FB was down 90% from it's IPO it would still be a $13 billion company. That's not a huge behemoth that instead grew by 4x since its IPO, but that's still respectable as an exit.
- ies7 4y agoFor me being down 90% from IPO means their exit strategy is to take the money by fooling a lot of retail investor.
- Ekaros 4y agoIt might be success for the scammers. But it is certainly failure for the retail investors and general public. And people involved maybe should be vilified. In the end I think real successes are those that deliver reasonable dividends.
- andrewmutz 4y agoFair enough. If you raise 100M, IPO for 10B, and then drop 90% to 1B, you still accomplished a great thing, I agree. You turned 100M investment into 1B. But Bird scooter raised more than 900M, and today is worth 75M. Yes, it's an IPO and that's great, but it destroyed a lot of wealth. Not clear who ended up holding the bag (VCs or the public investors), but either way it's a bad outcome
- HWR_14 4y agoIn this example, fair enough, Bird failed. It seems obvious from the 75 million valuation (and the being banned in city after city). And that was assuming a far smaller total raise than 900MM. They raised that much money? Their capital costs were really high, and it's possible they actually needed it. My point was mostly about the details, not claiming that Bird was a success.
- thdespou 4y agoI haven't used Uber. How does it work?
- SJetKaran 4y agoI wonder how this looks in relative terms to Netflix