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Good 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 wer

Good 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 ago
I’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 ago
  Yeah 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 ago
Yeah. 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.

sklargh 4y ago

I’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 ago
Yeah 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 ago

Yeah. 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.