viscanti

35 ms·

361.
by viscanti 11y ago
> You say this as if Uber isn't heavily involved in lobbying for their own benefit. No. I say it to point out that there are laws that aren't for the public good. At that point, we're free to have an open discussion about
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by viscanti 11y ago
They did. It's only been a few months since that regulation was dropped.
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by viscanti 11y ago
> All the laws regulating taxi-like services were enacted because of abuses before they existed. I'm not convinced. What does the hour pre-booking requirement in Miami do to prevent previous abuses? What does the business test that
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by viscanti 11y ago
A litmus test for telling how corrupt a city/country is, is to look at how much additional regulation they try to use to block companies like Uber. Things like Las Vegas and Miami requiring pre-booking an hour early are prime examples
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by viscanti 11y ago
Things like UberHop, where there's a pre-defined route seem like a logical first step. There's likely a large jump from that to fully autonomous vehicles that can drive on any road in any situation. But in that world, Uber (or Ube
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by viscanti 11y ago
The current technology is incredibly dependent upon high quality maps of the area. In theory that's a solvable problem, but it requires breakthroughs in mapping (it's prohibitively expensive to map to the degree needed for large a
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by viscanti 11y ago
Also, it's unclear that big companies would be willing to hire 100% of the people who want to work in tech. For some, working at a startup might be the best way to learn and improve. Google might not blindly extend 100k+ more offers, a
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by viscanti 11y ago
> If you're trying to raise $500M, you don't have many choices. Every other unicorn in the world suggests otherwise. This is the first large round by either GM or the Saudi prince. The Saudi prince isn't even a strategic i
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by viscanti 11y ago
The point isn't that they've never had VCs or 'smart money' (we could debate Carl Icahn's smartness for tech), it's that their latest round of $750M didn't have any. They have GM and a Saudi prince making
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by viscanti 11y ago
That answers why a second VC might join a round. It doesn't explain how rounds work in general though. I'm not convinced we can hand-wave over the first VC joining. They still have criteria they're using, and they seem willin
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by viscanti 11y ago
I've also seen hundreds of Lyft billboards around SF along with their promotions with the Giants. So they've got the poor performance of their primary product (they claim that Line accounts for the majority of their trips) along w
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by viscanti 11y ago
> Let's assume self-driving cars take off in <5 years. That means that this isn't "winner take all". It means its a commodity that's going to be driven down to razor thin margins. In that case, neither Lyft no
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by viscanti 11y ago
Their continued spending spree to incentivize riders suggests otherwise. Uber seems to only give a first trip incentive, but I've gotten hundreds of dollars worth of free trips, 50% off trips, etc with Lyft. If riders aren't stick
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by viscanti 11y ago
Actually it seems like black car regulations designed for protecting taxi. There's a law there that requires a driver to drive back to their "base" before picking up again. That means the Uber drivers often need to spend an e
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by viscanti 11y ago
But he's defending against a strawman. Almost no one is arguing for flat payment where everyone makes the same amount of money. What most want is equality for opportunity (something that YC and other VCs might give). In many ways, star
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by viscanti 11y ago
> Hint -- think about the really good (US-born) software engineers in SF you know. How many grew up in dense urban areas? Barely any, I'm willing to bet. Most are from the middle-class 'burbs, and didn't go to decrepit urb
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by viscanti 11y ago
I guess I don't see how liquidity effect and network effect are different here. If there aren't enough riders then there aren't enough drivers. If there aren't enough drivers then pickup times are too high and the servic
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by viscanti 11y ago
They would if the cost of hiring someone to help save money on taxes cost more than it saved. It's not about a sense of fairness. If paying someone to save on taxes is a bad investment, people stop doing that.
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by viscanti 11y ago
> According to public information, Lyft is losing approximately 3 to 5 times the amount of money per ride. And it sounds like they're struggling to gain market share even given those subsidies.
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by viscanti 11y ago
I'm not sure it's a sexist ranting though. Zuckerberg just faced a similar criticism (about the precedent he is setting by only taking half the allotted time). I suspect that most CEOs would face criticisms if they were about to s
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by viscanti 11y ago
What about Lyft doing apparently 3x more cancellations of Uber rides? http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/uber-lyft-slap-fight/
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by viscanti 11y ago
Or Uber wants to provide a reliable ride to riders, and they have to make certain assumptions in their dispatching algorithms in order to do that. Or they want to make sure that anyone can get a ride in any neighborhood in a city and driver
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by viscanti 11y ago
> Look at how he lives You mean buying multiple homes around his home for privacy? http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24285169/mark-zuckerb... Or you mean driving his neighbors crazy with his over-the-top c
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by viscanti 11y ago
Well, there's a difference between being able to work for multiple systems, and having all or nearly all drivers actually doing that. Is there anything to suggest that all or nearly all drivers actually do that? In SF i see most uber d
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by viscanti 11y ago
The network effect was just explained above. The more drivers on the system, the shorter the ETAs. The shorter the ETAs, the more riders want to use that system. The more riders on the system, the less downtime between each ride for drivers
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by viscanti 11y ago
If anything, I think the Hailo case shows that these drivers will have a tough go of things. Hailo managed to get significant funding, had their own in-house engineering team and still had to pull out of all of North America. It's a di
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by viscanti 11y ago
At $2B, I think the money talks. There's certainly some threshold where dollar amount matters. It's trivial to throw away a dollar. There are very few places that can afford to be as flippant with $2B. At some point, you're v
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by viscanti 11y ago
A small investment of 2B.
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by viscanti 11y ago
Sure. But why don't we blame literally every other company who is worse and isn't giving any better opportunity. It would be fantastic if everyone had hundreds or thousands of options and they could compete for the best opportunit
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by viscanti 11y ago
If a company grows significantly in a year, the earnings for their most recent week would be more typical of their "size" than what they've made throughout the year. In that case, what they've made over the past year mig

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