When I try to balance the elements, it frankly looks like an enormous grift. Some key early investors have probably made out really well, but at what cost to others involved?
Not that the taxi industry didn't need disruption - it desperately needed a modern ride calling and fare estimating feature. But being well regulated and having to compete with a maverick service that simply ignored rules meant that the taxi industry lost while Uber gained.
Drivers for Uber have come out losers as well, earning much less than expected.
Passengers did well at first, but surge pricing and eventual regulatory costs eroded that gain as well.
Late investors? The jury is still out on them, but likely they will be losers too.
Who won?
I think you're way too pessimistic here:
(1) A whole industry of rent seekers (medallion owners) was mostly run off
(2) The taxi experience in cities other than NYC, Chicago, and SF got a million times better. Before Uber in a city like Nashville you call for a taxi and maybe one shows up at some point. Since Uber you can reliably get a ride whenever you want. And that's not even talking about discrimination.
(3) Uber caused a dramatic decline in drunk driving. Likely because of (2)
(4) It allowed people to make some money with a flexibility that traditional jobs don't offer
For me, Uber/Lyft has definitely had the biggest positive impact on my life out of any tech company in the last decade. The only close competitor would be Android/iPhone. I don't know if Uber is worth the ~60 billion that they were last valued at, but they definitely fill a legitimate role.
That is a good point I hadn't considered until now.
I remember back in my college days in Champaign, IL right before Uber's debut, I would have to call three separate cab companies a day ahead of time and then the day of to get a ride to the airport, and only one would maybe show up.
I ended up befriending an Ethiopian cab driver that was really kind and responsible and only then this challenge came to an end.
It wouldn't be fair to NYC and Chicago to compare them to SF. In my mind, the completely horrible broken experience of the SF taxi system was what created Uber & friends. I've been living in SF pre-Uber and having moved from a big city, the taxi system just drove me nuts, I could not understand why it was that fucked up. If it were as good as it is/was in NYC, prob we would've never seen Uber.
When I moved back my drivers license had expired and since I live in a different state now I will have to take the driving test all over again. I've been here for almost three years now and I never bothered buying a car because I can get anywhere in town for less than $15 within a few minutes of requesting a ride. My monthly rideshare costs are about $450, which is comparable to the cost of owning a car. There are some inconveniences but it has totally changed how I get around and where I choose to live.
I travel a lot internationally, and in so many countries I have been able to just get out of the airport, open my app, and hop on a ride—it's fascinating and amazing what a revolution it has been in barely 5 or so years.
Another aspect that's not discussed much is the drastic reduction of cognitive load. Earlier moving around in a city would require lot of planning - route planning, parking etc,. All of that is now a thing of history. And don't get me started on how ridiculously inefficient is car ownership and how mentally and physically taxing commute driving is!
That's a unnecessarily simple reading of this situation, don't you think?
Lyft's innovation was "regulatory arbitrage".
Uber's innovation was burning investor money.
There are times when I've pondered, "Gee, what could have happened if I had finished that POC?" But I don't think I would have ever thought to break the law, burn investors, or exploit drivers.
You could also talk about how it disrupted the taxi medallion market, which was an older solution to the trust problem of getting into a car with a stranger, but for many cities that wasn't really in need of disruption, just optimization.
Do you think the public markets are going to allow Uber to keep bleeding this much cash year over year?
Prices will go up on consumers just as Uber has completely dominated the market and effectively has no competition. They’ll be able to charge whatever they want.
Taxi regulation was so comprehensively captured and rider hostile, and this was true for so long, that there was never any reason to believe it would improve. If all Uber achieved was coming close to burning that entire industry structure to the ground Uber is a massive boon to everyone who wants a ride and doesn’t want to deal with lying, cheating, lying, racist taxi service.
What about areas that had little to no taxi dispatch service before Uber/Lyft?
And what about regions where supply of cab driving licenses was artificially constrained?
- could refuse service based on factors like customer's race without repercussions.
- accept nothing but cash as payment.
- take the "scenic" route when they realize you're from out of town.
I'm not happy about the way Uber got here but I also don't want to go back to the world before it.
Before Uber, traveling abroad in another country meant getting scammed by taxi drivers. After Uber, there is now a safe, trustworthy, and familiar mode of transportation when in a foreign place.
Note: Lyft is only domestic.
Uber has revolutionized transport in all of the areas it has disrupted. Bad comes along with the good, but for consumers, the good outweighs the bad (at least for now while the prices are VC subsidized).
Uber, for example, sucks from your phone access to your camera, all of your contacts, your location at all times, your microphone at all times, and the ability to dial or text from the phone itself.
At the same time, all of the people in your contacts have their privacy productized as well, involuntarily and silently.
The ride isn't the product. The riders are.
Are you sure you’re outside the bubble? Because the taxi industry could have done with some improvement, but it didn’t “desperately” need “disruption”. People got from a to b just fine, and drivers got paid.
The only thing that desperately needs disruption is the destructive influence SV has on societies that were doing just fine before its “disruption”.
It was heavily unionized and the only people winning were at the top of unions, everyone else was losing. Yes, it desparately needed disruption.
Edit: VC is actually not passing to VC, but larger investment funds like PE.
This is very unlikely.
I would strongly recommend that you not ride an electric scooter. Consider the diameter of the wheels. If you hit any pothole or rail or anything which has a lip higher than HALF the diameter of that little wheel, you're going to go flying over the handlebars. If you ride it every day for months or years, you're going to crash, no matter how careful you are, at least on SF streets.
Or, there's no hills, and you go your own pace, and it's fine.
Having tried both I do feel bicycles are safer - those tiny scooter wheels shake me to pieces.
Dangerous in what way? By what measure?
> public transit
How does the previous danger measurement compare to your average ride on public transit?
He apparently accepted the ride before cancelling it, because the pickup and drop-off addresses were different. I got a $6.50 charge instead of the normal $5.00 cancellation charge. I wrote into Uber about it, and instead of refunding me $1.50 they refunded to full $6.50 amount.
Sometimes my Uber fares are super cheap. I paid $3.00 to go a mile in snowy weather in Denver the other day. It was a shared ride but nobody picked up.
I think Uber is spending lots of money, and could probably make their numbers better by tightening up. They'd lose some of my rides, but probably less than half of them. In more than half of them public transportation is inconvenient or unavailable for the full route (the last mile problem is relevant to me).
I don't think they have hit true market dynamics yet (rides are subsidized), so comfortable might be a strong word here.
There have been a number of "Uber is cheaper than taxis because they are losing money" newspaper articles, but they usually point to the loss of the company as a whole.
A duopoly the likes of which not seen since that of Yellow and Checker.
It's just as easy to rent a self-driving Camry from Toyota.
Oh and then there's the thing where Google and Apple and probably a hundred startup hopefuls scraping APIs will try to disintermediate them at the device.
Think credit cards, collaboration with last-mile transportation (Uber + Bird), discounts on restaurants, things of that nature. They can and are working towards building more of a brand ecosystem.
Who is going to pay for these discounts? Uber's investors?
Given the money the entire industry has spent on self driving cars and gotten little reward for, I don't think anyone is getting replaced for a very long time.
How fast will you be gone once the nice rewards give way to price increases necessary to reach a sustainable business covering expenses, let alone profitability?
He famously missed the dot com boom. And in the middle of it, gave a private speech about exactly why, about how few of those companies were likely to be around in a few years even if the internet were exactly as successful as hoped for.
He was widely derided as being behind the times, out of date, and so on for a couple of years. But looking back now, he looks prescient.
If you are a value investor and don't understand how to value it, don't invest.
I don't think he regrets his conservatism. From 1990 through now, BRK.A is up 4,200%, while the NASDAQ composite is up only 1,500%.
- facebook and google sure, but how many are there of those who didn't make it?
- sounds like a fear of missing out.
- Buffet didn't invest in Microsoft because he didn't "get it". His idea, I believe, is: "it's ok to pass on investments". He's looking for "sure things".
Personally, I think the entire thing is ridiculous. 120B ? for what? 2 of my friends are uber drivers and hate every second of it, that's worth that kind of money? or the fact that they have an app. What do they have?
Market share? As soon as somebody gives me the same or slightly less price, I'll push a button on that app instead. Why didn't they go public for so long? Are they trying to rescue their investments now? I don't know. Don't care.
It's not the type of product I would miss. it's just a taxi.
When Facebook IPO'd did they already have the self serve ad product rolled out? I believe Google did not and if you could imagine that future then it might have been easier to see a bright future. I didn't see Android coming until the iPhone came out as another example.
at the moment of their IPO
I remember getting so much joy out of requesting an Uber back in the earlier days. Nowadays I get about as much joy out of Uber(pool) as using the bus, sometimes less because the wait time has increased so much.
https://www.recode.net/2018/12/12/18134882/lyft-uber-ride-ca...
i get that you want to equate homeless folks on transit with violence but you did a really bad job of it.
One must be stuck in the 50s to think that individual buyers have any power over corporations.
To what degree does Uber's main business have seasonality? Are people going more places when it's nicer out in the Northern hemisphere?
This is if my two options are walking or staying dry/warm in a car.
Is 1 or 2 spikes in a season that lasts months going to carry you, especially when supply is limited?
Every winter India witnesses a massive influx of westerns to its popular beach holiday locations of India (Goa, Pondicherry, etc.,). Similarly to the hill-stations of north India during summer.
Regulatory capture seems like the only real route to sustainable profits with their existing main product. What they really need is something where they are the only one or two legal providers for a locale.
A different model of what they are doing is using their massive revenue growth (not profit) to raise money to fund a search for real pricing power with food delivery, shared bikes, and Uber freight.
that's nowhere near the cost of acquisition for a driver. having worked on driver acquisition, i can tell you it's hundreds of dollars, not $5.
Uber trying to raise it's fees is an invitation for someone else to jump in with lower fees and compete. You don't need any kind of national reputation, taxi companies never did. You can just compete city by city.
That is lack of pricing power.
"A different model of what they are doing is using their massive revenue growth (not profit) to raise money to fund a search for real pricing power with food delivery, shared bikes, and Uber freight."
I suspect this isn't far from the truth.
Though they are really offering higher driver pay for a limited time on signup. To compete I'd just offer that higher driver pay all the time by taking less fees than Uber. Not correcting you or anything, just embroidering.
Over 10 years or so, this devolves into the taxi business, which without medallions is very low margin. [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-...
Grocery stores, restaurants, and taxis (especially without medallions) are famously low margin, highly competitive business. [1]
Single passenger ride hailing looks a lot like a low margin business.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-...
Uber can offer those drivers $10 not to switch and their capital will last longer than yours.
They can't actually do that because it messes with the contractor thing, but they can do what they are doing with the rewards for a certain amount of availability.
But still I could just halve the amount I take from the transaction and give it to drivers. That's surely better for the drivers.
Moat is about them having a long term advantage that makes it hard to compete against them. Lots of capital isn't enough in 2019.
Long term it seems like the restaurant business, where most are just scrounging for minimal profits all the time.
And, I'm not knocking that that how business works, I just think we probably acknowledge that many businesses have little interest in actual market competition and letting the best overall product win. Free markets are discussed and desired in theory, but people don't really want free competition in practice.
It's more of an "emilinate burdens on me as a business, but don't make me actually compete" economic system.
Furthermore, having a large network of riders and drivers enables lower wait times and better carpooling utilization.
If they hadn't, the entertainment companies would have just taken all their profits.
I don't know what Uber's equivalent moat is, but they are desperate to find it.
Taxi service is not a good candidate for a global monopoly - because most rides are for local population and there is no need for a global trust. Each dispatcher needs to compete locally. This is different from for ecample AirBnb - where the customers come from away and need some global entity to trust.
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Uber also does not seem to do very well in the self-driving car competition, which could potentially save it. What is left is maybe some data play and maybe being useful for spy agencies - a global entity knowing, and also being able to manipulate, delay or maybe even deny in some cases, communication in remote states (but that probably would rely on it being a monopoly). But I am waiting for this to end bad. The SoftBank way of growing the valuation by doubling their investments seems really crazy.
I also wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla enter this space, given their advanced self-driving capability (frankly the one that has come closest to a normal consumer as myself).
Re: Lyft vs Uber, I go for the cheapest usually, even though I know there are other differences. Many people who really care about the difference are mostly drivers. Many friends of mine who use both apps mainly use it to price differentiate.
https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...
I for one am excited by the prospect of their failure.
It's been done before.
Disclaimer: I am a SWE at Uber.
So I understand why the salary portion might be high, to compensate for some of that risk.
I like Uber as a service but I don’t really care how they do, except that a friend works at their AI lab.
Supposedly Uber's original pitch to early stage investors was that they were going to grow so fast that they would quickly put all the competition out of business, and then, having achieved a monopoly, would begin to jack their fares way up. I don't know if that's true, but it's at least the only hypothesis that would seem to fit all the publicly available information. If it is true, then that would imply that they never intended to sell below cost over a long time period. It would also explain why they've been flailing for ancillary revenue sources since just about the exact moment it became clear that the story in their main market was going to be one of trench warfare rather than blitzkrieg.
Certainly this didn't just happen to me. I wonder how many people are in my situation and how many users Uber has lost. It is nice they are devoting engineers to far-flung projects like food delivery, helicopter rides, ML-as-a-service projects (Michaelangelo), and GPU Databases (AresDB) but I honestly just wish they would fix their main money maker -- ride hailing.
I know this sounds like a sob story, but here are real points:
1. Cant add a credit card, just get a generic error. No error code that I can give customer service, just a generic error.
1b. For a while, didnt even get a credit card entry form, just the stupid green scanner box to photo-scan the card, which didnt work on any of my cards despite me having a top of the line iPhoneX camera
2. Cant add any credit cards no matter how many I try. Reach out to customer service and I get a generic response "I see you cant log into your app."...umm no. I'm already in the app adding a credit card obviously I can log in.
3. CAN add credit card, thanks for customer service, probably only because I started adding Dara Khosrowshahi @dkhos on my irate twitter messages....but when I try to hail a ride, "Payment Failure" regardless of how many cards I try. This is the worst error, because it is a silent runtime failure ...who wants to risk those when you're at the airport desperately needing a ride.
4. Pickup locations stale (SFO Airport changed ride hailing to the roof of the airport. Lyft immediately updated their app but Uber had stale pickup locations. Lyft had a service rep standing at the pickup location helping customers with the transition, Uber was nowhere on this -- in their own home city airport!)
5. Customer service provides useless generic responses and never closes a ticket. I understand customer service was outsourced to another company, which I wont name.
6. I'm a VIP customer in a sense. 2000 rides in a short period of time! Come on...if you are going to ignore people at least see if they are an early adopter / megauser and court your top customers!
7. Tried the pre-pay option using multiple cards...Bam! Payment Failure. Please take my money!
8. Within the span of a year in 2017, I used Uber multiple times at airports in SF, LA, NYC, Singapore, Taiwan. Given all the ML prowess at the firm, don't they realize I'm a price-insensitive business user? Come on...this is the cohort you want on your platform. Didn't all the ML segment me into the most valuable cohort?
Sometimes I feel like i'm trapped in some bad A/B test they are doing. I even tried to delete the entire account and start anew with a new email and new credit card, but it almost seems like my name itself has been blacklisted. No response from customer service.
If Uber/Lyft were public companies, i'd be shorting Uber and go long on Lyft. I love both, but I can already see the disarray.
Disclaimer: I am a SWE working at Uber.