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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

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Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#91

Post by erikpukinskis »

jacknoble wrote: post #48
salimmadjd wrote: post #46

I actually think this might be a blessing in disguise for Uber. I always argued self-driving cars would destroy Uber should Apple or Google want to enter this space. Why? Because self-driving cars are basically a fleet service driven by a software. Once you remove the driver (where Uber spent so much acquiring) The only differentiator is the consumer facing experience. Neither Uber or Lyft will have as much power as…

The drivers are going to be removed from the equation no matter what though.

The drivers will get removed from the "bring me from X to Y and leave me alone" equation, but drivers who can do slightly more complex things while driving around (pick up flowers here, then get my son from Judo practice, and practice his French with him in the car) will be a huge market, bigger than the current rideshare market, and a better moneymaker for drivers.

Uber just needs to think of themselves as a mobile staffing company and they'll be fine. Unfortunately, staffing is a market where "Move fast and be an asshole" isn't a great philosophy so they'll need a bit of a temperament change to survive.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#92

Post by ryandrake »

ghughes wrote: post #84
ryandrake wrote: post #71

> By the time Otto was acquired, they had 91 employees. This seems like a lot of salary commitment to take on via self-funding by Otto’s four co-founders (all ex-Google). Were these founders previously Google executives or "9th engineer from the left" individual contributors? If you were getting exec pay, it might be semi-believable that you could come out of it and be able to self-fund salaries for 91 employees, but…

According to Bloomberg, veteran Waymo employees were paid "F-you money". https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reaso...

Thanks for the link. And they self-funded a startup, wow. Waymo money than I'll ever see...

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#93

Post by cvwright »

mmanfrin wrote: post #59

Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago? I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

They have some pretty cool stuff for monitoring their internal systems. For example, this distributed live forensics system:

GRR Rapid Response https://github.com/google/grr http://grr-response.blogspot.com/

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#95

Post by cma »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #86
techthroway443 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Uber be awarded licensing terms they could "live with" for code they (allegedly) outright stole from a competitor?

Because lawsuits can drag on for years (if not decades!) and Google is a major investor in Uber. Google/Waymo might not want to actually destroy the company.

But if Google won a huge judgement they would outright own the company and not just be an investor.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#97

Post by harryh »

beefman wrote: post #89
harryh wrote: post #29

Uber passengers only pay 41% of the cost of trips, with investor capital making up the difference FWIW this assertion (which isn't really core to the central thesis of the post, but still) is wrong. That number comes from https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/12/01/2180647/the-taxi-unic... but the author of that story misread the data. Uber only counts their cut as revenue not the full cost of the ride. Despite this repet…

What is the correct percentage?

AFAIK there is not enough publicly available data to answer this question. But total_corporate_revenue(1) / total_corporate_spend(2) is an almost nonsensical way to calculate that number.

(1) which is not the same thing, at all, as the total amount customers are paying for rides

(2) which is not the same thing, at all, as the cost of providing all uber rides

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#98

Post by stale2002 »

hangonhn wrote: post #60
psbp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably mean network effects. Facebook is the prime example. For Uber, a critical mass in users and drivers makes it hard to unseat.

There is no network effect here. Each additional driver does not increase the value of the network to the other drivers and similarly for passengers. Uber and Lyft are old-fashioned market makers. They increased the pool of suppliers and consumers and connected the groups. In cities where both Uber and Lyft exist, substituting Uber for Lyft and vice versa does not change the value the driver or passenger derives from…

Yes, that is called a two-sided market/network effect.

Each driver increases value for riders, and each rider increases value for drivers. This two sides.

A 1 sided network is facebook. A two sided market is like the video game industry (more video games are good for gamers and more gamers are good for video game devs)

For taxi apps, imagine if there was only 1 driver in SF. That wouldn't be a good experience for consumers. Thus, network effect.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#99

Post by dantiberian »

harryh wrote: post #29

Uber passengers only pay 41% of the cost of trips, with investor capital making up the difference FWIW this assertion (which isn't really core to the central thesis of the post, but still) is wrong. That number comes from https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/12/01/2180647/the-taxi-unic... but the author of that story misread the data. Uber only counts their cut as revenue not the full cost of the ride. Despite this repet…

Thanks, I've updated the post.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#100

Post by aresant »

- Google's recently revised goal for their program is to license to existing manufacturers vs. building a car. (1)

- It's unlikely that whichever automotive company achieves autonomy first is going to immediately get into the ride sharing game, except perhaps Tesla but they don't have enough manufacturing capability (yet, or anytime soon) to be a global threat to Uber.

- Uber is never going to be a manufacturer but they have partnered with Volvo and Daimler (2) recently who seem very amenable to licensing / leveraging third party tech to continue to be competitive in selling automobiles.

- Why does Uber need to build autonomous tech vs license it? Are they concerned that the Google / Ford partnership is going to leave them out / decimated?

(1) http://www.techtimes.com/articles/188654/20161213/alphabet-l...

(2) http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/31/14453704/uber-daimler-part...

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