Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 542 posts

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#341

Post by taormina »

partiallypro wrote: post #280
NathanKP wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be really interested in seeing what happens if Uber can't recover from the burn rate and make a sustainable business without self driving. I can see in the best possible scenario we end up with more cities like Austin, Texas that have their own nonprofit ride sharing app. I actually have huge respect for what Austin did in banning Uber and Lyft and making their own app (Ride Austin) that isn't designed to make i…

How is what Austin did good? It dissuades capital investment and innovation. City governments were why rides were so expensive and service was poor for decades upon decades. Taxi licensing and medallions priced out everyone. Soon Austin's city government could easily be "captured" and limit the number of drivers, driving up ride prices and stifling competition. That wouldn't be market demand driving (unlike surge pri…

Are you kidding? They proceeded to create an incubator of competitors with both of the biggest players out of the way. I've watched several of these apps grow and thrive because of the market that Uber & Lyft created and then abandoned.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#342

Post by pfarnsworth »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #281
pfarnsworth wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloggism at its worst. A blog post with an agenda making huge leaps of faith without bothering to keep a semblance of impartiality to try to show that Uber somehow conspired to steal technology. Without bothering to hear the other side. "From Waymo’s filings, it seems that they have Levandowski dead to rights on stealing their LiDAR designs." This is one of the dumbest quotes in the post. Of course the lawyer's job i…

Reading the deposition, under oath, of the forensics engineer who investigated the situation basically made me agree with the blog post and even that quote in particular. I think they have him dead to rights, here, barring a miracle of explaining away very, very suspicious behavior and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I would hope if I asked any of my source control clients to dump a bunch of stuff and then wal…

All testimony in a trial is under oath. You still haven't heard the testimony from any of the accused, and you already came to a conclusion based on the single testimony of the plaintiff? "Welp, that's good enough for me, I guess Levandowski is guilty. Let's wrap it up, everyone!" I hope you realize how ridiculous this is.

You don't know he dumped anything onto a USB drive. As far as the testimony knows, he plugged in a USB drive to the laptop. Any lawyer worth her salt would rip that to shreds. Do you know he didn't copy a movie onto the USB drive and watched it from the laptop? Do you know he didn't use the USB drive to copy information onto the hard drive? To qualify that as "Dead to rights" is particularly stupid.

The only person being unfair is the blogger, and you, by coming to a conclusion without hearing all the evidence. It's not solid analysis, it's lazy and premature.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#343

Post by jonathansorum »

eugeniub wrote: post #181
amptorn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly amazed that anybody bought "pivot to self-driving cars" as a strategy. Even if it did work and they built perfect working autonomous vehicle software, right now, legitimately, what's the next step? Were they going to buy and operate a fleet? Have random people sign up to rent their unused cars out as taxis?

> Were they going to buy and operate a fleet? I don't see what's the problem with that.

They will have to change their entire organization, structure and how they do business, to accommodate this. It's as "easy" as copying Apple's vertically integrated model - many have tried...

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#344

Post by usrusr »

GCA10 wrote: post #132
MagnumOpus wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Ventures owns only 6% of Uber. If they can drag this out sufficently, then Uber cannot IPO, will have burnt all their cash - and the whole company will be at the mercy of their biggest creditor who just got awarded a billion-dollar penalty payment.

The math still doesn't work. Right now 6% of Uber is worth about $4 billion, if you believe the latest venture valuation. (Make adjustments as you see fit.) If this is litigated until Uber collapses in a heap of dust, Google ends up owning 100% of a heap of dust. No money left to pay off the judgment. Most of the talent is gone, and the folks that remain are hardly motivated to rebuild the business for their new mast…

On the other hand, if they think that Uber is likely to go down anyways, a big settlement could allow Alphabet to recover a disproportional amount relative to other investors. Timing would be key, ideally they would want to settle while there is still cash, and use the legal battle as an excuse to find a buyer for their stake while there is still hope.

Thinking in conspiracy theory mode I wonder if it could be possible that Alphabet knew about the theft for longer than they admit, waiting for Uber's self driving projects to grow more valuable, kind of like a secret stake. Would that even be legal?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#345

Post by randyrand »

harryh wrote: post #303
habosa wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain further what was wrong with the calculation? This number is widely reported and yours is the first refutation I've seen.

The number was determined by looking at gross revenues (which is just Uber's cut of rides not the total that customers pay) and comparing it to corporate expenses (which is not the same thing as what it costs to deliver the rides). It's an almost non sensical calculation. The fact that it has been widely reported is a sad statement on the innumeracy of journalism.

^ to reiterate. This is a bit arbitrary since investor capital is not actually used this way, but the numbers would be:

- 41% of Uber's corporate expenses are paid for by the customer, 59% by investors

- 100% of non-corporate costs (driver, car, fuel, maintenance, etc) are paid for by the customer and 0% by investors.

But this instead somehow got interpreted as "the customer only pays for 41% of the ride cost". Which is completely false.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#346

Post by alpha_squared »

Eridrus wrote: post #129
themgt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at the time, knowing none of the characters or background I found Otto a very odd startup, one I almost didn't believe looked legit, and their rapid acquisition by Uber was one more "huh, strange" moment - how could they have bootstrapped out of nowhere and had tech worth that kind of money so fast? It's almost hard to believe Uber would be so brazen as to put something like this together, except that breaking t…

It doesn't seem that much stranger than the Cruise or Argo; people with real experience are getting snapped up like crazy without a product.

Can't find info on Argo (not looking properly, most likely), but Cruise raised over $18m before being bought (for ???). It looks like a solid effort to launch a product/startup that was snatched up. Otto was ~6 months and bought for $680m. I think there's a pretty large delta of strangeness there.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#347

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#348

Post by Retric »

svachalek wrote: post #333
xapata wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pool is profitable on average, but low margin, so any particular ride is likely to be an expense. Much like how a casino loses money on 49% of slots sessions.

Sliding off topic but I think that's more like 49% of pulls. The amount of time that it takes a slot machine to drive your odds of walking away richer down to hopeless levels is pretty short.

I have only played slots for a few hours, but my lifetime average is up ~3x and a few hundred dollars vs. what I put into the machines. So, I think they are set fairly close to break even as that's from a few dozen minor wins vs a single jackpot. Honestly, if every single time someone played for 3+ hours they where always down then fewer people would come back.

That said, they probably set machines in very high traffic areas to terrible odds to catch as many suckers as possible.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#350

Post by ghaff »

eco wrote: post #269
wavefunction wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"accidentally copied" Thank god for the honest among us.

It could have also been a simple mistake. Several Otto employees came from Waymo. Not hard to send email to John Smith instead of John Smith by mistake if you were in regular contact with that person as part of their role at a previous job doing largely the same thing.

I like autocomplete email addresses but I do worry that the day will come when I send something embarrassing or damaging to the wrong person. I never have afaik although I have sent a couple emails that resulted in a frantic follow up to please don't read the prior message.
Post reply on HN