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

361–370 of 542 posts

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#361

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

ambicapter wrote: post #316
NathanKP wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can understand that. Honestly, the non profit / coop thing is just a big part of Austin culture. Not only are food coops a pretty big deal in Austin, but when I lived in Austin even the electricity company that I got my power from was a coop ( https://www.pec.coop/ ) and if the coop made too much money it redistributed the profits back out as credits to member accounts. I generally ended up with one out of twe…

> if the coop made too much money it redistributed the profits back out as credits to member accounts. This is great and all, but wouldn't that money be more effectively utilized maintaining or upgrading the grid or investing in renewable energy? Seems like the co-op model never really invests in progress.

"never"? The (UK) Co-operative Bank was 99% powered by renewables in 2014.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#362

Post by halflings »

payne92 wrote: post #109

I'll be curious to see if the Uber-Otto acquisition gets strained. It's common for the acquired company to make specific "representations and warranties", particularly around IP. "We own our IP and didn't steal it" is typical, and some percentage of the deal is held back for ~1-2 years in case there is a problem. But if there's fraud, all bets are off. Does Uber throw Otto under the bus? It would be "The Uber Way", b…

The lawsuit is against Uber as they own Otto. I don't think Uber can just "throw Otto under the bus" at this point.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#363

Post by aianus »

catshirt wrote: post #313
aianus wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Settlements are not admissions of guilt.

if your definition of guilt is "found guilty by a jury"- then sure. but because OP claimed they were "breaking the law", whether or not they were found guilty is irrelevant (by your definition). that is, just because one was not found guilty by deliberation does not mean one didn't break the law.

They may or may not have broken the law but asimov_ is trying to present settlements as proof of lawbreaking which is invalid.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#364

Post by londons_explore »

objclxt wrote: post #217
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by that? Could they actually be awarded ownership of Uber if the damages were larger than a cash amount Uber could pay? Or do you mean indirectly, like, Uber gets found liable for say $10bn, and Google offers isntead to buy a controlling share of Uber and then forgive the liability?

> Could they actually be awarded ownership of Uber if the damages were larger than a cash amount Uber could pay? Sure, although that's an extremely unlikely outcome. Normally the company would be liquidated to pay the judgment (this is basically what happened in Bollea (Hogan) v Gawker - Gawker couldn't afford the damages, so had to declare bankruptcy and sell itself to pay for them).

It amounts to the same thing though - when the company gets liquidated, Google can buy all the assets and continue to operate the business, knowing that all the money they pay will be going right back into their own pockets.

Obviously, it runs the risk someone else will come along and buy the company instead, but any other buyer will have significant ongoing IP concerns by using google tech vs re-engineering stuff. Hence, Google will probably outbid other buyers since the company has more utility to them than to others.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#365

Post by Dylan16807 »

jsemrau wrote: post #321
dcosson wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of the comment was as kind of an upper bound. For instance if drivers made 100% (or more) of what the passenger pays, then Uber would be obviously not breaking even. At 65-75% it's feasible that at a certain scale Uber's cut would make them profitable.

Feasible but not likely. From this 25% to 35% Uber will still do this 1. Run their operating business - Maintain data centers - Maintain a global web infrastructure - Maintain the app 2. Run campaigns to compete in markets with strong local competition - Europe (Hailo, Car2Go, etc) - Asia (Didi, Ola, Grab, etc) 3. Finance their ongoing operations - Equity financing expensive - Debt financing hard to get at this stage…

A lot of that is about expansion. You don't need to factor it in to a question of whether they can run a viable business on 30%.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#366

Post by londons_explore »

muninn_ wrote: post #120
cma wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or they could just buy Uber. The thing is they likely wouldn't want to own Uber, especially considering it's just burning through mega-cash.

Google has mega-cash, and is happy to burn through it if long term returns look plausible.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#367

Post by fernandotakai »

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.

one of my bosses had my personal email and my work email on his auto complete. for some reason, he kept emailing me work stuff to my personal email because autocomplete recommended my personal email first (and he never bothered to check).

i had to ask him more than a couple of times to delete my personal email from his agenda so this wouldn't happen again.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#368

Post by NelsonMinar »

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.

Google has been the target of infiltration by staet actors. At least once we know for certain, with the incident in China, and presumably other times.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#369

Post by fernandotakai »

memmcgee wrote: post #175
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…

Uber's drivers aren't really fans of them though, nor are they loyal to a single company. Uber could disappear tomorrow and all its drivers would be fine on Lyft.

lyft is US only, uber is not US only. if uber disappeared tomorrow, thousands of drivers would be unemployed outside the us.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#370

Post by londons_explore »

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.

Google corporate accounts might behave the same as gmail accounts. When an employee leaves, the account is disabled, and all emails bounce.

Hence, if jsmith left google, emails to jsmith@google.com would bounce, and bounce messages from google are returned as SMTP errors before the mail server accepts the contents of the message.

Post reply on HN