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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

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Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#381

Post by chx »

GCA10 wrote: post #118
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.

They'd own a broken company. Bear in mind that this sort of litigation can run five to ten years if you let the lawyers on both sides wrestle to their hearts' content. It becomes all consuming. Executives spend much of their time preparing for depositions, tussling about what ambiguous documents mean, tussling about what obvious documents might mean if you try hard to misinterpet them, etc. It's no fun to be working…

> tussling about what obvious documents might mean if you try hard to misinterpet them,

In this case, it really sees this is cut high and dry. We will see but this really looks bad.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#382

Post by memmcgee »

fernandotakai wrote: post #369
memmcgee wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did not know that. But I'm sure there are plenty of foreign startups that would pick up the slack. There's no secret sauce in Uber's tech. It would be fitting to see Uber fail due to hubris.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#383

Post by londons_explore »

_audakel wrote: post #230
d--b wrote: post #32

It's not a bigger bombshell than what was already in the news. We know what stealing means. The guy is an engineer at Waymo and plugs a USB stick in a laptop to download 9GB of code. And he hoped to get away with this? I'm pretty sure everyone at Google knew, they were just waiting to time it right. "Hey, what about now? When Uber is taking fire from all directions?"

i can't believe someone as smart as he is would just blatantly stick in a usb. With how much money he was going to make he could have researched some more annomous ways to get it. Not the least would be to intercept a team members auth/pw and use that to access the data.

He had a Windows laptop according to the filing.

Engineers rarely use windows. He was also a manager at Google. Very techy folk don't take on manager responsibilities because it quickly saps time.

Both those things tell me he was more of a people person than a technical person.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#384

Post by memmcgee »

angus-prune wrote: post #254
memmcgee wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be fundraising awfully quick for a company that has plenty of cash on hand. They'd probably have to fund-raise again or go public to pay off the damages.

One of their strategies is to starve competitors of investment by hoovering up as much as they can themselves. This doesn't mean that they're in a good financial position, just that the signalling is different from other VC funded companies.

True. But I wonder if more VCs are going to put money in smaller localized ride sharing startups now that Uber is getting such a bad rap.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#385

Post by foxylad »

Applejinx wrote: post #240
r00fus wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when Google, Apple, Amazon or other company with a solid cloud app team steps in? Austin's homegrown competitors may not be fearful, but one of the existing majors could single-handedly shatter Uber's image with a half-decent app, esp if it's integrated with something like Google Maps or Apple Wallet or equivalent feed.

Why could this not be a public service? Sort of like the very public highways the cars drive on.

What are you, communist or something?!

I read a poignant comment on Twitter the other day, about how nowadays public libraries and fire services would never be funded - perhaps we'd give illiterate people tax credits for buying books, and insurance companies would have private fire engines.

The neo-liberal agenda of not allowing any public entity to provide services that could possibly compete with a private corporation has succeeded too well.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#386

Post by mulmen »

ivraatiems wrote: post #296
mulmen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally do this. It's also not that great. Want to pay $12.00 for a cold $8.00 sandwich? Safeway has its own delivery service in some markets and so does Amazon. Instacart does Costco delivery as well. Costco itself has business delivery at least and possibly other delivery options.

Yeah, but for Costco it actually makes sense. Costco sells items that are big, bulky and hard to transport, and they already do a ton of logistics - supply chain stuff is a big part of why they remain profitable. Uber is trying to do something that other people are already doing, better, for less cost, without experience. It isn't working out.

Does supply chain expertise really carry over to last mile delivery though? Especially hot food delivery. Seems like Uber's strength is getting to where the customer actually is instead of putting the product where it is most economical.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#387

Post by xanderstrike »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #376
jsemrau wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everything in that list, aside from 2 (advertising and expansion), 7 (fleet operations), and 8 (self-driving R&D, which is honestly well outside of their current business) is dirt cheap in comparison to their operating costs - paying drivers, vehicle purchasing, insurance, and maintenance, and buying fuel. Service and hardware businesses have completely different cost structures as compared to tech companies. Think a…

> vehicle purchasing, insurance, and maintenance, and buying fuel

These are all things Uber does not do. It comes out of the cut the driver takes home, not Uber's revenue.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#388

Post by chx »

michaelt wrote: post #232
GCA10 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The math still doesn't work. If the article's predictions come true, gaining control of Uber isn't Google's only motivation. They have a secondary motivation: To set a precedent that serves as an example to other people who have the opportunity to sell or buy their trade secrets. If there's a $680 million prize for a successful theft, and people think the chances of being caught are low, you'll need a big penalty to…

> If there's a $680 million prize for a successful theft, and people think the chances of being caught are low, you'll need a big penalty to act as an effective deterrent.

The problem here is the prize. It's not a paltry few hundred millions. Just in the USA the yearly car sales are above 500 billion and we are talking about disrupting that big time. Really, really big time. It is not unreasonable to think that private car ownership will become deprecated in 20-30 years. Do you think Google won't be happy to burn the $260M they invested in Uber and a hundred more for lawyers over the years to make sure Uber doesn't get an illicit advantage when the time comes of who will be the doorkeeper?

Can you imagine -- and I know Google can -- the possibilities of an ad company selling all the cars there is? Or the software therein which amounts to the same. Your self driving taxi today is free you just need to listen / watch / immerse / whatever happens by then to ads enroute. You can't even count the trillions they would make.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#389

Post by jimmywanger »

NathanKP wrote: post #158
jimmywanger wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because I prefer the non profit approach that respects drivers and gives them a much higher percentage For now. I generally prefer for-profit approaches because their motivations are far more transparent. They want to make money for the investors. Non-profits exist to serve the wishes of the donors, which may be opaque. For instance, the Ride Austin investors might suddenly decide that they really want to focus on…

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…

With for-profit enterprises, there's generally an objective measure of how well you're doing, the bottom line.

Non profits, you can get a lot of people arguing about how to best fulfill the intents of the non-profit. In that situation, whoever argues the most persuasively or loudly wins, and it's the customers that suffer.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#390

Post by dboreham »

dookahku wrote: post #17
empath75 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a stupid moonshot play. They should have just focused on being a really good taxi company.

They're not. Every major car company plus competitors are focusing on self-driving cars. Why pay a human what a machine can do for cheaper? Uber's future depends on being first with self driving cars. Being a good taxi company in the 21st century will mean good at self-driving cars.

Except self-driving cars (in the sense that people in the Silicon Valley Bubble mean) don't exist and likely won't for decades.
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