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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#61

Post by phamilton »

us0r wrote: post #12

>In January 2019, we entered into an addendum to our commercial agreement with AWS, pursuant to which we committed to spend an aggregate of at least $300 million between January 2019 and December 2021 on AWS services. If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we may be required to pay the difference, which could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations. Not as bad a…

100M/year is ~8M/month. Some perspective on that, it could by you one of:

~400PB of data in S3.

~2600 bare metal "x1 type" ec2 instances running 24/7, 3 year upfront reservation.

~60M Write IOPS in dynamodb

~300M Read IOPS in dynamodb

~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances

Again, each of those is spending the entire budget on a single service, but that seems like a nonsense level of spending.

Maybe they really have that much data. Maybe they have 100PB of data in S3. Assuming 1B rides since day 1, that's 100MB per ride, which seems high. If the average ride is 20 minutes, that's 80KB per second. That would be 25% of the budget.

But assuming they generate 80KB/s/ride, that's ~1MB/second (assuming 1M rides/day). So maybe all of that hits DynamoDB, and between duplicate data, secondary indexes, and size of dataset we have 6 million write iops. And then we do big data processing jobs and have 5x the read load. That's 20% of the budget.

And to process all these events there is a massive EMR cluster of bare metal instances. About 1750 of them. That's 50% of the budget.

Leaving 5% (a measly 400k) for load balancers, and the like.

Those numbers are all a little outrageous to me, but I can see how they might be using that much.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#62

Post by 40acres »

The prediction was that ride-sharing would become a winner take all market and that Lyft and Uber would fight it out to attrition, but I'm not sure if this is the case. Both of these companies are massive and I don't see one reaching escape velocity to leave the other in the dust. At a point the losses will matter and the realization will need to be had that the other will not die.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#63

Post by untog »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #48
untog wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that always strikes me about the amount of money swilling around in tech. $90M is an absurdly huge amount of money. By absolutely any outside objective measure of work put in to payoff it is off the scale. To look at this as the founders having lost out is almost comical.

Well apparently you can play baseball and make $330m. Yes, it’s a lot, but to build a $30b company and make 90m pre-tax (maybe 50m post in CA) is something... The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick, who is definitely a billionaire and retained much more of Uber.

> The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick

That's why I said outside objective measure. By any objective standard 90M is an insane amount of money for one person to have. One billion is so far off the scale it is impossible to describe.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#64

Post by ihuman »

jonknee wrote: post #3

2018 revenue of $2.16B, with a loss of $911.3M. Oof. Though as a passenger I can't say I mind buying $2 bills for $1!

Depends on how you look at it. $1.24B profit sounds pretty good to me.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#65

Post by trimbo »

It looks like they spend a bunch of pages on rider retention and gloss over what I think is the primary issue for the gig economy: provider retention.

It's just like Groupon, you can't have a good sell-through product indefinitely if the service providers aren't happy and churn at a high rate.

Sooo... what's the churn for the drivers?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#66

Post by untog »

teej wrote: post #58
untog wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that always strikes me about the amount of money swilling around in tech. $90M is an absurdly huge amount of money. By absolutely any outside objective measure of work put in to payoff it is off the scale. To look at this as the founders having lost out is almost comical.

The founders (theoretically) created $20B in value and you think $90M is sufficient compensation? $90M is definitely enough to be more than comfortable the rest of your life. But a $5B payout would have meant they could start a VC firm, invest in the next several generations of startups, partially self-fund something ambitious like a Space-X, start funded non-profits, etc.

> The founders (theoretically) created $20B in value and you think $90M is sufficient compensation?

...yes? I don't really see what's so absurd about that idea.

It also seems more than a little disingenuous to suggest that the founders were the only ones that created that $20B in value. They didn't single handedly create the apps, the marketing platform, drive the cars, etc. etc.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#67

Post by piker »

CondensedBrain wrote: post #60
bluedino wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would buy a couple racks worth of servers and plenty of ops staff wouldn’t it?

Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company. That's the same reason billion dollar companies rent buildings instead of owning them.

This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#68

Post by jwegan »

chollida1 wrote: post #4

Some stylized notes: - If they do go public for $20B+ they that would be for more than Twitter and Facebook went public for. Would you really want to own Lyft over FB and TWTR the day they went public? That's a very large ask of the public markets. EDIT To be clear I"m talking about their valuation multiple not the abs valuation. - working with JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Jefferies. So I guess we know 3 banks who won…

> If they do go public for $20B+ they that would be for more than Twitter and Facebook went public for

Lyft is IPOing at a higher valuation than Twitter, but Facebook went public at a valuation of $100B and raised $16B. FB's IPO was 5x bigger than Lyft's.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#69

Post by xiaolingxiao »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #7

Biggest thing I noticed is that the cofounders only own a little more than 1m shares each, which is less than .5% each! Painful amount of dilution....wow.

Are you looking at page 192? Logan Green(1) 1,180,329 John Zimmer(11) 1,180,329 Ben Horowitz(5) 15,040,924

So the last line is 15million common stock held by A16Z

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#70

Post by smallgovt »

trimbo wrote: post #65

It looks like they spend a bunch of pages on rider retention and gloss over what I think is the primary issue for the gig economy: provider retention. It's just like Groupon, you can't have a good sell-through product indefinitely if the service providers aren't happy and churn at a high rate. Sooo... what's the churn for the drivers?

Driver churn isn’t important if driverless cars are on the way.
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