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Lyft Files S-1

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71–80 of 405 posts

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#71

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.

Absolutely. Next thing we know they stop selling books only and turn themselves into a cloud-services giant :|

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#72
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 muc…

At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#73
post #64
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.

Not a correct reading. They had negative nine figures of "profit".

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#74

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.

> Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company.

That assertion makes no sense at all, particularly if we acknowledge the fact that they are in the business of providing a web service. IT infrastructure is critical to Lyft's core business.

Would it make any more sense to criticise Lyft for hiring developers because that would mean they would slowly turn into a software development company?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?

Very much so. The cost benefit analysis must also question how much it would cost to educate the teams on the new hosting tools. Management has clearly decided that it’s not worth the retraining and loss of productivity.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#76
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m making the point that you have two cos whose main US product is virtually indistinguishable from one another. The founder from one became a multi billionaire and the others are 1/20th of the way of becoming one.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#77
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.

So you think they'll stay solvent for 25 years?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?

Very much so. The cost benefit analysis must also question how much it would cost to educate the teams on the new hosting tools. Management has clearly decided that it’s not worth the retraining and loss of productivity.

Will add if lyft is using things like dynamodb, there is no good onprem alternatives that they can easily migrate to without significant rewrites of core business logic

This is expensive and risky and also difficult to do in piece meal

Disclaimer: former AWS + Amazon employee

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#79

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.

How would they become a data center company? There are 1000s of huge companies using a mix of colocated DCs, their own DCs, and cloud providers like AWS including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Most of them are not datacenter companies like QTS.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#80
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $90M is an absurdly huge amount of money. is it? A 10 million dollar house isn't all that special in a lot of parts of the country. A family worth 90 million can still have a lot of financial anxiety.

> A family worth 90 million will still have a lot of financial anxiety My god, get out of the valley for even 2 minutes. $90,000,000 is an obscene amount of money literally anywhere in the world.

Not to mention even by that standard, owning your house outright and having 10x its value in wealth is not "financial anxiety"
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