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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#111

Post by Declanomous »

occamrazor wrote: post #89
cabaalis wrote: post #28

> In 2017 and 2018, certain of our named executive officers provided rides to riders using the Lyft platform in a similar manner as other drivers. We believe that these driving activities provide the named executive officers with substantial practical insight into how our platform serves drivers. I thought this was a pretty interesting point. I was about to call it dogfooding but not quite, since it's more of an expe…

McDonald's does (or used to?) the same, requiring corporate managers to work in a restaurant at several points in their careers.

Still does. I grew up near Oak Brook, IL, which used to have the corporate hq of McDonalds, and still has Hamburger University.

I believe every franchisee is required to attend Hamburger U. There are a number of corporate-owned stores in the area where the a lot of the staff is white-collar professionals in training. Those stores are always amazing.

In general stores in the Chicagoland region are way better than stores elsewhere, and I think part of this is due to the fact that corporate sends managers around for training here. I didn't understand the "mcflurry machine is broken" meme until I took a road trip. I had a number of horrible experiences, including a 20 minute wait for a mcflurry that ended up having more ice cream on the outside of the cup than the inside.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#112

Post by munchbunny »

geezerjay wrote: post #72
phamilton wrote: post #61

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?

Maybe. Running your own infrastructure at large scale is actually really hard and therefore surprisingly expensive in risk and talent cost. If you look at how big the internal infra teams are at companies that host their own infrastructure, they're often individually the size of growth stage companies.

The problem is that provisioning, reliability, and security are by themselves really tough problems. If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that.

I look at it as the question: can you get the same set of agility/reliability/security guarantees for your narrower set of use cases by paying for your own hardware and engineering? I won't even begin to pretend I have any answers there, but I think that's the calculus.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#113

Post by djakjxnanjak »

geezerjay wrote: post #72
phamilton wrote: post #61

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?

They have many teams making their own web services, so replacing AWS with in-house infra would require an AWS-like “private cloud” feature set, backed by geographically distributed datacenters. Network segmentation that is managed by configuration, user accounts with permissions to do specific things to specific services, etc. Engineers to build all this stuff are not cheap, and management to build and migrate to it cleanly it is not easy. If you can do this you ought to be selling cloud services. Even if it makes sense for Lyft to implement this, it would take a while. The RIO is probably much better on improving their core product, where there is more than $100M/year at stake.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#114

Post by kolbe »

untog wrote: post #86
randomacct3847 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm making the point that when you look at both objectively rather than in comparison they are both absurd amounts of money.

If you had a billion dollars, would you immediately give away $900mm, since you appear to be arguing the difference is meaningless? Just because they're both a lot of money doesn't mean it's not important to the people who have said money.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#115

Post by jrochkind1 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #84
40acres wrote: post #62

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.

"winner take all market " This is the wet dream of all tech bubbles. It was the same in the 90s when people said whoever sells dog food online first will win that market and be the leader in perpetuity. Lyft and Uber will be easy to attack by local companies once they have to stop subsidizing their rides and actually run a real business (aka making profit)

That's an amusing example, because it turns out... pretty much only Amazon will sell dog food online. So it maybe WAS a winner-take-all market, but the winner wasn't that winner...

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#116

Post by bduerst »

geezerjay wrote: post #72
phamilton wrote: post #61

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?

No. The capex and overhead for rolling and maintaining your own infrastructure is outstanding. The only time it typically makes sense these days is when it's done in quantity and also sold to others, which is where the economies of scale kick in.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#117

Post by zjaffee »

geezerjay wrote: post #72
phamilton wrote: post #61

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?

It's believed that it would be cheaper for Twitter to have used cloud services (Snapchat spends less then they do on data center operations).

There are certainly examples for big companies that benefit from having their own infrastructure (i.e. Dropbox since they have relatively specialized hardware needs compared to what cloud providers set prices around), but the number of people you need to hire to build and maintain datacenters is very high.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#119

Post by zjaffee »

wil421 wrote: post #79
CondensedBrain wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of these companies aren't managing their own data centers at least for areas that use a large amount of compute. Banks and the like that have their own data centers, generally are still using some type of contractor to manage the physical real estate, network connections, ect. even if they are the ones purchasing the servers.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#120

Post by iblaine »

As a former engineer at Lyft, looks like my RSUs would be worth ~2x my salary per year. Typical RSU grants are 25% of your salary per year, so those Lyft RSUs would have been a good return. But that's at a $18-25B valuation. I think $15B is more realistic given the losses and most recent round of funding. Lyft is in a tough industry. Kudos to Logan Green for getting this far. Good to see a UCSB alumn do well.
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