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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#121

Post by Certhas »

kolbe wrote: post #110
jonknee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the baseball player will create much more than that in value while Lyft has lost billions of dollars. If someone here is underpaid it's not the Lyft founders.

Lyft has enriched its investors far more than any baseball player could even dream of. You're just looking at accounting losses. But when this IPOs, early stage investors will have all made billions.

But that's not creating value. Unless the lottery creates value for people who buy the right tickets.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#122

Post by SilasX »

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!

Right, but is this "selling $2 bills for $1" or is it "selling $1 bills for $1.10 and spending $1 billion to tell people about the offer"?

People have mistakenly accused both Uber and Amazon of doing the former when they were doing the latter.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#123

Post by maxxxxx »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #115
maxxxxx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

There are tons of dog food sellers online. Chewys, Petco, Petsmart and many others. Amazon is usually more expensive.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#124

Post by zjaffee »

darkerside wrote: post #14
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!

2017 Compared to 2018 * As a percentage of revenue, cost of revenue decreased from 62% to 58%. * As a percentage of revenue, sales and marketing expenses decreased from 54% to 37%. These seem to be positive signs.

This also implies that the vast majority (if not all of their) loss is sales and marketing.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#125

Post by whyaduck »

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…

I expect that support, consulting and development could all be part of their commercial agreement.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#126

Post by dmode »

pastor_elm wrote: post #50
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.

> $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.

Is this a quote from the HBO show "Silicon Valley" ?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#127

Post by reaperducer »

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…

Not as bad as snap but what could they possibly be spending $100 million a year on?

Maybe they're harvesting more than ride information. Perhaps they're aggregating behavioral data on customers to sell.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#128

Post by Scoundreller »

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.

I thought that was a tax law thing: Real Estate Income Trusts don’t pay any tax on their distributions, and nor do you (immediately) if they’re in a tax-deferred or tax-free account.

In other words, holding real estate in a Corp that does other stuff isn’t efficient.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#129

Post by jjeaff »

pastor_elm wrote: post #50
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.

> $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.

You must be joking. $90m, even in the valley is massive, generational wealth. It is the top 1% of the 1% if not higher. You could buy some of the largest mansions in America. It puts you around the wealthiest 30,000 people in America.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#130

Post by netik »

zjaffee wrote: post #117
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maint…

Twitter initially ran everything in the cloud. I should know, I was employee 13. It was much cheaper to build our own server hardware and move to our own server and network agreements. Peering and transit is cheaper at scale, as is commodity hardware.
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