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Lyft Files S-1

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131–140 of 405 posts

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#131
post #58
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.

You can do all of those things and more - easily - with $90m.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#132

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…

This caught my eye in their exec compensation section:

> For Mr. Green, the 2018 amount reflects $935,105 in personal security services and $1,787 in ride credits for use on the Lyft platform.

Nearly a million dollars for the CEO's security services (presumably also including private air travel)? I can understand Facebook or even Twitter doing this for their high-profile CEOs, but most people would not recognize Logan Green if they seem him on the street.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#133
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, a $150M-90M personal net worth at the 18B-30B valuation window. They're not going to starve either.

you could have made that much with a few good crypto choices

I mean if I went all in on crypto from the start and sold around end of 2017/beginning 2018 I would have been a multi billionaire. But that's not the point. Similarly, if I "only" bought far OTM option on FANG between 2010 and 2017 but not march 2014-2015 I would have also been a multibillionaire. Heck, I could have went long volatility at high leverage in February 2018 and be a good way to a billionaire. The point is, of course, if you make "good choices" one can be a multibillionaire in many ways. Alas, I am not a multibillionaire because "good choices" are good mostly in retrospect.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#134
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, a $150M-90M personal net worth at the 18B-30B valuation window. They're not going to starve either.

you could have made that much with a few good crypto choices

Would you please work on commenting more substantively? We're aiming for the kinds of discussion in which we stand to learn something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#137
post #8
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!

20% of Uber's revenue with 50% in losses.[0] I want to see Lyft succeed just to counter Uber, but yeah, those numbers need to be healthier [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-results/uber-posts-5...

That fully depends on what the losses are. I haven't read their financials, but if the losses are from expansion and other investment but their unit profitability is good, then it's not a problem. They can always pull back on investing in growth just to reap profits.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#138

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.

Uber hosts its own infrastructure, so does Google, so does Facebook. All three of those companies have no problems remaining focused on their business models without turning into a "datacenter company."

I strongly dislike the notion that on-prem hosting is somehow a bad thing, or too cumbersome, or otherwise totally solved by cloud providers. AWS specifically is hugely convenient in a number of ways, but it doesn't come close to the cost savings from running your own infrastructure. You need a pretty large amount of capital and engineering talent, but it really is worth it even in the short term (~3-5 years).

I think people would be shocked at what the money comes out to be if they saw costs from companies doing their own physical infrastructure. AWS makes you pay through the nose, seeing the difference would change a lot of minds I'm sure.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#140

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

thats only shares owned though.

page 169 shows that Logan Green also has 3.5M in vested (unexercised) options and about 2M in unvested options.

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