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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#221

Post by Consultant32452 »

jnaddef wrote: post #195
occamrazor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wish they would require executives to eat their food everyday, in a Super Size Me fashion

This really makes me curious about what is served at the lunch counter at McDonald's corporate headquarters.

I used to work at the corporate headquarters of a company that owns several chain restaurants. The cafeteria there didn't have any of the chain food dishes, but was very high quality as far as office cafeterias go. They had a test kitchen there also and sometimes they'd give out free meals of the stuff they were testing.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#222

Post by cyholic »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #174
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lyft's load varies wildly, with significantly higher traffic on Friday and Saturday nights than e.g. 4 AM on a Tuesday, plus spikes on certain evenings like Halloween and New Year's Eve. Having cloud hosting where we can dynamically grow and shrink based on load saves us a lot compared to having fixed infrastructure that is always provisioned for the NYE peak. Source: I work at Lyft.

so, all workers at Lyft have to do continue to grow and protec to stand point performance, at some point company will face to choose between continue to grow and except paying extra cost whatever AWS bills to them or stop growing until contract end. i guess we all gonna watch.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#223

Post by peteradio »

eropple wrote: post #182
halbritt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've built a heterogenous environment at the end of three years, then you've failed. The reason that AWS, Google, Azure, et.al do so well is that they don't just buy some servers. They do actual capacity maangement, and not a very good job of it I might add. They also manage the lifecycle of every component in the infrastructure such that the next iteration of that component is understood and interchangeable. Ne…

Fully agreed on all points. But it remains a really hard problem. And when you start to do it out at the scale of something like Lyft, you're gonna blow through your available parts of that $300m (because you can't spend it all up front, obviously) pretty quick. The care and feeding of fleets of (physical) machines is really, really hard and not to be underestimated.

But what if you had 8m per month?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#224

Post by SeanAppleby »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #199
throwaway-1283 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how these companies will stop losing $1b+ a year each year. The public markets will not be too kind. The end game was supposed to be autonomous taxis (cutting the driver out). I don't see how that's going to happen before they run out of money unless they 1) significantly raise prices or 2) take increasingly bigger cuts from drivers. Personally I will be shorting as soon as I can.

Right? Even if autonomous taxis _is_ their endgame, why couldn't companies that actually produce the cars do it cheaper? Almost all of them are heavily investing in it right now, some are even partnering up with companies that know how to do a lot of it. I don't see how this works out for Lyft or Uber. To me it just looks like they'll both eventually run out of money and get squashed. Maybe I'm missing something?

My thoughts exactly. My understanding is that Tesla plans on including a clause to prevent their autonomous cars from being used on other ridesharing platforms and simultaneously launching their own service.

I believe Lyft has significant financial ties with GM, who has Cruise, so maybe they'll be able to navigate it from a partnership angle.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#225

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #157
munchbunny wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that. Maybe that's just the story cloud providers tell you. Until you try, do you really know if it's all that complicated? People have been running datacenters for a long time, and not all of them work for Amazon. But there may be also a beneficial side effect of having gearheads around, and…

I think the point is, Lyft doesn't want to be in the business of running enterprise could infrastructure.

They want to make money brokering rides.

Taking on their own cloud infrastructure -- in theory -- could economically make sense. But that's just an extra layer of risk and complexity they'd rather forego to focus on their core business.

After all, their core business is already losing $930M on $2B in revenue. They're cash-flow doesn't put them in a good position to make large up-front investments on data centers.

So, yeah, like a broke renter in an expensive city. In theory, it might be better to buy a house, but you don't have the down payment, and maybe you should be focused on increasing your earning power rather than saving money anyway...

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#226

Post by Areading314 »

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!

Looks like they skewed their charts to make their growth look bigger. Seems pretty disingenuous, especially for an official filing: https://imgur.com/a/NaroN6P

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#227

Post by eropple »

peteradio wrote: post #223
eropple wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed on all points. But it remains a really hard problem. And when you start to do it out at the scale of something like Lyft, you're gonna blow through your available parts of that $300m (because you can't spend it all up front, obviously) pretty quick. The care and feeding of fleets of (physical) machines is really, really hard and not to be underestimated.

But what if you had 8m per month?

Respectfully, having read your other comments: I'll answer that question if you demonstrate to me an understanding of the difference between $300M/3 years capex and $8M/month/3 years opex.

If you do that, though, my answer will be "right, so we're done here."

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#228

Post by kerng »

munchbunny wrote: post #112
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not really, at that scale it eventually will be a lot cheaper running your own thing - Lyft might still be too small, but if they go internationally and grow ×10 then AWS seems like a choice to reconsider.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#229

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

kccqzy wrote: post #191
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!

As a passenger I've found my Lyft prices to be steadily increasing. In the beginning they were cheaper and more reliable than Uber; then I stopped comparing prices until one day I found that Lyft charges much more than Uber. There was a time when both my friend and I were trying to use Lyft to book the same trip with the same destination, and yet my price was 20% higher than hers.

I’ve noticed the same. I rarely ever see Lyft as the cheaper option now.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#230

Post by iMuzz »

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #148
iblaine wrote: post #120

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.

I don't see how these companies will stop losing $1b+ a year each year. The public markets will not be too kind. The end game was supposed to be autonomous taxis (cutting the driver out). I don't see how that's going to happen before they run out of money unless they 1) significantly raise prices or 2) take increasingly bigger cuts from drivers. Personally I will be shorting as soon as I can.

Be wary of shorting such a high profiles stock!
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