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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#301

Post by glass_of_water »

Alupis wrote: post #243
diminoten wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, you know the performance profile of a streaming service is wildly different from a mobile ridesharing app... Their surges are nothing like yours.

It still stands... $8mm monthly is over 350 full time engineers making $250k annually (ya that doesn't cover hardware, but it just illustrates the point). That would be a 22% increase in Lyft's total number of employees. If you have engineers making less than $250k annually, then you have a lot more staff. $8mm monthly is a LOT... Amazon's clearly making a profit after $8mm monthly.

But it's not like Lyft would suddenly have 350 full time engineers developing new features. A large chunk of those engineers would be working on building and maintaining infrastructure that AWS provides.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#302

Post by bradstewart »

halbritt wrote: post #292
python300 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The description here seems to be more of the compute and storage. How about the boat load of services that are offered with AWS. Plugging and playing with services maintained by AWS makes it easier for companies to focus on their product logic. The major expense is actually engineering.

Outside of S3 I can't think of any services that AWS offers that are worth a damn.

Route53, RDS, DynamoDB, SNS. To name a few.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#303

Post by panarky »

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.

Friends and family social networking is a winner-take-all market because your friends lock you in.

Messaging for gamers a la Discord is a winner-take-all market because fellow gamers lock you in.

But from the rider perspective, there's very little lock-in for ride sharing services. Just install a new app and the car shows up.

Doesn't matter if your friends use it. There's no moat.

Ride-share lock-in is on the provider side. Can they get enough scale to cover entire cities and nations with enough cars that riders don't have to wait?

Turns out with a market this big, there's room for two or three players.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#304

Post by Alupis »

glass_of_water wrote: post #301
Alupis wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still stands... $8mm monthly is over 350 full time engineers making $250k annually (ya that doesn't cover hardware, but it just illustrates the point). That would be a 22% increase in Lyft's total number of employees. If you have engineers making less than $250k annually, then you have a lot more staff. $8mm monthly is a LOT... Amazon's clearly making a profit after $8mm monthly.

But it's not like Lyft would suddenly have 350 full time engineers developing new features. A large chunk of those engineers would be working on building and maintaining infrastructure that AWS provides.

The point stands... 350 engineers is an army of engineers... for $8mm monthly, it wouldn't be unreasonable to achieve 500+ engineers depending on salaries.

Lyft could definitely build and maintain their own infrastructure for this kind of money... probably do it better (customized to their needs) and cheaper.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#305

Post by alfalfasprout »

halbritt wrote: post #294
python300 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a Lyft engineering perspective would rather focus on things like how do I make sense, process, extract the ton of data. How do I focus on customer experience rather than how do I save money in data-center, how do I keep my data-center stack updated and many more

My argument is that spending 10% of their revenue on cloud infra affects their unit economics sufficiently that they'll find it difficult to compete. Perfectly willing to admit I'm wrong if and when that time comes. At this point, that's my theory.

You can't just eliminate that 10%. Even if going to fully bare-metal lowers costs it takes a lot of time and manpower to make that transition. When that investment can be made in other areas that have much more impact it really doesn't make sense.

Bare metal works when your workload is well-defined and understood. Then you can actually put reasonable estimates for what you need and hire/purchase infra accordingly.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#306

Post by mckee1 »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #221
jnaddef wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

There is a free McDonald’s restaurant in the corporate headquarters, but there’s also a deli counter which has fresh sandwiches, as well as a counter for other hot meals (chilli, chicken curry (UK) etc.

Source: work for McDonald’s head office.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#307

Post by alfalfasprout »

azylman wrote: post #269
meowface wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick Google search says it's $2000/year. Don't know if that's accurate.

I have some friends at AirBnB and I've heard it's much more modest, like $300/yr or something. My experience with these type of "dogfooding" credits is that companies are much more generous when they're smaller, so it could be that older employees get more than newer employees.

$2k/year ($500 every quarter)

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#308

Post by fierro »

Alupis wrote: post #245
fierro wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if I have one job in this life, it's to hang out on hacker news and repeatedly post about how it's not cost effective to run your own infrastructure. 8MM/month doesn't even come CLOSE to needing your own infra. - person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure

> person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure > fierro Profile: SWE @ Google Resource & Capacity Planning I think you mean "Person who's job it is to convince others it's really hard and they should just buy your product"...?

ha sure. I just meant I know the sort of operational burden cloud customers are able to outsource by not rolling their own, based on my time at the G inside resource planning and management.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#309

Post by panarky »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #298
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Auto companies are not service companies, those are very different things. That said, given the dynamism of markets, there's nothing to indicate that Lyft/Uber will have any huge advantage when the time comes. But this is a game of musical chairs - early investors need to create the biggest, most miraculous but 'believable' story so they can pass the bag onto retail investors long enough to cash out. If retail invest…

> so they can pass the bag onto retail investors long enough to cash out

I used to say this too, when companies sold stock to the public at outrageous valuations.

I thought it was insane to be the retail "dumb money" left holding the bag on companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter and Snap.

So will Lyft and Uber be more like Snap or the others on this list?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#310

Post by llama052 »

zjaffee wrote: post #119
wil421 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As if Google or Amazon isn't using contractors for some of their stuff as well?
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