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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#331

Post by TheCoelacanth »

treis wrote: post #258
throwaway-1283 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems to care...until the company literally runs out of money. The difference between a SaaS and a Lyft is that Lyft has huge operating expenses. Burn rate is order of magnitude higher.

>The difference between a SaaS and a Lyft is that Lyft has huge operating expenses Lyft is SaaS (technically a platform) and doesn't really have more operating expenses than any other internet company.

Lyft is not SaaS. Their software is how you purchase non-software services from them, you do not pay for the software itself.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#332

Post by sjg007 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #225
doctorpangloss wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The…

Great analogy.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#333

Post by stale2002 »

qxi wrote: post #188
KerrickStaley wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) f…

Umm, everyone I know is trying to move off of any existing bare metal boxes that we have.

Source: also work at Twitch.

Oh, or are you making fun of using Bare metal?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#335

Post by cabaalis »

mckee1 wrote: post #306
Consultant32452 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My morning egg mcmuffin is a highlight of the day. You people are building dreams.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#336

Post by sciurus »

CondensedBrain wrote: post #180
djsumdog wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. Sure you can run your own DBs instead of using RDS, but what if you start using their proprietary rubbish, like Knesis or DynamoDB? You have to rewrite application to use something else that's open source and self-hostable. For new startups, I honestly recommend using DigitalOcean or Vultur. You don't get all the AWS compone…

Netflix and its (ongoing?) transition from AWS to its own systems might provide some guidance if they ever decide to do the same.

What transition are you talking about?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#337

Post by jhall1468 »

Alupis wrote: post #304
glass_of_water wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of that is ignoring payroll taxes (for your new, very large staff), shifting all of your tax-deductible operational expenses into tax limited capital expenses.

Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. There are huge advantages to offloading non-primary business costs to other businesses.

Netflix is doing this too. I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#338

Post by icedchai »

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #231
icedchai wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public will eat this stuff up if there's huge YoY revenue growth like they've shown in the S1. You see this all the time with public SaaS companies. Sure, the losses also increase... but nobody seems to care.

Nobody seems to care...until the company literally runs out of money. The difference between a SaaS and a Lyft is that Lyft has huge operating expenses. Burn rate is order of magnitude higher.

"Running out of money" is a long way in the future once your public. Most SaaS companies have huge operating expenses that exceed their revenue, most of it going towards marketing. Take a look at HUBS, NOW, WDAY... The list goes on. Lyft has huge expenses, but they also have huge revenue.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#339

Post by jhall1468 »

docker_up wrote: post #287
darkwizard42 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats how companies work though... no one expects Lyft to be immediately profitable. The company will be rewarded by public markets if its able to keep up that trajectory

No, most companies do not work this way. Most companies that lose this staggering amount of money go out of business quickly. We are living in a time of "eventual profitability" where some companies have immense privilege to lose an immense amount of money, are encouraged to lose it to build a large company in hopes of creating a sustainable model. Right now there's not even profitability on the horizon. Losses incre…

No offense but Amazon did exactly this for nearly 2 decades. I don't know why you think Lyft is somehow an exception to the rule. They aren't. Hyper Growth is not the stage you start looking at P/L statements. If they were generating big profits, there would be little point in going public at all.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#340

Post by PhoenixReborn »

stale2002 wrote: post #333
qxi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) f…

Umm, everyone I know is trying to move off of any existing bare metal boxes that we have. Source: also work at Twitch. Oh, or are you making fun of using Bare metal?

> constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures?

I think the parent was pretty clearly sarcastic and suggesting that this was a bad idea.

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