Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lyft Files S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 405 posts

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#341

Post by MuffinFlavored »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #219
phamilton wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100M/year is ~8M/month. Some perspective on that, it could by you one of: ~400PB of data in S3. ~2600 bare metal "x1 type" ec2 instances running 24/7, 3 year upfront reservation. ~60M Write IOPS in dynamodb ~300M Read IOPS in dynamodb ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances Again, each of those is spending the entire budget on a single service, but that seems like a nonsense level of spending. Maybe they really have that muc…

Everything seems reasonable except... ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances? I worked at one of the 100 biggest websites on the internet (a search engine), and we only had 3. Why/how would Lyft need 1000x that!?

What'd you use those 3 for?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#342

Post by fma »

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.

General Motors has built 2 data centers. Each one costs about what Lyft spends per year on AWS (https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content...)

Article says it takes 20 people to run. GM hasnt turned into a datacenter company...

Is a century old car manufacturer in Detroit able to do what a startup in Silicone Valley can't?

Interestingly enough, GM owns 7.8% of Lyft.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#343

Post by jpeg_hero »

ericd wrote: post #275
codegoblins wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing viewers' eyes to lucrative television timeslots for advertisers, selling tickets to local stadiums, and selling merchandise such as jerseys and figures.

Those are all wealth transfers, though, not really value creation. The only value creation by the baseball players is the entertainment provided (which is definitely not nothing).

How about getting a massage? “Wealth transfer”? Or “value creation”?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#344

Post by sonnyblarney »

panarky wrote: post #309
sonnyblarney wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They are all different kinds of companies from different eras.

Amazon went IPO very early and had a very long term vision.

Lift and Uber, it's hard to say and also depends on price.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#345

Post by spookthesunset »

llama052 wrote: post #313
theossuary wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. A few examples: - Recently had to purchase new servers, because of signed contracts the only servers we were allowed to purchase and put in the datacenter were four years old and technically EOF. - Firewall changes, AD changes, provisioning a VM, etc. are 48 hour turnaround. Purchasing new hardware requires 4-6 weeks. - Had an intermittent issue with their edge firewa…

This honestly sounds like a company specific problem more than a datacenter issue.

No. That is my experience too. If your company’s core value prop isn’t running and managing a datacenter, your datacenter is gonna suck when compared to folks who do it for a living.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#347

Post by spookthesunset »

Alupis wrote: post #317
jmathai wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're making $200 million / month based on their S-1 filing. I'm sure they've done the math and the effort to cost savings here simply isn't worth it to them.

Or, more likely, in the beginning AWS is what their developers knew and were familiar with, and then as time went on it was easy and convenient to just spin up "one more instance". Fast forward to today, and now it would be a serious undertaking with serious risks to move off AWS, not to mention the costs of building up the staff and assets to reimplement their requirements in parallel of AWS until reasonably confide…

Thankfully most business leaders don’t make decisions based on cynical conspiracy theories...

Arguments like yours are why business people tend to roll their eyes and ignore engineers when it comes to anything outside of engineering.

Not trying to be dismissive, but you are so far from the mark I don’t know where to start...

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#348

Post by halbritt »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #305
halbritt wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No disagreement here.

The balance here is tricky. Based on public data, it seems that Netflix has ~$16B in revenue against $300m/yr cloud spend. 2% seems much more reasonable to me.

I feel like a drive toward efficiency is a worthwhile endeavor for a startup in terms of establishing a competitive advantage.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#349

Post by ashleyw »

ihuman wrote: post #156
piker wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a correct reading. They had negative nine figures of "profit".

I don't understand. How could they make more revenue than what they lost for the year, but have a negative profit? The loss doesn't subtract enough from the revenue to go less than 0.

They received $2B in revenue but spent close to $3B.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#350

Post by toomuchtodo »

metildaa wrote: post #181
djakjxnanjak wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have many teams making their own web services, so replacing AWS with in-house infra would require an AWS-like “private cloud” feature set, backed by geographically distributed datacenters. Network segmentation that is managed by configuration, user accounts with permissions to do specific things to specific services, etc. Engineers to build all this stuff are not cheap, and management to build and migrate to it…

Sounds like OpenStack...

Works for Wikipedia, and they’re in the top 5 of Internet websites.
Post reply on HN