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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#371

Post by BurritoAlPastor »

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…

But AWS will get cheaper in the future, if historical trends continue. To the best of my knowledge, Amazon has never increased pricing on a service. They do, however, routinely (but unpredictably) drop prices, either directly (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction) or indirectly (every new generation of EC2 instance is marginally cheaper and/or marginally more performant than the previous generation).

The “whims” of Amazon’s pricing are no more unpredictable than the pricing “mood” of your colo or your hardware vendor.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#372

Post by kerng »

kerng wrote: post #242
cheeze wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a bad comparison here IMO because Google IS a datacenter company. No different than Amazon... They run datacenters and offer IaaS to customers, and piggy back off of that. I agree with you on Uber and Facebook though.

To host your own infra, you dont need to build data centers, etc. Many just rent out physical space in datacenters.

Why the downvote? I know of multiple companies that went that route.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#373

Post by kerng »

buboard wrote: post #206
piker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.

It doesn't own cars, doesnt employ drivers, doesnt own hardware, doesn't own compute or storage , doesnt develop software. What is lyft after all?

A copy of Uber? They let Uber do all the dirt work and try to stay in the shadows.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#374

Post by esturk »

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.

So that comes out to be about 8x multiplier. If that's something given 8 years ago then you would just break even if you had gotten a 25% raise in your first year. Of course you might have gotten more raises through out those 8 years s you may have come out ahead.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#375

Post by monort »

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?

Why couldn't companies that actually produce cars just rent them out? I'd really like to have a mono-brand short-term rentals, but they just don't exist. Why is the case different for taxis?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#376

Post by lvs »

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.

But why do these companies have such huge operating expenses? It's a phone app for goodness sake. They're not fronting or maintaining the cars, insuring the drivers, paying any pensions or benefits to their workforce, etc.

These are just pyramid schemes disguised as companies.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#377

Post by richardwhiuk »

luminiferous wrote: post #324
bhelkey wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a social network lock in, its a marketplace lock in. If the majority of riders are on one app, that's where the drivers will go. If the majority of drivers are one app, that's where the riders will go. Think Craigslist not Facebook.

There's nothing preventing drivers from driving for multiple apps, though. Most Lyft/Uber drivers I see these days have both stickers in their windshield.

I assume that didn't work because if you rejected a ride or signed out you didn't get more rides?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#378

Post by richardwhiuk »

ackbar03 wrote: post #357

Aws costs aside, they are being painfully honest in their prospectus https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-02/lyft-s-ri...

You are pretty much required by law to be painfully honest. You are required to disclose anything that you know of that might have a material impact on the shares.
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