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

Uber S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 559 posts

Re: Uber S-1

#411

Post by bunderbunder »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #386
janfoeh wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are. I don't care whether a ride service is available in one, a dozen or three hundred locations. I care about the best option in my city, and I would bet dollars to donuts that this aligns with the market majority. A thousand local or regional competitors are just as much an existential threat to Uber as one or two big ones.

Agree, it’s definitely possible (and rather easy) for regional competitors to enter the market. I also live in Austin and when Uber and Lyft left I switched to Fasten and Ride Austin with absolutely no difference to the end user experience. If someone else came along at a significant discount to Uber and Lyft I would switch in a heartbeat. I often converse with drivers about it and they have the exact same approach.…

> Ride sharing is basically a commodity right now and anyone who thinks otherwise and invests accordingly is going to get burned. The only thing that is going to change that IMO is autonomous vehicles.

TBH, I think that the autonomous vehicles is just a further illustration of the extent to which it's a commodity. To an approximation, the product is that you got from point A to point B for $dollars in #time. If you can get that sorted out, people will barely even care if the service is provided by JohnnyCab from Total Recall.

It's exactly the same economics as govern airlines, which are famously the last place you put your money if you're trying to turn it into more money. There's some room for differentiation based on quality of service, but it's proportional to the product of the percentage of people who aren't spending their own money and the percentage of companies whose operations departments are on the ball.

Re: Uber S-1

#412

Post by femto113 »

lobotryas wrote: post #381
yalogin wrote: post #103

Feels more like Uber and Lyft reached a point where they cannot raise private capital anymore and so jumped onto the public markets to fool random investors. If they cannot be profitable now, what makes them think they will be profitable with SDCs? I challenge the fundamental premise that SDCs will make them profitable. There is no stickiness to their business model. Moving on to another ride sharing service is frict…

Are you kidding? True AVs will make Uber/Luft even MORE profitable because they won’t have to pay out or worry about human drivers. AVs are the end game for these companies.

They will have to pay out and worry about the cars, so this is true only if the cost of buying and maintaining the AV is less than the cost of paying a driver, and I’ve seen no evidence yet that this is or ever will be the case.

Re: Uber S-1

#413

Post by matthewaveryusa »

sytelus wrote: post #257
mckenna wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The numbers look horrible to me. Both LYFT/UBER have horrible numbers. I would prefer LYFT(@80% discount to IPO price) than UBER(@80% discount to IPO price). Both of these stock valuations are being pumped and dumped onto public markets with clever tricks. Funny thing is, many of us won't even realize that some of our money will be invested in these stocks without our knowledge(ETFs/Funds tracking indices). M…

I'm starting to believe this is how all of these IPOs are getting funded. No sane dilligent investor would be willingly investing in these stocks. Almost entire funding therefore must come from indices which in turn are funded by unsuspecting 401K, state pension funds, educational endowments like accounts. There was a book called Modern Tycoons which had term for these accounts, something like "global river of money"…

What if you short the stock by the equivalent ETF holding amount. Not sure the math is right, but assuming you have an s&p500 ETF, and s&p500 has 23.7T in market cap and Uber is 100 billion, then they represent something like 0.4% of the s&p500. So for every 10k you have invested, short by 40 dollars worth of Uber stock. If uber stock drops, your ETF drops but your shorts gain and vis-versa.

FYI I'm not even sure if what I'm saying even makes any sense or is realistic to do.

Re: Uber S-1

#414

Post by rootusrootus »

jiveturkey wrote: post #368
tsycho wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's SDC? I got nothing obvious from googling it. UPDATE: Got it, self driving cars. I am not deleting the comment in case others were confused as well.

use contextual clues ... Self Driving Car

SDC as an acronym for self driving car seems to have become a 'thing' on HN very recently, I never noticed it until just the recent past. It's not unreasonable for someone to be ignorant of it.

Re: Uber S-1

#415

Post by jacques_chester »

Centaur1989 wrote: post #362
jacques_chester wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they didn't collude, they'd be under suspicion of it. Depending on how DOJ wind blows, that could be a big and expensive distraction.

No. That's not how price collusion works. If Delta airlines started charging for 2nd baggage, and after their announcement United/American/Southwest follow suit, that's not a price collusion if it wasn't predetermined secretly through implicit and explicit signaling among the airlines. The other airlines had option of either increasing their margins by adding new fee, or keeping 2nd bag free and hoping to make more m…

> If Delta airlines started charging for 2nd baggage, and after their announcement United/American/Southwest follow suit, that's not a price collusion if it wasn't predetermined secretly through implicit and explicit signaling among the airlines.

I understand that.

That's why I said "suspicion". Something that seems too convenient and warrants some more poking and prodding and surveillance.

It's not as though folks colluding walk around waving "I am colluding, please investigate further" placards.

Re: Uber S-1

#416

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #255
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. http://www.rideaustin.com/ was launched in Austin a couple years ago when Uber and Lyft were temporarily kicked out of the city. The app had some growing pains but now I use them whenever I can in preference to Uber and Lyft because they pay their drivers more. If Uber and Lyft suddenly went away Ride could easily pop up all over. Of course, Uber and Lyft right now ARE so big because of all the advantages…

How is that a counterexample when they started when Uber and Lyft couldn't operate? Are there examples of local services that sprouted up and had to compete with Uber and Lyft and got off the ground?

You are implying an argument I did not make. I was replying to the statement "The cost of entry into this space is much greater than I think most people realize. It's not "building an app". It's building a balanced, efficient marketplace." My point is that building a balanced, efficient marketplace is actually not that difficult. The fact that Uber and Lyft can kill the competition now by burning through multiple billions in VC funding is irrelevant to that.

In the end, I think the ride-sharing business will look a lot like the airlines: lots of people traveling, but not a particularly great business.

Re: Uber S-1

#417

Post by mypalmike »

nostrademons wrote: post #350
rocqua wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is stocked taxed at the IPO value rather than the current value? Relatedly, what happens if you simply sell the stock? Seems to me like that would just generate income you owe taxes on.

Aliston is referring to a specific circumstance that screwed many employees during the dot-com boom. If you exercise your options , that creates a taxable event for the difference between your option strike price and the fair market value of the stock on date of exercise. If the stock price subsequently goes down a lot, you can end up with a tax bill greater than the market value of the stocks when the lock-up period…

Pigs get slaughtered. Trying to time your options on a volatile stock to avoid short-term capital gains is gambling. Same-day exercise + sell is what any financial advisor will recommend.

RSU risk is worse because it is outside of your control, unless of course you don't have RSUs. You get taxed on the vest date. Withholding is often at the 25% minimum government rate. Assuming you're in a no-sell window, any downward movement before you can sell increases your effective tax rate, potentially to over 100% in the worst case. Consider the dot-com crash case where your RSUs were worth $1M on the vest date, withholding is $250K, taxes owed are ~$370K, and your regular salary is $100K. If the stock goes to $0 before you can sell... On April 15, the government will demand a check from you for something around $120K, but all you actually took home was around $70K. An effective tax rate of around 170%!

The real issue here might be that you can only deduct $3000 per year in losses. With $1M in losses, you'll be able to carry that over for centuries!

Re: Uber S-1

#418

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

rorykoehler wrote: post #409
wskinner wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a thought experiment: how hard is it for a billion dollar company to roll out a simple crud app? Easy, right? Now name a single major bank with an app that is better than "barely usable". Which is easier? A crud app or a ride hailing app?

All my banks have good apps on par with the fintech startup apps I use (and actually I trust them more because they aren't moving fast and breaking things).

> and actually I trust them more because they aren't moving fast and breaking things

VERY true, not just in finance.

Re: Uber S-1

#419

Post by albertshin »

eggie5 wrote: post #191
nemothekid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that Eats is doing more revenue than GrubHub and much more revenue than Caviar.

can you share the two numbers you are using for comparison? The Q4 numbers I see: Uber Eats: $165 million Grub Hub: $205 million* * https://investors.grubhub.com/investors/press-releases/press...

your Grubhub number is referring to Q4'17...

Re: Uber S-1

#420

Post by scurvy »

halr9000 wrote: post #403
benburleson wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't just raise prices willy-nilly; taxis still exist.

Most people I know hate taxis. Uber can nearly raise prices to parity with cabs.

And as much as people used to hate taxis, the tide is turning to people hating Uber/Lyft more...mainly due to trying to kill passengers, pedestrians, bicyclists at a greater rate since the drivers aren't professionals and rarely know the city they're driving in.
Post reply on HN