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Uber S-1

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Re: Uber S-1

#481

Post by virgilp »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #459
bo1024 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> soon can license the self driving tech My personal guess is that "soon" for fully autonomous cars is not any reasonable definition of soon. Even if you accept the tech is close to okay in Arizona (I wouldn't), think about the weather and driving conditions in most of the worlds' markets for these global companies.

I agree. The other day I was driving and thinking about this, and I started noticing "how many times during this drive have I looked another human (driver or pedestrian) in the eyes in order to determine their intentions?" It was a significant number even in a 15 minute drive. I was still thinking about it during my bike ride later in the day, and I noticed that more than a dozen times I exchanged looks and nods with…

I got bear-ish on self-driving cars when I realized that, in order to be able to drive in Bucharest, you _have to_ break the (letter of the) law fairly often[1]. Knowing when to do so requires "common sense" which is a notoriously difficult nut to crack - computer vision may be advanced enough, but it's simply not enough. I still think it will evolve in time and reach mass-market, it's just that it will take lots of time - it's not something that will have a purely-technological solution, it will likely require legal and social changes too, and those take time.

[1] E.g. Car stopped in front; do you cross the continuous line to go to the opposite lane, or just wait a bit? Or merging from a side street into a busy main road.... some drivers will let you, but which ones? If you wait until "it's safe", well, good luck.

Re: Uber S-1

#482

Post by usaar333 »

dmoy wrote: post #376
nostrademons wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For RSUs the withholding should be in shares - if your effective tax rate is 40% and you vest 5 shares a month, they grant you 3 shares and immediately sell 2 to cover the taxes. If your effective tax rate was 30%, they'd round up, still sell 2 of them, but remit the cash in excess of taxes to your paycheck. At least that was how my Google shares worked. A higher IPO price works to your advantage, because the refund…

Except most companies (including Google) withhold supplementary income at 22% federal plus FICA, regardless of whether your marginal bracket is 22% or 35%+. Usually this results in significant underwithholding on RSU for federal tax.

Yup, had this exact fear during my IPO. Fortunately, stock went up, so it was a win that I was underwithheld.

I was and continue to be surprised companies release RSUs at IPO and not lock up expiry, the later of which avoids the tax risk.

Re: Uber S-1

#483

Post by usaar333 »

rongenre wrote: post #165
ahakki wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should've bought options to hedge.

It's against any competently worded lockup agreement. "“Derivatives” is sort of a vague term, and there is a persistent folk belief that they have magic powers, that any legal or financial problem can somehow be solved by doing a derivative." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-08/lyft-i...

Lyft's common stockholder market standoff agreement doesn't bar hedging. See the s1.

Re: Uber S-1

#484

Post by xiphias2 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #475
xiphias2 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I select credit card, but at some places the drivers wait 5-10 minutes, ask where I'm going and write that I should cancel the ride and they bring me for double the cash. At that point I also have to pay for cancelling the ride, and I'm also late, so I have ti accept their offer. They use the Uber messaging system and Uber doesn't catch these drivers (they should just filter for drivers that want users to cancel), al…

I had similar experience living in Sweden, where the market is present but ride sharing has not quite penetrated yet. For the most part (90% of the time in my experience) the ride share driver wouldn’t try to pull anything like you describe. About 10% of the time I would have an experience very similar to what you describe. Every time I was able to continue the normal transaction, however, by being firm with the driv…

It's very interesting, I have been feeling this in Dominican Republic, where people are screwing tourists whenever they can, but Sweden is one of the most advanced countries in the world, where I imagine that this isn't that usual behaviour from most people.

Re: Uber S-1

#485

Post by devonkim »

mypalmike wrote: post #417
nostrademons wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 downwar…

Carried over losses can be applied against future _earnings_ though so if you make $1M and not pay any taxes on it at that point because it's being offset by your past losses. I used it to offset my gains in taxes from selling my company stock (ISOs) when I sold a rental property at a substantial loss shortly after the Great Recession. Had my taxes double checked with an accountant to make sure I did the math right and I was right to the cent.

Re: Uber S-1

#486

Post by xiphias2 »

maximente wrote: post #445
xiphias2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem that I see with using Über in South America is that the service is not improving. - The time estimations are way off - The app doesn't know one-way roads well, although they should have a lot of training data on the routes I go on - They allow drivers haggling for the price by forcing users to pay with cash instead of credit card. - The app doesn't know about the road tarifs sometimes, and the driver…

where? i''ve used several times over several years in Medellin, BsAs, without issue. also CDMX, Panama City in CentAm were fine.

Boca Chica, Dominican Republic whenever I wanted to go to Santo Domingo (though Boca Chica is anyways a bad place to go to, any other part of DR is much nicer). Also Recife, Brazil, also far from the city center.

Re: Uber S-1

#487

Post by usaar333 »

ahakki wrote: post #147
dman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about morale at Lyft. You have employees locked in who cant sell for first couple of months. They are seeing their networth plummet everyday.

Should've bought options to hedge.

It's a tough call to make. By the time options came out, puts were extremely expensive relative to calls due to shorting pressure driving up hard to borrow fees. Aside from how bearish you had to be to justify buying them, you also need a lot of capital you might not have.

Besides, any current employee is barred from trading options by the insider trading policy.

Re: Uber S-1

#488

Post by ignoramous »

ManishR wrote: post #469
sfifs wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no VC will fund their rapid growth (small offerings will still find a niche, assuming they don't get gobbled up And yet Grab and Didi drove Uber out of South East Asia and China, Ola is giving Uber a run for its money in India and now GoJek in turn is challenging Grab. In my recent trip to Tokyo we were mostly advised to take regular cabs Vs Uber in contrast to a year ago. That's literally half the world where they…

>>When reasoning doesn't line up with facts, there are usually flaws in the logic. I don't think there's an opposition of facts and logic here. Grab was founded in 2012 ( https://www.grab.com/sg/about/ ), Ola in 2011 ( https://www.olacabs.com/about.html ), and GoJek in 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-Jek ). All of these were entrenched players in their respective markets when Uber decided to put up a fight. U…

Apart from SDCs, there might be a market for an enterant that focuses on drivers as much as the rider experience: That could really steal drivers from Uber/Ola/Grab 'cause I hear nothing but endless list of gripes from drivers about how they are treated and how helpless they are.

I'd go back to late 2000s when Nokia's and Blackberry's stranglehold on high end phone market seemed unassailable but how it was blown away in the preceding years by a more expensive product (better app store for developers, better device for the end user).

Re: Uber S-1

#490

Post by nabla9 »

ManishR wrote: post #355

People here seem to think that Uber/Lyft do not have any competitive moat. I disagree. What we seem to forget is that just because a VC can burn boatloads of money to capture ridesharing market from Uber/Lyft doesn't mean that they would. From a game theoretic POV, Uber and Lyft have signaled that they're ready to fight for survival in markets they are established in. Unless as a startup founder you can demonstrate t…

> From a game theoretic POV, Uber and Lyft have signaled that they're ready to fight for survival in markets they are established in.

And fight they have, because they don't have a moat. A moat is a competitive advantage that is _cost_effective_ to defend. Uber/Lyft don't have that.

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