Live data from Hacker News

Uber opens at $42 per share

techcrunch.com

361–370 of 470 posts

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#361
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon didn't turned profit for first 5 years or so after IPO. If you go back 15 years down the history, you will find many articles/analysis doubting if they would ever become profitable. However no one doubted that online retail was the future and brick-and-mortar stores will increasingly become part of the history. I see a lot of parallels here. No one doubts anymore that app-based cabs are the future and traditio…

> Amazon, the company that everyone loves point to as an example of how losing money eventually makes money, lost a combined $2.8 billion over its first 17 quarters as a public company, significantly less than the $4.5 billion Uber lost in 2017. Source: https://oversharing.substack.com/p/bird-raises-prices-to-tri...

Was Amazon as big as Uber in those first 17 quarters (in ters of revenue)? If not, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#362
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define 'dramatically', and by when you expect this will happen, and I'll offer you odds as well!

In 5 years I expect the MarketCap to be around 10B$ max. If Self Driving cars are a thing then even less than that. their customer base will be richer//business people ready to pay higher sustainable prices for rides.

If you really believe this then you can probably make a healthy amount of money buying put options.

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#363

There's way too many comments in this thread comparing Uber's non-profitability to Amazon's which I think is quite silly. Amazon lost $2.8 billion over its first 17 quarters while Uber lost $4.5 billion in 2017 alone. Also comparing Uber to Facebook is quite silly too. Facebook had a lot more users than Uber but they are also different types of users. One is a free user with hope for targeted advertisement (in which…

Amazon is definitely misleading: they became profitable within specific business areas (e.g. books & music first) but invested that money in new businesses. The analogy would be if, say, Uber was profitable in San Francisco and Los Angeles but still bootstrapping Phoenix and Denver.

I haven’t read anything which suggests they aren’t subsidizing rides in their most established markets just like everywhere else, and both their drivers and customers can switch to competitors so easily that it’s not obvious how they can change that.

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had very extensive and very negative taxi experiences around the world. Uber is night and day from a UX perspective. Being able to see where the car is when it's on the way, pre-inputting your destination, paying through the app... The gig economy aspect was definitely revolutionary as well. It's essentially changing the nature of work (love it or hate it). As much as I love Amazon and always have, in the early…

I don't see how the UX thing is so revolutionary. I live in a city with 120k people, and the app of the local taxi company here does all of those things as well.

But did they do that before Uber?

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#366

Some notes from watching Uber open: - if it closes below $45(its IPO price) it will be the first time since 2008 that the happened for a major IPO - TD Ameritrade executed more orders in the first 10 minutes of trading than they did for the first 2.5 hours with Lyft. - Uber is 9% of all trading at TD Ameritrade, retail loves this stock, - market is down today, which isn't helping Uber but its probably not much of a f…

I know very little about shares. How does an IPO close lower on it's first day?

Wouldn't someone have to have bought in at $45 and sold for lower in the same day? Why would anyone do this?

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#367
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also comparing Uber to Facebook is quite silly too. Facebook had a lot more users than Uber but they are also different types of users. The main difference seems to me that Facebook enjoys a network effect: you can move to a different social network, but who will you find there? While you can download as many taxi service apps as you want and use one or the other, the one that has the cheapest offer. If an Uber com…

That's a very good point too which I missed. People don't care about whether their friends are using Uber or some other app. They care about whether the ride is cheaper. It's a bottom of the barrel pricing game in ride sharing apps.

They also care about wait times. And drivers care about utilization.

"Taxi apps" definitely have network effects from the two sided market, though not as strong as a social network.

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon in 2016 was $502 a share, it is $1900 now Microsoft in 2016 was $51, $127 now Facebook was $97, $189 now We're not even talking about rocket-ship growth here. We are talking about option strike prices losing money in one of the most favorable economic time periods where massive, healthy public business did have monstrous growth. I would have at least expected price parity with other large companies - even that…

Expecting price parity with other large companies, okay. But the expectation in 2016 wasn’t for Facebook etc. to be at today’s prices in 2019, or they would have been priced higher then.

Even parity with cash. Investing in tech (say vgt) has had 90% returns over the past three years.

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#369

Some notes from watching Uber open: - if it closes below $45(its IPO price) it will be the first time since 2008 that the happened for a major IPO - TD Ameritrade executed more orders in the first 10 minutes of trading than they did for the first 2.5 hours with Lyft. - Uber is 9% of all trading at TD Ameritrade, retail loves this stock, - market is down today, which isn't helping Uber but its probably not much of a f…

I know very little about shares. How does an IPO close lower on it's first day? Wouldn't someone have to have bought in at $45 and sold for lower in the same day? Why would anyone do this?

Because they think it will go even lower and want to get out before losing more? Alternatively, they may have got in at a lower price and are still taking a profit.

Re: Uber opens at $42 per share

#370
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that feels that Uber has a ton of valuable location data? Aren't rides to a particular location similar to FourSquare checkins? "How many customers are likely to come to your restaurant every Saturday night? How has that changed over time?"

Is that really monetizable? I feel like Uber's biggest revenue generator would be putting a small smartboard in front of passengers and selling targeted ads. Data isn't valuable. Using that data to create a product that people will pay for is (e.g. showing an ad to someone en route to the restaurants across the street).

Hah, I guess they'll do that within the next year (the ads thing). Tell drivers they'll earn more if they did that, or the passenger can hit a button on their phonw to turn the thing off for a "premium ride". Just xx cents per ad-free minute!

Or most likely the driver will agree to put the running gadget in the glove compartment for an off-the-app tip.

Post reply on HN