61–70 of 310 posts
400 people at say 40k salaries or around 80k with benefits is around 32 million. Definitely a significant chunk of change, but barely scratching the surface for offsetting 1B in losses.
You think Uber employees are only making $40k???
> The marketing team had more than 1,200... I fully admit that I'm not in marketing, so there are surely nuances I don't know. But that scale of marketing department is orders of magnitude above any other place I have worked, with the possible exception of IBM in the 90s. Just maybe... this was a reasonable move.
Uber's business model has the same problem as Groupon's, which is that they don't really have economies of scale. Every market requires a new team of people to run promotions to attract drivers and customers and match supply with demand.
> The marketing team had more than 1,200... I fully admit that I'm not in marketing, so there are surely nuances I don't know. But that scale of marketing department is orders of magnitude above any other place I have worked, with the possible exception of IBM in the 90s. Just maybe... this was a reasonable move.
Uber's marketing / customer acquisition cost is their highest non-driver line item by a significant multiple. They spent ~$3,200,000,000 ($3.2 billion) on sales & marketing in 2018 of which ~$1,800,000,000 is direct media / HR cost to drive customer acquisition. In 2019 this number, as of the first quarter, has gone up substantially to a >$4b run rate. With a burdened cost of $150k/yr for every single member of the 1…
>Coca-Cola has made a yearly commitment to large ad spends. In 2017, the beverage manufacturer spent $3.96 billion, in 2016, $4 billion, and in 2015 $3.96 billion on global advertising.
But I'm not sure if that's a comparable figure, as "advertising" is only a subset of "marketing". Still, if the latter is basically just the former plus salaries, it still suggests Uber is overpaying and/or has some inefficiencies in how they operate here.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/081315/look-co...
> The marketing team had more than 1,200... I fully admit that I'm not in marketing, so there are surely nuances I don't know. But that scale of marketing department is orders of magnitude above any other place I have worked, with the possible exception of IBM in the 90s. Just maybe... this was a reasonable move.
By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You literally cannot profitably transport people at the prices they're offering. Uber is just one big bet that the price point of transportation will fall significantly with the advent of self driving and they'll be there to make the money off that margin.
Why would they care about self-driving if most of their drivers are making little more than the cost of operating their vehicle?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber's marketing / customer acquisition cost is their highest non-driver line item by a significant multiple. They spent ~$3,200,000,000 ($3.2 billion) on sales & marketing in 2018 of which ~$1,800,000,000 is direct media / HR cost to drive customer acquisition. In 2019 this number, as of the first quarter, has gone up substantially to a >$4b run rate. With a burdened cost of $150k/yr for every single member of the 1…
Echoing twic's disbelief here. A quick googling turned up Coca-Cola's global advertising budget as being $4 billion/year [1]. >Coca-Cola has made a yearly commitment to large ad spends. In 2017, the beverage manufacturer spent $3.96 billion, in 2016, $4 billion, and in 2015 $3.96 billion on global advertising. But I'm not sure if that's a comparable figure, as "advertising" is only a subset of "marketing". Still, if…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re trading cash to build their moat (keeping out competitors, investing in self-driving). From what I can tell, at least.
That's the theory, but I have no idea what this "moat" is supposed to be. Apps to hail a cab are interchangeable commodities as far as I can tell.
That's what I keep getting stuck on. It's getting easier to compete with Uber and I don't think that's going to change. They have a well known brand but even that feels like it's on verge of becoming genericized.
> The marketing team had more than 1,200... I fully admit that I'm not in marketing, so there are surely nuances I don't know. But that scale of marketing department is orders of magnitude above any other place I have worked, with the possible exception of IBM in the 90s. Just maybe... this was a reasonable move.
https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
> I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do?"
Granted he's mostly talking about engineers, but I'm sure someone more knowledgable about marketing could write an almost identical essay.