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Uber Lays Off 400

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#151

Post by sethhochberg »

criddell wrote: post #69
ForHackernews wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Right now it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of Uber inertia was specifically because their competitors are smaller and more localized.

I live in NYC, and there are half-dozen major rideshare apps here in some form - but I often travel to places where, if there is any major service operating there at all, its Uber... maybe Lyft, but certainly not Via or Juno or Gett or any other smaller names.

I don't want to load my phone up with a bunch of different apps and give my data to a bunch of different companies, so guess which app I use even at home where I have plenty of options? Uber. The barrier to entry of getting a new local competitor up and running is small, but the convenience of being able to stick with one provider no matter where you are is big.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#152

Post by askl56 »

rolltiide wrote: post #14
ProAm wrote: post #4

Profitability doubts after the IPO? Everyone in the world knew they were never close to profitability pre-IPO, this is just the reality of being a publicly traded not profitable company. Can't funding round yourself out of this one anymore.

Well you can... the terminology is just different They’ll say “saudi investors bought into secondary offering at X share price” instead of “round completed at Y valuation!!!” Which is just X share price of last purchase multiplied by total shares in existence Public companies can do secondary offerings from treasury or from creating brand new shares from nothing (dilution) Liquidity is one of the benefits

> “saudi investors bought into secondary offering at X share price”

I think Beyond Meat are currently demonstrating the perils of doing a secondary offering whilst the company is unprofitable.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#153

Post by luckylion »

dvt wrote: post #3

When I was at Edmunds (working on a fairly profitable ad tech product), Uber was actively poaching from our team; a few ex-coworkers (albeit mostly engineers) moved up to SF and hopefully they didn't get axed. We can chalk this up to "business as usual," but let's not forget people's livelihoods are at stake.

> but let's not forget people's livelihoods are at stake

Meh, but let's also not pretend that they didn't make a lot of money by working for a company that treats the people that provide the actual service, the drivers, like shit.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#154

Post by wp381640 »

bduerst wrote: post #119
mevile wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pizza delivery is profitable. Pizza comes in a shape easy for transportation, the size and value of the delivery is economical for a delivery business and there's an established culture around ordering pizza for delivery. The food delivery companies just need to figure out these problems, which a hard, for non-pizza foods.

Is it though? Most pizza delivery is an ancillary service to the restaurant itself. Are there very many profitable pizza-delivery only businesses? Also you could argue that for the genre of restaurants where delivery is profitable as an ancillary service (pizza, chinese, etc.), they already offer delivery and there isn't any profitable market for the restaurants where they didn't have it before.

Lookup the stock of Domino's[0] - they've been on a years long tear by scaling delivery and adopting tech

In theory this could work better for some food delivery companies as they charge the restaurant rather than produce themselves and run the overhead of stores, etc.

[0] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:DPZ

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#155

Post by lapnitnelav »

user5994461 wrote: post #121
aresant wrote: post #42

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…

Just fire half of them to save half the money. Marketing has large budgets to spend (multiple of their salaries) on marketing campaigns. They're usually incentivized to spend as much as possible on whichever marketing campaign they can come up with, with little accountability on whether it brings any ROI. It's the equivalent of software engineers wanting to use the latest tools for resume building, no matter the situ…

I don't know when was the last time you got involved in anything marketing but if anything, marketing teams are fairly metrics driven nowadays.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#156

Post by bduerst »

H8crilA wrote: post #150
bduerst wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then what's the planned payout for those secondary investors? Liquidating on the market would plummet.

Companies do this all the time (issue new bonds or equity). There's really not much of a difference between public and private markets, in principle. Planned payout is, and has been the same ever since limited liability companies were invented by humanity: excessive cash flows plus liquidation value of corporate assets at end of life. Hoping on anything else is speculation (nothing wrong with that, but it is just spe…

Right, but that specific activity is all visible on the financial filings, so how is that the same as the pre-IPO funding rounds that Uber was burning through?

If you take out a ton of debt while burning through cash reserves then your market price plummets. Same with issuing new equity, through dilution. At least pre-IPO, the investors could lock in favorable pay outs on their funding rounds - now this is all visible to the public investors.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#157

Post by rb808 »

squarite wrote: post #144

Well if any of those 400 are in SF/NY, and are reading this, we're hiring for a marketing manager for my team at Square! PM me or apply here: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Square/743999690593237

Link says job has expired

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#158

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

SilasX wrote: post #118
MiroF wrote: post #22

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.

>You literally cannot profitably transport people at the prices they're offering That's not my understanding of the figures, which say that they're charging plenty enough to cover the costs associated with the ride, but are blowing lots of money on aggressive marketing. The transportation costs (i.e. driver pay and customer service) are not what's killing them.

"incentives", i.e. discounts/coupons for passengers or pay bumps for drivers, are a huge part of those marketing costs. So while they're rolled under the marketing budget they fundamentally are a distortion of the price they need to pay drivers or amount they need to charge passengers to become profitable.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#159

Post by wp381640 »

user5994461 wrote: post #143
b_tterc_p wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantics. Cars don’t cost that much to operate. Uber doesn’t cost that much. The portion going to the human take home pay minus car value depreciation and other expenses is small, but a substantial chunk of it.

Cars cost a huge amount of money upfront and require a tremendous amount of maintenance to operate, and that's before we get into insurance and accidents. Right now, all of these are fully on the drivers. This will turn around if Uber rolls self-driving cars worldwide.

Having looked into the finances of car share companies I can vouch that the fleet costs are just huge blots of red ink on their finances

Uber wouldn't work if they owned the fleet - it's a huge advantage to just be the app + ops + acquisition costs

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#160

Post by zemotion »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #100
smallgovt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand why every new market requires an operations team on the ground, but marketing ought to be centralized.

I'm not sure. There is a big billboard ad here in Sydney, which seems to be coordinated with a radio and online marketing campaign, around saying how 'safe' Uber is. Could campaigns like this all around the world be centralized into a smaller team?

It's not quite that simple. The needs and responses of a local market can be completely different from one to the next.

Because of differing cultures, we respond very differently to color palettes, design aesthetics, safety concerns, cool factors, etc. And since the entire point of marketing is to sell, then the the brand's visuals, branding strategy, responses to concerns, etc, all have to be completely customized for the local market in order to engage customers.

For example one common difficulty tech companies often encounter while trying to enter Japan was how difficult it was to acquire and retain users compared to anywhere else. Some gave up, some would keep trying, and surprise—it would magically work out when you hire a local ad team, local designers, art directors, etc. Western companies' sleek, advanced designs are easy to use and navigate, but the locals understand that culturally, the Japanese society resists change. They are used to early day yahoo/geocities level of banner ads and flashing gifs on a page so that they can feel certain that what they are using can be authentically catered to the Japanese people and supported. Overly simple designs like a Bootstrap framework was simply too frightening, new and confusing.

Same can be applied to pretty much anything from fashion, beauty, food, retail of any kind, to things like Uber, which specifically has its own complexities to solve while trying to enter a taxi-efficient market like that; a completely different marketing problem to solve than say Australia's safety concern as you mentioned.

TL;DR: Can't easily centralize marketing because local cultures and needs are always different; and you need locals to know what locals will want/engage with.

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