Engineering will be next. Expect this from more companies in the valley as the reality of being a public company looms on the newly public companies.
Uber Lays Off 400
171–180 of 310 posts
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#172Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
so that was hilariously well timed with my post but very strange: its some investors doing the share sells, but having the company announce it (and selling just a tiny amount of shares in it too). The company doesn't make the bulk of the money here, so why announce it at all? The investors just used the company to advertise that they have shares to sell
so this is more of a hilarious red flag of incompetence, if one planned to add to a position in this
but it does the prove the point that the company and shareholders have many financing options: the issuer is unscathed here, they will create shares and exchange it for $50,000,000 or maybe $40,000,000 due to the 20% drop from announcing it, oh no. Those private shareholders are still planning to make 9 figures.
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 p…
I never ride Uber at home but there are some places where it's so entrenched (e.g. Mexico) that there are no real competitor apps. On the other hand, I've gotten better deals there from taxis and they've been more reliable. You can often look up a ride on Uber and negotiate with a taxi driver right then and there. If you don't speak Spanish, though...
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Right, eventually the drivers will figure out that they are the losers in this scheme. People really don't understand just how much it costs to own a car, especially one you drive 30k miles a year.
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#176Earlier 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…
> Uber operates in 600+ international major markets. Maybe it’s because I’m from a small country, but can a single country have more than one “major international market”?
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Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#177> 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.
Since we're talking about tech startup marketing budgets, it's a good time to reread http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html 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 r…
40% of all invested VC dollars go to Facebook and Google in the form of customer acquisition costs
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#178I bet they get to profitability before driverless cars. The alternative is Taxis, which are an awful experience. And ubiquitous driverless cars could be a decade away or more.
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#179Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
The best way to understand this is to look at their financial statements: https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... Generally, you would go to the 10-K to get a quick snap shot. I direct you to look at the "CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS" You can see that they made about 1.4B (in Q1) after paying the drivers but then they spent 2.2B on: Operations and support, Sales and marketin…
Agreed, but like others have pointed out “marketing” includes marketing to drivers with incentives to drive. They’re not running advertisements they’re subsidizing rides on the driver and passenger side and calling it part of their marketing spend.
The problem with Uber is that their technology isn’t that innovative and their platform isn’t that sticky.
Re: Uber Lays Off 400
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know when is the last time you got involved in marketing but if anything, the metrics driven culture is precisely a free pass allowing to justify any decision whatsoever, through a careful selection of data points and scale, whether intentional or accidental. God forbids having to point out to your manager that he mixed up the X/Y axis and sales have been decreasing month over month, not increasing.
By the way, a lot of marketing is still not quite metrics driven. Unlike the internet, when spending money on national TV, sports teams, tube station ads, there is little feedback that can be captured.
And even on the internet, how do the new junior marketer learns that google/facebook ads don't have a positive ROI for his use case, assuming he's measuring at all? That's by spending a few million dollars in vain.
Anyway, that is not to say that marketing is useless, it's an important aspect of some businesses. The capital costs involved are fairly high though and can quickly spiral out of control. A big part of the marketing/advertising industry is a scam operating at a loss, an elaborate conduit to transfer money from the client to the advertiser.