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Uber Lays Off 400

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#271

Post by mruts »

paulcole wrote: post #149
bduerst wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really profitable though? Your article talks about how Pizza Hut is struggling as it switched to digital delivery. Also according your statista link, delivery only accounts for 30% of revenue in the pizza industry.

Your intuition is probably spot on. Dominos stock has been doing terribly and pizza delivery will likely cease to exist because it is a constant money loser.

Dominos has out performed the S&P 500 by like 200% in 5 years. In the last year it returned -2%, so that’s not good, but still a positive story overall.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#272

Post by bloemy »

stevietopsiders wrote: post #249
resters wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a shareholder, but I think market share is the short term goal. The incentives can be phased out as prices increase a bit after competition cools off.

A criticism of this "model" is that building a ridesharing app and cloud backend is now not that hard. So some developers with VC money can develop an app, launch in a city, and force Uber to cut prices, because people will be happy to install a FastRyde app and get rides for $3 less than Lyft/Uber.

And that is exactly what is happening in Paris, for instance. There are a ton of different apps there. Kapten is one of them. They simply cut their commission by 15% compared to Uber, pay the drivers 7.5% more and make the rides 7.5% cheaper, basically. Since they don't have as much legal costs and marketing costs as Uber, it seems to work out for now. I really don't see how Uber will be able to prevent this in other places too...

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#274

Post by mruts »

bduerst wrote: post #250
askafriend wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is...not correct at all. Dominoes stock has been on an absolute tear the past decade. I don't know what charts you're looking at...

They've plateaued this past year with negative growth. Is what dominoes was doing a decade ago really relevant?

They have an excess return compared to the S&P 500 of 200% in the last five years. That’s hardly ten years ago, and the story for Domino’s is still very strong. There’s tons of market share left to eat up and many international opportunities.

Pizza Hut has already moved into EM markets (like Africa) and is gradually expanding. Domino’s could do the same thing, and probably better with their superior tech stack.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#275

Post by hef19898 »

lapnitnelav wrote: post #155
user5994461 wrote: post #121

Earlier 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.

Good ones are.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#276

Post by [deleted] »

dcposch wrote: post #215
aresant wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBER masks this real number across many of their general line items. EG they put ~$300,000,000 of the "Driver Incentive" cost into "Cost of Revenue" line item that represents: - "Any amount paid to a driver that exceeds the revenue earned by that driver (for instance, if a driver’s earnings from a trip exceed the fare for that trip). Excess driver incentives jumped by about $300 million in 2018 from the previous year…

The elephant in the room for ride sharing is unit economics (and, closely related to unit economics, the race to self-driving). Hiding $1800m of ride discounts under Sales and Marketing feels deceptive. If a store advertises "summer sale, 30% off!" for a month, you can reasonably call that marketing spend. Uber is different. If my flight's leaving in 1h30m, I pull out my phone, open Uber, type in LAX, open Lyft, type…

[deleted]

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#278

Post by brandnewlow »

scarface74 wrote: post #241
MegaButts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think there is a more cynical take that Uber exemplifies. The VCs do everything they can to drive up the valuation, except make money. They then sell their shares to the public markets for an incredible profit and let them deal with the problem of actually making money. I fear venture capital (and Silicon Valley) is much more about value extraction than value creation t…

Facebook was already profitable pre-IPO and was forced to go public because of some security law involving the number of investors. But the number of tech startups that go public is small. Only one YC backed company has ever gone public - Dropbox. And it seems to be proving Steve Jobs right. It was never a product, it was a feature. It still doesn’t have a clear road to sustainable profitability. Even out of the few…

PagerDuty (YC S10) is also a public company: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pagerduty-stock-skyrockets...

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#279

Post by dalbasal »

cm2012 wrote: post #237
mrnobody_67 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40% of all invested VC dollars go to Facebook and Google in the form of customer acquisition costs

90% of all new ad spend goes to either FB or Google because they actually work for acquiring customers at scale. Every other ad provider squeezes into the last 10%.

Not sure this is true anymore. The market is so big, those two can't cover it all.
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