How they "got lost"? Uber has never been profitable. Ever. They sold their investors on the idea that if you hemorrhage money to create growth profit will spontaneously appear like mana from heaven. Recent events are just people realizing, after ten damn years, that just maybe never ever making any money is a bad thing. 100% market share of nothing is still nothing and it's time to pay the piper.
How Uber Got Lost
31–40 of 144 posts
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#32I always wonder how HN does de-deduplication. Sometimes it works automatically, sometimes it doesn't. This was already submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778994
The earlier submission likely didn't attract enough attention for the later submission to be rolled in.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#33I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how…
The cultural problem is with the investors that are willing to spend $100B to win a cut-throat $10M/year profit market.
Perhaps this is an example of a "dollar auction":
A dollar bill is auctioned with these two rules:
1. (As in any auction) the dollar bill goes to the highest bidder, who pays whatever the high bid was. Each new bid has to be higher than the current high bid, and the game ends when there is no new bid within a specified time limit.
2. (Unlike at Sotheby’s!) the second-highest bidder also has to pay the amount of his last bid – and gets nothing in return.
[...]
This peculiar game leads to a bad case of buyer’s remorse. The highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for a dollar, and the second-highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for nothing.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you do the same complex class calculation every time you interact with a cashier, talk to a receptionist, or pass a janitor? People do honest work and earn a living, no shame in that. Your life must be exhausting if you have a class-based panic attack when you hop in an Uber!
Uber feels different for some reason. Maybe it's the lack of transparency with salary. With a regular job, you get paid x dollars an hour. That's it. You may get paid minimum wage, but at least you know it's minimum wage. With Uber, a lot of people come in with expectations of a high salary (falsely perpetuated by Uber), then end up making a whole lot less. Sometimes less than minimum wage. Maybe it's the semi-predat…
Another difference is that the cashier, receptionist, and janitor have a good chance of having an employer provided health insurance plan, and perhaps other employee benefits.
Since Uber says the drivers aren't employees, it does not provide them with any of that.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#35I always wonder how HN does de-deduplication. Sometimes it works automatically, sometimes it doesn't. This was already submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778994
I think if the URL is identical, a second submission within 8 hours serves as an upvote. (That submission was about 10 hours earlier.) Or if it got substantial traction, then the window is larger.
If the URL is not identical for any reason, it has to be manually addressed.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#36I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how…
This makes a lot of sense. A large business doesn't rely on the average employee. The employee relies on the business for food, shelter, healthcare...everything. It's just an inherently large imbalance, and the only way it doesn't exist is if there is a shortage of employees in the sector and the ROI per employee is high. This is a pretty small percentage of jobs. Unions are one way to try to curb exploitation, but I…
Unions work well if a large part of the workforce in that sector are members, see the nordic countries for examples.
It's a bit like herd immunity.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#37I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how…
This isn't necessarily "The NYT." It's an excerpt from the book that Mike Isaac ( https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac ) wrote about Uber for the past 3 years.
Still, they are making an editorial decision that the book is worth reviewing and/or excerpting.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#38I feel like Uber became a gamble on self driving technology. It will be interesting to see if they can last long enough to see it happen. I could see them running out of money before that happens but I kind of hope they make it.
Uber really has no advantage to self-driving. A customer network doesn't mean much if you cannot finance actually building the cars. They also don't any training data to give them a tech advantage. It'd make way more sense for an existing car company to build the features into the car and let the owner rent out the car when they don't need it. (Telsa, GM/Cruise). Another option is to simply build the best technology…
I don't think see the point of owning a car, if it's used by other people for most the day. I think there is going to be a big company that owns most cars.
Uber could raise the capital for it on the stock market. The problem that I see is that Uber doesn't have the technology.
In a world where self driving cars are a commodity, Uber's brand could be an advantage. But in reality, by the time Uber gets access to the technology the market has already been taken by others.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#39I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how…
The cultural problem is with the investors that are willing to spend $100B to win a cut-throat $10M/year profit market.
or they don't have a good place to park their money, looking for the NBT.
Re: How Uber Got Lost
#40The infrastructure they've built their business on is crumbling. Every so often I'm running late and think to myself "I should just drive" (by which I mean take an Uber). I check the driving times in Google Maps and it's as long as waiting for the subway and walking. There are just too many people on the roads for cars to be a competitive mode of transport; people only drive when there is absolutely no other option.…
Evil is a little extreme. The drivers are still doing it, so they clearly prefer giving you a ride to not.
To add in some more anecdotal stories — the only times I really take a lot of Ubers and talk to the drivers are when traveling, and I’ve found the opposite. In Austin and Portland recently I talked to quite a few drivers that were happy with the job. And they all mentioned the flexible hours as a perk. One guy was retired and just liked getting out of the house and meeting people and making a bit of extra money to spend. A lot of people did it as a second job, but emphasized that if they don’t feel like it on any given day they can just stay home, which is very unlike any non-contract second job you could get. Obviously there are also some miserable drivers, like the ones picketing and wanting to be employees not contractors. But even though I’m pretty liberal on a lot of issues it’s hard for me to jump on the progressive bandwagon on this one because it seems so clear that most people, riders and drivers, are much better off than if Uber didn’t exist.
I do suspect that the cost of living and housing in these cities I mentioned has something to do with it. They’re still low enough that driving for Uber can make you real money, compared to somewhere like SF where everyone who doesn’t make like $150k or more is screwed.