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It's still a 45B company...still the largest and most successful company to come out of SF this decade.
If Uber counts as a successful company by SV standards, that's a pretty strong condemnation of SV standards.
Is anyone really surprised? Years before the IPO we knew they were not profitable in the least. We knew VC cash was subsidizing rides. We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. This on top of a horrible culture with pretty lousy ethics and morality. This is how this was supposed to play out and everyone here (on HN) knew that.…
This is by far Uber's best trick. Convincing people that there is an end game they can win.
I see no way that self-driving saves them. Either they'll have to buy/lease/maintain a massive fleet of cars or they'll have to rent self-driving cars from the owners. Either way, in the near future, how much cheaper can it be than paying humans peanuts?
How much wealth was redistributed upwards? Who benefited from Uber other than the founders and maybe 1% of the entire business? I find it highly unethical for such a business to be able to ignore so many laws most of which protect the have nots to build a system that moves most of the profits to the haves. Then dump the broken business to IPO for fools to buy up and loose as well.
That’s a pretty cynical and inaccurate way of looking at it. They did create hundreds of thousands of part-time to full-time jobs which presumably did not benefit only the 1%. They did drastically lower the price of point-to-point transportation, thereby massively expanding the market for it which presumably did not benefit only the 1%. etc
Is anyone really surprised? Years before the IPO we knew they were not profitable in the least. We knew VC cash was subsidizing rides. We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. This on top of a horrible culture with pretty lousy ethics and morality. This is how this was supposed to play out and everyone here (on HN) knew that.…
This reads like the usual Uber criticism and doesn't touch on the lockup. The market knew the lockup was ending, so it should have been priced in. Dropping when the lockup ends should mean that markets underestimated how many insiders wanted to cash out, and employee sentiment is worse than market sentiment.
The lockup period is a known event (nothing to be suprised about). The market already adjusted the stock price to reflect the anticipated insider cash out after the lock up.
Any rise or fall in the price at the specific time the lockup ends is because the reality is different than what the market anticpated.
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This will sound very naive (because it is), but I thought that the free market would see through the bullshit and value them appropriately. That is happening, just far more slowly than I imagined.
The valuation was largely over the general hype for self-driving vehicles. Those who thought they were imminent must have just been ignorant to how slow regulation moves and how risk averse corporations are to the potential fallout of being "first to market" with a self driving car that ends up with someone dead regardless of fault. As the hype dies down so does Ubers market cap.
There will certainly be regulatory and liability issues to work through but if the tech were really ready for prime time I actually don't believe those those are showstoppers.
I think Lyft and Uber hurt public transit. There has gotta be a better way to make American cities more livable and accessible without adding additional car traffic. Buses, denser house, better urban planning, metro rail and subway additions are the way we need to go like Asia and Europe. Uber and Lyft are not doing well in Europe and Asia because leaders realize they make traffic worse and are trying to focus on zon…
This problem and its solutions are not new. The solutions weren't implemented because there wasn't enough desire to implement them, and I doubt that has changed today.
American culture pushes the idea of personal vehicle ownership equaling success, and if you have a car you're going to drive it instead of taking the subway.
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Sure, but the same could be said of Tesla. Horrible employer, constant exec churn, unbelievable cash burn, what appears to be structural losses.... But Tesla still has a 56B mcap today. Uber is 46B. These VC/equity issue cash furnaces can go on longer than most can fathom if a subset of investors believe in the long term vision.
Tesla has arguably a more clear path to a profitable future. Uber's path to profitability is arguably much more speculative and dependent on risky technology advances.
As far as I understand, Uber does some autonomous vehicles R&D, but the required tech advances will probably not be developed by them ?
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Weird that this is being downvoted because Uber has shown no interest in acquiring and managing assets (self-driving cars or even their own cars) which is a completely different business than being a marketer for independent taxis. If self-driving cars become a business it seems like rental car companies would be ideally positioned to take advantage of them.
Uber is the ultimate middleman company. It would only work if people bought their own self driving cars and rented them out to Uber to make some extra money.