Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#321

Post by bshanks » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 5:32 AM UTC

ybot wrote: post #140

cglong wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the services I've tried in this space, only Postmates lets you request items from businesses they aren't partnered with. This was a huge win once when I needed groceries delivered quickly.

They all do this now, to one degree or another. [1] [2] The economics are even worse (because they don't get a cut from the restaurant), so these types of orders are either very high fee for the consumer, a loss leader, or both. [1] https://gizmodo.com/doordash-pizza-arbitrage-shows-the-fubar... [2] https://www.eater.com/2019/10/30/20940107/grubhub-to-add-res...

I've heard that on Postmates you can use the write-in functionality to order from a business that isn't on their platform at all (you order from a nearby business and in the write-in field tell the Postmate to go across the street, etc). I'm not sure if many of the other services provide a way to do that.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#322

Post by tuckerconnelly » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #138

tuckerconnelly wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postmates has the cleanest API IMO. If you want to see an engineering horror check out DoorDash. Half GraphQL, half REST, random 500s, no SSR.

Lack of SSR != An engineering horror. Crawlers can handle these pages effortlessly these days. So long as the client-side performance is good, SSR isn't very important.

In aggregate it's all a horror, given how easy it is to add SSR with Next.js. I know, I work on crawlers and scrapers professionally, and it's wayy easier, if you want a robot to scrape you, to have a site with SSR disabled. It's just generally faster and and a better experience for the user, and cheap to add.

As an aside, Stripe IIRC seems to use half-SSR, half client-side fetching really interestingly to fetch data below-the-fold after load, for even faster load times. That there is excellent engineering.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#323

Post by mvkel » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

Isn’t this effectively just a “public roll up,” combining market caps to ultimately lift the valuation and multiple for shareholders? There’s a reason it was all-stock. Not a penny to be found.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#324

Post by anotherman554 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

dsl wrote: post #308

jacobr1 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big debate is whether this is due to luck or skill, whether it's possible to tell the difference and whether it's possible to determine which fund manager will be successful in the future. And the other factor is this: if it is skill, do the high-fees still give you a better risk-adjusted return?

> do the high-fees still give you a better risk-adjusted return? Yes. With your standard 2 and 20 fee structure, you don't pay performance fees on anything below 8% returns. Performance fees are where bonuses come from, so anyone coming up short sees capital and employees disappear overnight. RenTech has a 40+% performance fee on their Medallion fund because it consistently generates 60% returns YoY.

You might have indicated you were talking about a hedge fund with non public listings and no transparency. If investing was as easy as picking whatever did well in the past then we'd all be billionaires.