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The Uber Bubble

braveneweurope.com

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Re: The Uber Bubble

#331

Post by maybelsyrup »

kanbara wrote: post #321
jmyeet wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your points but let me give you some counterpoints: 1. Taxi services are balkanized; 2. Many tax services don't allow you to order a taxi ahead of time. You have to flag one down (eg NYC). For ordering a car, you need to otherwise deal with an (expensive) car service; 3. Uber made the payment process seamless and I cannot overstate how important this is as a user. I hate dealing with NYC yellow…

in europe there are many taxi companies that have started to do uber app features and prepayment and all the jazz that make uber so great. the main issues i have with uber are that it's now almost more expensive than taxis, there's almost no regulation, the drivers are taken advantage of / not making profit and also not getting proper benefits. just because taxis suck doesn't mean uber should replace them. government…

> in europe there are many taxi companies that have started to do uber app features and prepayment and all the jazz that make uber so great

For me this is the real evolution, and what was needed all along. I've used the apps you're talking about in Europe and Asia, and they're great.

> just because taxis suck doesn't mean uber should replace them.

Hear, hear. I don't miss the old taxi model, and Uber/Lyft came in with simple, strong improvements in usability and payments, as users outlined above. But after 12 years, Uber has shown itself to be what it is: an expensive, shitty vampire.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#332

Post by justinpowers »

this_steve_j wrote: post #250
justinpowers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias…

Survivorship bias, which is a subtype of selection bias, is what I was contemplating along those lines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias Now if I could somehow know whether I have any biases I should be aware of, I’d greatly appreciate that information, Steve.

Yup, this selection bias is also survivorship bias.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#333

Post by masonic »

chrischen wrote: post #295
femto113 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Turning a profit" has almost no meaning, particularly with mark-to-market investments in the mix. More concretely Uber's business has never generated positive cash flow (i.e. taken in more money in a given period than they spent in that same period) and are projecting they will reach that milestone for the first time in Q4 of this year.

A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. They deduct profits by creating artificial expenses charged by other companies providing services. If they did have profits they’d get double taxed (once on the company’s profits and then again in payroll taxes if they decide to disburse profits to employees). They’d also have to pay out royalties on profits in some cases. It’s usually pointless to…

>A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow.

You're confusing cash flow with declared income/loss. The shenanigans pulled on shows like "Columbo" and "The Rockford Files", resulted in high-quality, long-successful shows showing "losses" by the studio, are classic examples. Search on "Hollywood Accounting."

Re: The Uber Bubble

#334

Post by chrischen »

xeromal wrote: post #326
chrischen wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Uber can’t turn a profit then how did cab companies (essentially Uber but with a worse product, no software efficiencies, and bad UX) turn a profit for over a century?

Because in a lot of locations, they had regulatory capture that ensure their success.

Even if you subscribe to this belief that somehow artificial conditions allow for taxis to exist, you have to start wondering maybe they have a good reason to exist since taxis are pretty much universally available everywhere you go. Even in their previous crappy form, they were ubiquitous like cockroaches. If literally every city in the world adopted this form of regulatory capture, maybe Uber et al can benefit from the same thing, except with a better non-cockroach like UX.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#335

Post by jjav »

jmharvey wrote: post #261
mikeryan wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many tax services don't allow you to order a taxi ahead of time. You have to flag one down (eg NYC). For ordering a car, you need to otherwise deal with an (expensive) car service First this is just inherently wrong. You’ve been able to call and schedule a cab, even in the burbs, since before the internet was a thing. Second there’s now services like Curb (in NYC) or Flywheel which allow you to use an Uber/Lyft style…

> First this is just inherently wrong. You’ve been able to call and schedule a cab, even in the burbs, since before the internet was a thing. And maybe the driver would show up on time, or maybe they'd see a street hail en route to picking you up and decide to make you wait an extra 40 minutes. Uber drivers cancel, too, of course, but "automatically fall back to a different driver after a cancellation" is a meaningfu…

> Uber drivers cancel, too, of course,

Or never show up. Twice with uber (I'm not a frequent user, so this is a high percentage) the driver never showed up. The app didn't let me request someone else until a very long timeout (don't remember how long). Good thing I wasn't going to a flight or other time-sensitive trip on those times, but waiting around in the dark in an industrial park, not so fun.

Pre-uber I'd reserve cab rides to a relative remote area and not once was there a delay or missed pickup.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#336

Post by chrischen »

masonic wrote: post #333
chrischen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. They deduct profits by creating artificial expenses charged by other companies providing services. If they did have profits they’d get double taxed (once on the company’s profits and then again in payroll taxes if they decide to disburse profits to employees). They’d also have to pay out royalties on profits in some cases. It’s usually pointless to…

>A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. You're confusing cash flow with declared income/loss . The shenanigans pulled on shows like "Columbo" and "The Rockford Files", resulted in high-quality, long-successful shows showing "losses" by the studio, are classic examples. Search on "Hollywood Accounting."

Corporations do the same thing via end of year bonuses and dividends. Those things are considered expenses too and can be used to offset income. If Uber is going to get taxed 20% on their excess income for the year or they can give out some bonuses to their employees, incentive bonuses to their drivers, and ramp up their marketing spend, what do you think they'll do?

You can't just declare 0 income. You have to actually spend it to declare 0 income.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#337

Post by erik_seaberg »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #278
mikeryan wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And maybe the driver would show up on time, or maybe they'd see a street hail en route to picking you up and decide to make you wait an extra 40 minutes. That’s not how it worked, or works (see Curb). You didn’t schedule a particular cab you call the cab service and the dispatcher sends a cab to you and makes sure they got there. If they didn’t show up you call dispatch back and they call the guy and find out what th…

That's definitely how it **ing worked, man. I came so close to missing so many damn flights before Uber came around, because I'd book a car the day before and it would just ghost me. I had to aim to get to the airport 4 hours early because half the time I had to reorder a fresh cab and hope for the best. Cabs had a 45+ minute lead time in the evenings and at night too, when I could order them by phone at all. It was…

Yeah, I used to drive Sea-Tac airport shuttles, and we routinely rescued people whose taxis just never arrived.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#338

Post by skobovm »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #286
criddell wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employs thousands of people You made me wonder how many people are actually employed by Uber. I thought thousands sounded like a lot for what they do. First Google result - 29,000 employees. That blows me away. It sounds like Uber itself is ready for disruption.

I've been trying to figure this out for the last few months.. Uber isn't THAT complicated on the technical side. The driver/rider matchmaking is simpler than algorithmic trading code I've worked on, and I'm happy to take 1% on a trade in that space, yet Uber and Lyft are helping themselves to 30% or more. I was personally thinking it'd be great to offer an Uber competitor that aims for complete transparency with no f…

The complexity is not the depth of the problem, but rather the scope. Matchmaking — while complicated — is a very small subset of the domain. Pricing, demand forecasting, routing, payments, etc. are all equally important on the pax side. Similarly, there are many teams needed to support the overall ecosystem for things like driver onboarding, compliance, and support.

Also comparing a 1% return to a 30% charge isn’t exactly fair. Fixed costs like background checks aside, chargebacks, fraud, insurance, support claims, incentives among others warrant the markup

Re: The Uber Bubble

#339

Post by jsemrau »

xeromal wrote: post #327
Firmwarrior wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to figure this out for the last few months.. Uber isn't THAT complicated on the technical side. The driver/rider matchmaking is simpler than algorithmic trading code I've worked on, and I'm happy to take 1% on a trade in that space, yet Uber and Lyft are helping themselves to 30% or more. I was personally thinking it'd be great to offer an Uber competitor that aims for complete transparency with no f…

The one thing that might make it harder to figure out the scale is that literally every market (city, state, country) has different regulations and that is not simple to manage.

Regulations that they, at least initially, mostly ignored until they started to become banned in many jurisdictions.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#340

Post by mym1990 »

escot wrote: post #322

I always thought Uber Pool was their main advantage over traditional cabs that couldnt coordinate sharing rides with multiple users. It was an actual productivity gain, like the article complains about them not having. I remember getting across SF for 3 bucks. I think it only shut down because of covid, so if they restart the program it could make them more interesting than paying for the whole route.

Wow this brought back some memories! Its interesting thinking back to a time when riding in a Prius with 3 other strangers seemed perfectly normal haha.
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