Is the Ride over for Uber? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#181

Post by astrange » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:32 AM UTC

bergenty wrote: post #161

voz_ wrote: post #25

Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one. It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either: (A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon we…

Who is DD and what do you mean they crushed them in food? Uber Eats is king in every major city I’ve been in.

DoorDash. No idea who’s winning, though the business seems fundamentally bad since it’s so expensive for everyone involved.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#182

Post by astrange » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:33 AM UTC

naravara wrote: post #104

addicted wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say there was just 1 delivery service. Could they charge enough delivery fees to actually build a sustainable business? How much fees would you need to charge? $4/delivery means having to make a delivery in 15 mins to be able to pay the delivery person minimum wage. Plus Uber’s profit, plus the cost of the car and maintenance expenses + tickets, accidents, etc, It’s hard to see how a monopoly can also make mone…

The only successful version of this business I can imagine is, maybe, the ghost kitchen model that is basically App equivalent of a mall food court. So it's basically a handful of giant kitchens to serve an area that offers several styles of cuisine. You order and their delivery drivers go to the one place and bring it to you. At that point, though, you're not gigging out delivery people. You're just hiring short-ter…

Ramen travels fine if you separate the ingredients and have people mix them at home. It does use a lot of plastic though.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#183

Post by aetherson » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:34 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #169

aetherson wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restaurants would do it to increase sales, of course. There simply is demand for delivered food; there always has been, and in a world where more and more families are dual-income and have more money than time, there always will be. During the pandemic, there was certainly more pressure on the restaurants. After it, the restaurants may get a better deal -- none of that is a particular reason not to comply with the se…

Right, but every additional sales channel is also work , and so the sales need to be large enough to actually justify doing this. If they're not, in a world where some mix of users and restaurants get charged the true costs of delivery service, then you're left with a service that gets people to order things for you, which is basically just Postmates, and they're also not doing hot.

I think some of the actual value of delivery apps has been that they have low start-up costs for restaurants. They aggregate demand for that channel and some of the genius here is that it's pretty simple putting a restaurant's menu online.

It seems clear to me that there is plenty of demand to justify the service. Doordash's revenue was about $5B last year (I believe that's revenue and not GTV, which is probably 5x that). Doordash also only has about 50% of the market. Even if you believe that some of that demand is illusory, brought about by subsidized prices, that still seems like there's a pretty straightforward business there if you can charge a sort of "ordinary business profit."

And, again, there's been delivery food businesses since time immemorial, it would be weird if we thought that there was no kind of business here. Pizza companies used to be more or less the only ones because pizza delivered so well that pizza restaurants could absorb the fixed cost of entire delivery employees, but a food delivery app lets you pay for just part of a delivery-person.

It seems pretty straightforwardly the case to me that the problem in food delivery apps has never been that the fundamental business makes sense, the problem has been that from the very beginning there have been a large number of companies ferociously competing in the space, with nothing to differentiate them, which has squeezed margins to nothing.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#184

Post by astrange » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:35 AM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #30

michaelt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree. I mean, it's not like Uber is buying cars in bulk at a discount smaller operators can't match, or anything like that. And it's not like they're running a lean technology operation, with just 50 engineers globally, to get economies of scale on tech expenses. The only economies of scale Uber has on their side is marketing.

There's also maintenance on that fleet of cars to consider and ride-share gets no economies of scale there. You know who does? Taxi companies.

Taxi companies don’t like owning their cars either; they have the same abusive system of making the drivers be contractors who own the cars. Except Uber doesn’t let the drivers rip you off so is safer to use.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#185

Post by Hermitian909 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:46 AM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #156

Hermitian909 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. Peo…

Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technolo…

> I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams

Netflix has over 1000 engineers, maybe close to 1500? Uber has ~3,000.

If we assume these companies are handling similar amount of work, Netflix has only managed to do 2-3x better in terms of headcount to work ratio. (talking to friends at these companies, I think this paints a rosier picture of Netflix than is reasonable).

As another commenter pointed out, there's also a real step change when you go global. The requirements in terms of governmental compliance and engineering effort to outcompete local software shoots up headcount significantly. With a global audience you generally need to be providing an excellent experience in more ways as local values and tastes can vary more significantly than you expect.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#186

Post by SNosTrAnDbLe » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

csande17 wrote: post #97

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the "small team of focused engineers" trope for apps like uber. It's so easy to blow past that number. Website? That's a team. iPhone app? That's a team. Android? Another team. Data collection and A/B testing platform for all the front ends? Another team. Backend? A team. Infrastructure? Another team. AI solutions for problems like delivery time estimation? Another very expensive team. BI for the executives? Y…

An underappreciated aspect of computer programming is that maintaining a program often requires less work than writing it in the first place. Once you finish writing the iPhone app, you've finished writing the iPhone app , and you can get by with a much smaller team--possibly just one person--to handle bugfixes and maintenance. Unicorn tech companies generally don't realize this, which is why they all redesign their…

As long as you have good product requirements, creation is actually very simple. You have freedom to choose the technology and the tools.

However, The moment that you discover that your AWS bill exceeds your engineering budget, you will have a different view of maintenance. People will now start calling it resilience, scale, optimization, etc. And then one day, the db will need to be partitioned (almost always, if the product is successful) and then the people who created the mess [almost always using a nosql database as it was available ]will run for the exits. You (or the poor unthanked ‘maintenance’ engineer ) will start learning about why distributed systems are hard to maintain.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#187

Post by pm90 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:02 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #136

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these bi…

They're not saying it would take 15 to build, they're saying that maintaining it does not take nearly as many staff as they currently have. Which is correct: if Uber is simply a rideshare company, then with the technology established it should be winding down it's dev teams. If it's instead a "every market" company then it should be doing that with its considerable on-payroll staff.

No, maintaining a complex app with thousands of microservices doing a bajillion things still takes a lot (a LOT) more than 15 people.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#188

Post by fatbird » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

bergenty wrote: post #161

voz_ wrote: post #25

Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one. It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either: (A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon we…

Who is DD and what do you mean they crushed them in food? Uber Eats is king in every major city I’ve been in.

DoorDash. Uber Eats in Vancouver is hot garbage, and my wife and i have switched from Skip to DD because Skip’s quality has plumetted. DD has really captured reliable service in Vancouver.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#189

Post by pm90 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #101

vladf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.

Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these bi…

I remember that time quite well. These alternative apps would always fail over the weekends when demand skyrocketed. They just didn’t work, when most people needed them the most (drunk and trying to get home from bars/clubs). That really hurt their reputation in my eyes and in the eyes of others like me (which in Austin was a lot!). I personally remember wandering around at 4am trying to get a ride back… not an experience you can forget easily.

It also wasn’t just a single weekend thing. These other apps had almost a year to fix themselves and they couldn’t. I guess they just couldn’t muster the capital to build something really solid. But in any case it just made it very clear that this isn’t an easy problem. And when Lyft/Uber came back, the other apps were dropped immediately lol.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#190

Post by batiudrami » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

deepGem wrote: post #111

I think the market is ripe for a real Uber Black. A super premium service that guarantees a cab no matter where you are within a minute. No cancellations. Your own personal on demand limousine. People are so tired of cancellations and not finding rides, I bet some will pay a premium just for the predictability that you can go anywhere whenever you desire.

Not enough people to make anywhere near “in a minute” achievable. Maybe in half an hour in dense cities.

We know from air travel that most people prefer to pay the lowest fare for the worst cattle class airfare.