Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? Curious.
[flagged]
I think you have a failure of imagination. Who says that selling shares is the only way to raise capital?
The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
41–50 of 137 posts
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#42Oh man, a friend and I were thinking of building out a FOSS Uber clone for this exact purpose. Would allow a bunch of smaller regional Ubers to exist. Couldn't get funding and I don't have free time to write that much code. Hope these folks are able to succeed. FOSS is a great path for workers to seize the means of production.
There is no seizing here. FOSS is available to all, no one actually loses the means of production.
It’s “distributism” rather than “socialism”.
Anyway — FOSS can be crowdfunded by selling utility tokens to future customers. If you are worried about the SEC, then just use a broker-dealer like Rialto Markets to help you do Reg CF.
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#43"almost profitable" ??? "net loss of just $318,000 in 2022" "earned $5.9 million in revenue from 162,294 successful trips — and $5.2 million of that went directly to driver wages" Let's do the math: they earned $700K in net revenue and lost $318K - for a margin of -45.43%... sounds grim... But... if they can double the net revenue to $1.4M while only growing costs 25% to 1.3M then voila they're breakeven/ramen-profit…
It says they took in $1.6M of crowd funding. Not sure what the repayment terms are but presumably less predatory than VC. That gives them a few years of runway. And this is a non-profit, so "ramen-profitable" is probably the end goal. Every penny past break even just goes into the cash reserves.
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#44"almost profitable" ??? "net loss of just $318,000 in 2022" "earned $5.9 million in revenue from 162,294 successful trips — and $5.2 million of that went directly to driver wages" Let's do the math: they earned $700K in net revenue and lost $318K - for a margin of -45.43%... sounds grim... But... if they can double the net revenue to $1.4M while only growing costs 25% to 1.3M then voila they're breakeven/ramen-profit…
I don't quite understand the logic here.. the 5.2MM wasn't fixed costs, that was costs of goods sold because they needed to provide the service to earn in income.
So as far as I can tell they lost 318K, but they don't need to grow gross revenue by very much to close the profitability gap.
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tried that. Didn't work well - you never knew if you could find one, they often refused trips to places they didn't like, they would cheat you on the fare, and it was impossible to get one in a less popular area without calling, and you never knew if they were actually going to come.
i guess i'm the only one who never had a problem
You must live somewhere sufficiently dense. In a midsized city life before Uber was awful for getting a late night taxi. Have to call a central line, No shows, multi-hour waits, etc.
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#46Scheduled rides are a neat strategy, but they're tough for consumers to use effectively. For one thing, if you're attempting to schedule a last mile ride after you get off the subway, your arrival at the pickup point could be subject to minor delays. But on the network side, a few minutes on each ride impacts efficiency in a major way. Personally, my biggest (non ethical) issue with Uber/Lyft et al. is that they're u…
In NYC the volumes are humongous. They could probably build a successful business just going back and forth from airports.
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#47Über is gonna sue you out of existence just like municipal broadband.. this is by design
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#48Oh man, a friend and I were thinking of building out a FOSS Uber clone for this exact purpose. Would allow a bunch of smaller regional Ubers to exist. Couldn't get funding and I don't have free time to write that much code. Hope these folks are able to succeed. FOSS is a great path for workers to seize the means of production.
There is no seizing here. FOSS is available to all, no one actually loses the means of production. It’s “distributism” rather than “socialism”. Anyway — FOSS can be crowdfunded by selling utility tokens to future customers. If you are worried about the SEC, then just use a broker-dealer like Rialto Markets to help you do Reg CF.
can you elaborate on the difference between your definitions of distributism and socialism?
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#49Oh man, a friend and I were thinking of building out a FOSS Uber clone for this exact purpose. Would allow a bunch of smaller regional Ubers to exist. Couldn't get funding and I don't have free time to write that much code. Hope these folks are able to succeed. FOSS is a great path for workers to seize the means of production.
> FOSS is a great path for workers to seize the means of production.
It's... not. Open Source is not a business model, nor a collective organizing principle, bargaining process, etc. It's just source code a couple of people have commit access to. I'm all in favor of everybody sharing source code too, but let's not pretend it's magic. Building and sustaining any kind of organization takes work, and has nothing to do with whether your source code is open or closed.
Re: The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tried that. Didn't work well - you never knew if you could find one, they often refused trips to places they didn't like, they would cheat you on the fare, and it was impossible to get one in a less popular area without calling, and you never knew if they were actually going to come.
i guess i'm the only one who never had a problem
parent gave five examples of issues they found while using a taxi in the manner you described
you could have just believed them instead of being antagonistic about it, this is especially unnecessary given the topic has a history that supports the experiences the parent poster listed