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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#101

Post by [deleted] »

pastor_elm wrote: post #50
untog wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that always strikes me about the amount of money swilling around in tech. $90M is an absurdly huge amount of money. By absolutely any outside objective measure of work put in to payoff it is off the scale. To look at this as the founders having lost out is almost comical.

> $90M is an absurdly huge amount of money. is it? A 10 million dollar house isn't all that special in a lot of parts of the country. A family worth 90 million can still have a lot of financial anxiety.

[deleted]

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#103

Post by nudgeee »

maxxxxx wrote: post #87
CondensedBrain wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think investors are mostly betting on self-driving cars being closer than anyone thinks. The first company to get rid of its drivers wins.

They have zero experience in fleet management. Rental car companies or car dealers are probably set up better than Lyft or Uber for self driving car sharing.

It appears that Uber has some toes in fleet management: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubercab.fl...

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#104

Post by eshyong »

jandrese wrote: post #99
morningmoon wrote: post #46

"We have incurred net losses each year since our inception and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We incurred net losses of $682.8 million, $688.3 million and $911.3 million in 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively."

It's pretty impressive that they've managed to lose that much money despite the fact that they are just running a website and an app. Yeah, that's oversimplifying it, but it's not like they own factories or storefronts or need to buy access to expensive services or something. The vast majority of their "employees" are independent contractors with no healthcare or retirement benefits who get paid by the ride (so Lyft…

See some of the AWS fees mentioned in the top comment on this thread. $300MM over 3 years is not a small amount of money.

Not to mention the salaries you need to pay to stay competitive in the bay area, they seem to have a sizable headcount (~1600 from a quick google search)

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#105

Post by vecter »

jandrese wrote: post #99
morningmoon wrote: post #46

"We have incurred net losses each year since our inception and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We incurred net losses of $682.8 million, $688.3 million and $911.3 million in 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively."

It's pretty impressive that they've managed to lose that much money despite the fact that they are just running a website and an app. Yeah, that's oversimplifying it, but it's not like they own factories or storefronts or need to buy access to expensive services or something. The vast majority of their "employees" are independent contractors with no healthcare or retirement benefits who get paid by the ride (so Lyft…

This is just wrong. Lyft has lots of driver hubs and massive costs for local operations and support.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#106

Post by econner »

Nothing like increasing net losses leading up to IPO!

2016 - ($682,794)

2017 - ($688,301)

2018 - ($911,335)

As a percentage of revenue though the loss is decreasing,

2016 - 2x

2017 - 0.6x

2018 - 0.45x

2018 revenue was $2.1bn.

Since they are a tech company and not a real company they can IPO at 10x revenue so that's ~20bn.

Who cares what their margins are.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#107

Post by enra »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #7

Biggest thing I noticed is that the cofounders only own a little more than 1m shares each, which is less than .5% each! Painful amount of dilution....wow.

Also suspect there has been some secondaries where early investors, founders and early employees have sold some of their shares to late stage investors.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#108

Post by dfgert »

phamilton wrote: post #61
us0r wrote: post #12

>In January 2019, we entered into an addendum to our commercial agreement with AWS, pursuant to which we committed to spend an aggregate of at least $300 million between January 2019 and December 2021 on AWS services. If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we may be required to pay the difference, which could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations. Not as bad a…

100M/year is ~8M/month. Some perspective on that, it could by you one of: ~400PB of data in S3. ~2600 bare metal "x1 type" ec2 instances running 24/7, 3 year upfront reservation. ~60M Write IOPS in dynamodb ~300M Read IOPS in dynamodb ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances Again, each of those is spending the entire budget on a single service, but that seems like a nonsense level of spending. Maybe they really have that muc…

When you make money more than what you need it irrelevant how you spend it.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#109

Post by mikepurvis »

cm2012 wrote: post #23
CondensedBrain wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think investors are mostly betting on self-driving cars being closer than anyone thinks. The first company to get rid of its drivers wins.

People online say this but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense. The word right now is self driving cars won't be working for quite a while since they're nowhere near solving for rain and snow.

Not that I disagree with the larger point here, but it's fully possible that a system which can't (yet) handle rain and snow could still deliver a ton of value— for example, in Arizona, where neither of those things happen all that much.

A partial launch also gives you a bunch of opportunity to iron out other details, like establishing the protocols which allow a rider to call for assistance, or a remote safety driver to take over in a construction zone, weird driveway pull-in, whatever.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#110

Post by kolbe »

jonknee wrote: post #51
randomacct3847 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well apparently you can play baseball and make $330m. Yes, it’s a lot, but to build a $30b company and make 90m pre-tax (maybe 50m post in CA) is something... The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick, who is definitely a billionaire and retained much more of Uber.

On the other hand, the baseball player will create much more than that in value while Lyft has lost billions of dollars. If someone here is underpaid it's not the Lyft founders.

Lyft has enriched its investors far more than any baseball player could even dream of. You're just looking at accounting losses. But when this IPOs, early stage investors will have all made billions.
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