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How Uber Got Lost

nytimes.com

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Re: How Uber Got Lost

#111

Post by sabujp »

jfoster wrote: post #68
dumbfoundded wrote: post #15

I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how…

If it's so easy to compete, why aren't there more competitors with a larger market share? I don't know of any ride share market with more than two major players. US: Uber / Lyft South East Asia: Grab / GoJek Australia: Mainly just Uber (lots of smaller players but none with very significant market share)

india: ola

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#112

Post by clairity »

ghaff wrote: post #61
clairity wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also the value chain of driver->dispatcher->rider just doesn't have a lot of extra margin to squeeze out of the ride-hailing business to make it really profitable (this should have been obvious from the beginning to VCs). once uber/lyft cut out the dispatcher, reduce no-shows a tiny bit, increase utilization a bit, off-loaded cap ex/risk to drivers, where do the killer profits come from? when you do a five forces ana…

I don't suppose we'll ever really know, if only because people are so good at adjusting their memories as needed but... One does wonder if the self-driving promise here was: 1. A cynical con job to get investors on board from the beginning 2. Not quite so cynical but nonetheless recognized by management as a hail mary pass 3. Uber just got swept up in the overall industry overoptimism/groupthink around self-driving d…

all of the above, probably.

but there was basically zero chance that self-driving cars of the sophistication and scale needed by uber would be widely deployed within 10 years (i'd wildly guess a 50% chance of its existence in 30 years), as anyone employing a critical mind for more than a few minutes could surmise.

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#113

Post by kshacker »

H8crilA wrote: post #94
cryptica wrote: post #73

Uber didn't get lost. It simply was never the kind of company that could acquire a monopoly big enough and fast enough to justify a multi-billion dollar valuation. I'm starting to think that many of the most successful tech companies of the past decade are not real monopolies but succeeded purely because the centralization of capital made it difficult for alternative projects to compete for a limited period of time.…

Billionaire half life is around 20 years. From 1995 till 2015 around 50% of billionaires dropped out of the league: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-com... Big money doesn't equate smart money.

This is quite a mis-representation. The total number of billionaires in 1995 = 289. Of them, 66 died. 24 of them diluted their holdings to family. This is 31% of them. Of the remaining, 126 are still billionaires. That is 43% of them. I rounded it down, but if you add them together, you see only 25% dropped out. Still a big number, but maybe some of them were spiky nasdaq 5000 of the 90s : very temporary wealth due to some reason. It seems like the odds are 80% or higher of retaining your billion dollar wealth over 2 decades.

But now that the dollar is cheap (by 1995 standards) and the billionaires aplenty, maybe we should look at 5 or 10-billionaires for our next study.

[ Edited to add: Actually you do not even need to downsize 25% to 20%. Take a 1% erosion per year and you get there anyways. So basically the odds of someone losing billionaire status were about 1% per year. Quite a low chance of failure. And quite a high chance of death in comparison.]

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#114

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jen20 wrote: post #49
ENOTTY wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree re competitors. If you look at when Uber and Lyft left Austin, almost overnight, competitors willing to follow the local laws sprung up and soon began providing equivalent service. In my opinion, it's going to be impossible to establish a moat (aside from incumbency) in ridesharing (absent some kind of regulatory change heavily favoring incumbents). The second someone thinks they can do it better, th…

I was in Austin many times over the period that Uber and Lyft were not there. One of my takeaways was that building a mobile app which feels polished and actually works as advertised is _hard_ - not one of the local competitors managed it. Most of them didn’t even bother to distribute their app outside the US App Stores (a common issue with American companies) making it next to impossible to use for international vis…

I (mostly) disagree. I always prefer to take RideAustin now because they pay their drivers more and donate a large amount of money to local charities with their round up feature.

RideAustin was most definitely sub-par when it first came out, but considering it was rushed on a teeny shoe-string, non-profit budget, that's not surprising. I'm sure Uber and Lyft had lots of issues when they first launched, too.

Point being these days RideAustin is 100% adequate. It gets me from A to B at a fair price, quickly.

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#116

Post by ghaff »

clairity wrote: post #112
ghaff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't suppose we'll ever really know, if only because people are so good at adjusting their memories as needed but... One does wonder if the self-driving promise here was: 1. A cynical con job to get investors on board from the beginning 2. Not quite so cynical but nonetheless recognized by management as a hail mary pass 3. Uber just got swept up in the overall industry overoptimism/groupthink around self-driving d…

all of the above, probably. but there was basically zero chance that self-driving cars of the sophistication and scale needed by uber would be widely deployed within 10 years (i'd wildly guess a 50% chance of its existence in 30 years), as anyone employing a critical mind for more than a few minutes could surmise.

It seemed obvious to me based on a combination of what some disinterested expert observers were saying and the sort of situations I see driving every day, especially in big cities, needed to get door to door without human intervention.

However, you've only had to read this site over the past few years to see the huge number of people who bought the Level 5 is right around the corner story hook line and sinker. In all fairness, I attribute a lot of this to people who so wanted to believe they'd never need to own or drive a car that they weren't as critical as they should have been.

I find it "interesting" how quickly the narrative has shifted. A lot of the same people who were more or less making the aggressive promises pretty much all changed their stories in near-unison. One suspects they all knew or had come to known at some level but felt they had to wait for others to back off too lest they be seen as laggards.

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#118

Post by buboard »

The "network effect" lock in is real when your service is free to use. Put a price tag and suddenly it becomes much harder to keep people from leaving. The "growth at all cost" strategy is profitable for facebook & G, for other things, the market will decide what profit margin they can have (if at all)

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#119

Post by H8crilA »

kshacker wrote: post #113
H8crilA wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaire half life is around 20 years. From 1995 till 2015 around 50% of billionaires dropped out of the league: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-com... Big money doesn't equate smart money.

This is quite a mis-representation. The total number of billionaires in 1995 = 289. Of them, 66 died. 24 of them diluted their holdings to family. This is 31% of them. Of the remaining, 126 are still billionaires. That is 43% of them. I rounded it down, but if you add them together, you see only 25% dropped out. Still a big number, but maybe some of them were spiky nasdaq 5000 of the 90s : very temporary wealth due t…

Thank you for the fix!

Re: How Uber Got Lost

#120

Post by markbnj »

jeremyjh wrote: post #96
cryptica wrote: post #73

Uber didn't get lost. It simply was never the kind of company that could acquire a monopoly big enough and fast enough to justify a multi-billion dollar valuation. I'm starting to think that many of the most successful tech companies of the past decade are not real monopolies but succeeded purely because the centralization of capital made it difficult for alternative projects to compete for a limited period of time.…

The whole premise of a monopoly was never sound. There is no cost to drivers to run multiple apps, and no cost to users to use multiple apps. You don't care who is on your network, you only care who can get me the fastest and cheapest ride right now.

I agree. A ride in a car is clearly a commodity, and having slick tech to make accessing that commodity easier can only be a differentiating factor for so long.
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