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Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#131

Post by viscanti »

mdorazio wrote: post #129
viscanti wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They've done nothing but lose money, more than any private company ever. This is a weird take for me. I don't mean to single you out but I see it everywhere. If I went and bought $100 worth of stocks, not many people would say I lost that money. Most people would agree that we have to wait and see how that investment works out. In every other context we call it "investing" (some investments work out and some lose m…

That's a rather poor analogy. If you go and buy stocks you're buying a security that can be traded back to fiat currency at any point in time. That's... not what startups do. A better analogy would be taking out a loan for $100 with fuzzy repayment terms. If the ROI on that loan is negative, everyone would agree that you're losing money, investment terms be damned.

> If you go and buy stocks you're buying a security that can be traded back to fiat currency at any point in time.

It depends on the stock. But there are lots of types of investments. None of the rest are referred to as "losing money" until it's clear they lost money. The act of investing is investing.

> If the ROI on that loan is negative, everyone would agree that you're losing money, investment terms be damned.

My point is that it's too soon to say what the ROI is for Uber's investments. I remember lots of people lamenting the "losses" that Amazon had year-over-year, before they realized that it was actually a wildly profitable set of investments that the company had made, creating one of the largest companies in the world.

No one is playing an investment term semantic game here. I'm simply expressing how silly (and misleading) it is when people refer to businesses investing in things as "losses" before they ever know how those investments play out. You only know how an investment turns out when you know how the investment turns out, not when the investment first starts.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#132

Post by beatpanda »

georgewfraser wrote: post #35

> The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A. If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuade…

Getting into YC is itself a credential

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#133

Post by deepnotderp »

georgewfraser wrote: post #35

> The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A. If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuade…

Second this comment, similar experience.

OTOH, it is true that outside YC there are subclusters that are a lot less meritocratic and more network based.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#134

Post by mdorazio »

viscanti wrote: post #131
mdorazio wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather poor analogy. If you go and buy stocks you're buying a security that can be traded back to fiat currency at any point in time. That's... not what startups do. A better analogy would be taking out a loan for $100 with fuzzy repayment terms. If the ROI on that loan is negative, everyone would agree that you're losing money, investment terms be damned.

> If you go and buy stocks you're buying a security that can be traded back to fiat currency at any point in time. It depends on the stock. But there are lots of types of investments. None of the rest are referred to as "losing money" until it's clear they lost money. The act of investing is investing. > If the ROI on that loan is negative, everyone would agree that you're losing money, investment terms be damned. My…

You and I must have had different Investments professors. If you invest in a stock and it decreases in value, you lost money. You might get that money back if it goes up, but it is absolutely referred to as losing money. People just like to play mental games and say things like "it's only a paper loss" or use the "unrealized loss" term which is for accounting purposes, but it's a loss regardless. If you don't believe me, take your rent payment and put it in a stock, then if it drops tell your landlord that you're not short the money - they just have to wait a while because it's an investment. Or put another way, had you not bought the stock before it went down, you could have used the same amount of money to buy more of it at the lower price point - i.e. you lost potential money even if it goes back up.

I believe the point of the parent post is that the entire business model of Uber is based on losing money on a unit basis to sustain the market. This is very different than companies like Amazon that lost money due to OpEx on growing the business in a sustainable way. The Amazon equivalent of Uber would be if Amazon paid for 20% of every item ordered out of its own cash balance. I agree that it might still turn out great for Uber in the end if various market forces align, but 1) I'm having a hard time thinking of a company outside of the VC-funded tech scene that could run Uber's financial games without going bankrupt, and 2) I personally think it's important to ask if the money going to keep Uber afloat is really best allocated there.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#135

Post by speedplane »

mdorazio wrote: post #134
viscanti wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you go and buy stocks you're buying a security that can be traded back to fiat currency at any point in time. It depends on the stock. But there are lots of types of investments. None of the rest are referred to as "losing money" until it's clear they lost money. The act of investing is investing. > If the ROI on that loan is negative, everyone would agree that you're losing money, investment terms be damned. My…

You and I must have had different Investments professors. If you invest in a stock and it decreases in value, you lost money. You might get that money back if it goes up, but it is absolutely referred to as losing money. People just like to play mental games and say things like "it's only a paper loss" or use the "unrealized loss" term which is for accounting purposes, but it's a loss regardless. If you don't believe…

If Uber wanted to be profitable, they could be tomorrow. Their growth would slow down, and they wouldn't be able to invest in next generation technology, but they could be a very profitable business.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#136

Post by jondubois »

georgewfraser wrote: post #35

> The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A. If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuade…

This is a fluke anomaly and so it doesn't count. Most people/projects keep getting rejected from YC. Getting any kind of funding without social connections is nearly impossible.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#137

Post by jondubois »

DeonPenny wrote: post #120
georgewfraser wrote: post #35

> The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A. If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuade…

It absolutely is a network. You just got lucky enough to join one. Without that connection is pretty hard to get started without going to Stanford or knowing someone.

Having being on the other side of this, it is infuriating to see how people take luck for granted. Even against impossible odds.

I can list every luck/event in my career over the past 10 years but I would trade them all for the luck of receiving single seed round of funding to work on my own project. It's not for lack of trying.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#138

Post by speedplane »

jondubois wrote: post #137
DeonPenny wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is a network. You just got lucky enough to join one. Without that connection is pretty hard to get started without going to Stanford or knowing someone.

Having being on the other side of this, it is infuriating to see how people take luck for granted. Even against impossible odds. I can list every luck/event in my career over the past 10 years but I would trade them all for the luck of receiving single seed round of funding to work on my own project. It's not for lack of trying.

> I can list every luck/event in my career over the past 10 years but I would trade them all for the luck of receiving single seed round of funding to work on my own project.

Luck plays an important part in making a successful business, but I wouldn't say it's all that important at the seed round.

Re: Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

#140

Post by Slartie »

barry-cotter wrote: post #124
joeblow9999 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this possibly downvoted? I suspect only a political agenda could be the cause but I'm willing to hear otherwise.

Here’s your political agenda. In the entire Anglophone and Francophone world the taxi industry was awful. In the US they were and continue to be racist. They lied about availability and scheduling and they did it for decades. Many people on this website are familiar with the area that used to have the worst taxi service anywhere in the US, San Francisco. Taxi service in NYC existed in large parts of the city in theor…

> I’m aware of only one country, Japan.

Germany is one of those, too. We have fairly good taxi services in any larger city, at least as far as I've seen as a user in the last 15 years. They usually have clean cars, are there on time (or waiting in taxi queues in front of public spots) and take you to your destination without major detours. I've never encountered any case (visible to me as the customer) of tax evasion or trickery with manipulated meters, so I guess correct metering is properly enforced by the regulators. And, very important: they also had apps for summoning them spontaneously and tracking their approach and optionally paying them relatively quickly after smartphones became ubiquitous and had those in widespread use by drivers, either provided by private non-taxi-related corporations (like MyTaxi) or by conglomerates of taxi companies that bound together to develop an app.

But I had multiple opportunities to "enjoy" taxi services of the classic kind in the US, specifically San Francisco and Miami, before and after Uber was a thing. And I definitely see quite a difference to the level of service I enjoyed back home, especially in the "before" time. I even think that this difference wasn't present in the minds of the Uber management - they probably thought that any taxi service in the world was generally as bad as the one in San Francisco and was thus in need of "disruption", and it seemed as if it took a while for them to notice that this wasn't the case, and to realize that people in places of the world with fairly well-working taxi networks might have much less understanding for their "civil disobedience", as you call it.

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