Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 196 posts

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#171

Post by WisNorCan »

jasonbarone wrote: post #165
WisNorCan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn shows new hires and total employees. Churn can easily be calculated by [June Employees] + [June New Hires] - [July Employees]

Good plan. It's not like that number includes vendors, contractors, drivers or anything that could skew the numbers.

Sarcasm doesn’t really help to move a conversation forward.

At some point, you will learn to try to extract signal from imperfect data. It’s a key skill. If you wait for perfect data, you will miss the trends until they are in the rear view mirror.

Unless you believe that there has been a sudden mix shift in vendors vs. employees, the general analysis of churn and hiring still hold. You are only debating the multiplier on numerator and denominator.

Those are less important.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#172

Post by angersock »

sah2ed wrote: post #108
angersock wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a small-minded view. Our entire runs on fraud of one degree or another--sometimes it's just more than people are willing to bear.

You are joking right? The question about fraud was in the context of the misappropriation of capital from investors for a purpose different from what was initially agreed to, and not as a general catch-all term for posturing or affectation either by politicians or the general populace.

Hell, you could make the same argument about a company jumping into a different product line with capital intended for a particular buildout.

Your blanket statement "this is never is justified" was my primary objection.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#173

Post by thanksgiving »

forapurpose wrote: post #169
geofft wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was gonna say. Surely Travis and his allies are interested in Uber's long-term success, yes, but that's a very different claim from them being good for Uber's long-term success.

> Surely Travis and his allies are interested in Uber's long-term success Why is that certain? Many people are interested in their own success at the expense of their companies. Kalanick in particular seems to celebrate selfishness.

As far as I understand, Uber IS Travis. I'm not trying to say he is God or anything. This "generation" (Uber, snap) to me seems adamant in fixing the errors of the last generation where founders lost control too quickly (Angie's list).

I'm not saying Travis is a good person. I'm just saying that in a war between founders and investors, it is usually a safe bet to side with founders.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#174

Post by sebleon »

WisNorCan wrote: post #171
jasonbarone wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good plan. It's not like that number includes vendors, contractors, drivers or anything that could skew the numbers.

Sarcasm doesn’t really help to move a conversation forward. At some point, you will learn to try to extract signal from imperfect data. It’s a key skill. If you wait for perfect data, you will miss the trends until they are in the rear view mirror. Unless you believe that there has been a sudden mix shift in vendors vs. employees, the general analysis of churn and hiring still hold. You are only debating the multipli…

Why not filter the analysis only to profiles with keywords like"engineer" or "operations". Otherwise the analysis is unlikely to be directionally correct.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#175

Post by johnnyfaehell »

needless2 wrote: post #155
tristanj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the 30,000+ employees are non-tech. Uber needs lots of hires for driver recruitment, training, support. They have people on the ground in every region they operate.

do they get paid okay?

Depends on what you consider "okay". For most people who will join I suspect they will think it's okay money.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#176

Post by johnnyfaehell »

needless2 wrote: post #155
tristanj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the 30,000+ employees are non-tech. Uber needs lots of hires for driver recruitment, training, support. They have people on the ground in every region they operate.

do they get paid okay?

Depends on what you consider "okay". For most people who will join I suspect they will think it's okay money.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#177

Post by calpaterson »

iamtherhino wrote: post #102
calpaterson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From crunchbase ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/benchmark/investment... ) it looks like Benchmark made three investments in Uber, the last of which was in 2013. The funds that VCs raise normally only operate for a specific term of eg 5 years, so now is the kind of time they will want to get out. Incidentally from what I can make of their investments in Uber on crunchbase, they need Uber's market cap to be $…

I think you dropped a 0. 0.13*31BN = ~$4BN, still a 10X return if they've invested $400M.

Yes I did! Thanks.

Can't edit it now, unfortunately.

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#179

Post by elmar »

WisNorCan wrote: post #146

It's interesting to see how all the chaos at the board and management level has affected employees. Data from LinkedIn paints a troubling picture both in terms of hiring and retention. * Uber has 31,537 employees as of August 2017. * New hiring is down from 1000 per month in 2016 to 500 a month in 2017. July was the lowest month since the start of LinkedIn data which is August 2015 @ 440 hires. * There are currently…

>Uber has 31,537 employees

Uber now has about 14,000 employees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/technology/uber-chief-tra...

Re: Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

#180

Post by uhhhhhhh »

btown wrote: post #107
uhhhhhhh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>travis + allies being more long term His actions and bad management hardly seem long term based thinking. While you could be right that is his intention, his actions to date, the bad management issues well documented, or his possible participation in fraud, to the antagonistic business practices hardly seem the best "long term" approaches.

Not to defend his actions, but to consider his possible mindset in doing them: His actions could be explained as pushing hard to build a defensive moat against a world allied against Uber as quickly as possible. If regardless of what you do you lose a bit of PR here and there, you get kicked out of cities here and there, and you have to pay a few hundred million in settlements here and there, you might as well throw…

I would disagree with the order of events here. His actions and business practices directly led to 'a world allied against uber', and getting kicked out of cities. That wasn't incidental, it was a direct result of their choices and behavior. You can't use the results of his actions to explain his actions.
Post reply on HN