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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#191

Post by kccqzy »

jonknee wrote: post #3

2018 revenue of $2.16B, with a loss of $911.3M. Oof. Though as a passenger I can't say I mind buying $2 bills for $1!

As a passenger I've found my Lyft prices to be steadily increasing. In the beginning they were cheaper and more reliable than Uber; then I stopped comparing prices until one day I found that Lyft charges much more than Uber. There was a time when both my friend and I were trying to use Lyft to book the same trip with the same destination, and yet my price was 20% higher than hers.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#192

Post by 0xffff2 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #186
buboard wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have so much data and so much computing. Would they be really dependent on that? Makes it scary to consider what could happens to their passengers if aws is down / hacked.

If AWS went down, we'd be worrying about a lot more than catching a Lyft ride. EDIT: typo

Who's "we" and why would they worry? I'm struggling to think of a side-effect of AWS going down that would worry me more than being unable to get a Lyft (which itself doesn't worry me very much).

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#193

Post by buboard »

CondensedBrain wrote: post #60
bluedino wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would buy a couple racks worth of servers and plenty of ops staff wouldn’t it?

Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company. That's the same reason billion dollar companies rent buildings instead of owning them.

> slowly turn into a datacenter company

That didn't turn out very bad for amazon

And frankly i 'd rather invest in a cloud company than a money-losing taxi company.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#194

Post by throwawaymath »

untog wrote: post #44
Fordec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, a $150M-90M personal net worth at the 18B-30B valuation window. They're not going to starve either.

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.

But they did lose out. You're confusing a comment about relativities for a comment about absolutes.

No one is saying they're not going to be well off, or that it wasn't a worthwhile use of their time to build the company. They're just saying the return is smaller than it could have been. Your "objective outside measure" isn't enlightening in that sense, because the point is specifically about relative measures.

Responding to a discussion about funding dilution by saying, "well they're well off anyway!" is kind of odd, because that's not really relevant. Dilution also materially impacts non-founding employees, and small changes in dilution could have outsized impacts on their returns.

It's also comparable to negotiating with a company who tells you that you're still getting a lot of money "by any objective measure" even if they won't meet your ask, because their offer is higher than the median wage for your locale. Yeah, sure, but that's a pretty empty observation isn't it?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#195

Post by jnaddef »

occamrazor wrote: post #89
cabaalis wrote: post #28

> In 2017 and 2018, certain of our named executive officers provided rides to riders using the Lyft platform in a similar manner as other drivers. We believe that these driving activities provide the named executive officers with substantial practical insight into how our platform serves drivers. I thought this was a pretty interesting point. I was about to call it dogfooding but not quite, since it's more of an expe…

McDonald's does (or used to?) the same, requiring corporate managers to work in a restaurant at several points in their careers.

I wish they would require executives to eat their food everyday, in a Super Size Me fashion

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#196

Post by fosk »

untog wrote: post #44
Fordec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, a $150M-90M personal net worth at the 18B-30B valuation window. They're not going to starve either.

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.

There is always a greater goal to achieve that requires more money: 90M to retire? Sure, it’s plenty of money. 90M to do greater and better things? Not so much. Hell, even Bill Gates would gladly take more money that what he already has in order to achieve his foundation goals.

Your point of view is not objective, but subjective to how much money you need to have in order to do the things you are planning to do.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#197

Post by privateSFacct »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #157
munchbunny wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Running your own infrastructure at large scale is actually really hard and therefore surprisingly expensive in risk and talent cost. If you look at how big the internal infra teams are at companies that host their own infrastructure, they're often individually the size of growth stage companies. The problem is that provisioning, reliability, and security are by themselves really tough problems. If those issues…

> If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that. Maybe that's just the story cloud providers tell you. Until you try, do you really know if it's all that complicated? People have been running datacenters for a long time, and not all of them work for Amazon. But there may be also a beneficial side effect of having gearheads around, and…

I'm actually curious how AWS is able to scale support so well with what seems reasonable quality. I had an issue (my fault in end), got excellent support - and they didn't tell us to take a hike at end when it turned out not AWS fault.

Conversely, with GCP 4 years ago now had some support issues - didn't come away impressed - I'm convinced even internally GCP isn't well doc'd or something.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#198

Post by prostoalex »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #136
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.

> Painful amount of dilution Lyft had a modern secondaries policy. Many early people sold shares.

Secondary sales is existing shares changing hands, there's no dilution.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#199

Post by BinaryIdiot »

throwaway-1283 wrote: post #148
iblaine wrote: post #120

As a former engineer at Lyft, looks like my RSUs would be worth ~2x my salary per year. Typical RSU grants are 25% of your salary per year, so those Lyft RSUs would have been a good return. But that's at a $18-25B valuation. I think $15B is more realistic given the losses and most recent round of funding. Lyft is in a tough industry. Kudos to Logan Green for getting this far. Good to see a UCSB alumn do well.

I don't see how these companies will stop losing $1b+ a year each year. The public markets will not be too kind. The end game was supposed to be autonomous taxis (cutting the driver out). I don't see how that's going to happen before they run out of money unless they 1) significantly raise prices or 2) take increasingly bigger cuts from drivers. Personally I will be shorting as soon as I can.

Right? Even if autonomous taxis _is_ their endgame, why couldn't companies that actually produce the cars do it cheaper? Almost all of them are heavily investing in it right now, some are even partnering up with companies that know how to do a lot of it.

I don't see how this works out for Lyft or Uber. To me it just looks like they'll both eventually run out of money and get squashed. Maybe I'm missing something?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#200

Post by throwawaymath »

untog wrote: post #86
randomacct3847 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m making the point that you have two cos whose main US product is virtually indistinguishable from one another. The founder from one became a multi billionaire and the others are 1/20th of the way of becoming one.

I'm making the point that when you look at both objectively rather than in comparison they are both absurd amounts of money.

But you're injecting that point into a discussion about a different point as though it provides more insight. It's not particularly interesting; we get it, they're fabulously wealthy. But no one contested that, which is why several people are trying to explain that it's not what they were talking about.

An S-1 filing encourages relative financial comparisons by design and intention. It's not surprising that Lyft's founders are extremely well off now. What could be surprising is the degree of dilution they experienced. Those kinds of financial technicalities require us to engage in discussion that treats objectively fantastic returns in terms of relativities.

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