201–210 of 405 posts
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.
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Still, a $150M-90M personal net worth at the 18B-30B valuation window. They're not going to starve either.
Looks to me like they've made out pretty well on the personal front considering they've run their business at a loss every year.
They are actually successful in the minds of VCs because their revenue has been growing.
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.
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.
Are you saying taxis can't exist?
As far as I know, any taxi dispatcher take a similar cut (30%) as them and their cost seems way higher (no automation at all, require people on phone, etc..).
Theses loses are either because they are considered unlawful somewhere (I never heard of this issue with Lyft but I guess that's may be happening) and have to fight for it, or because they are trying to expands. If they stop both of theses (operating everywhere they are considered unlawful and stopping to expands) then their cost remaining are pretty similar to any Taxi dispatcher but they require much less staff.
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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).
> Adobe, Airbnb, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, Acquia, AdRoll, AEG, Alert Logic, Autodesk, Bitdefender, BMW, British Gas, Canon, Capital One, Channel 4, Chef, Citrix, Coinbase, Comcast, Coursera, Docker, Dow Jones, European Space Agency, Financial Times, FINRA, General Electric, GoSquared, Guardian News & Media, Harvard Medical School, Hearst Corporation, Hitachi, HTC, IMDb, International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, International Civil Aviation Organization, ITV, iZettle, Johnson & Johnson, JustGiving, JWT, Kaplan, Kellogg’s, Lamborghini, Lonely Planet, Lyft, Made.com, McDonalds, NASA, NASDAQ OMX, National Rail Enquiries, National Trust, Netflix, News International, News UK, Nokia, Nordstrom, Novartis, Pfizer, Philips, Pinterest, Quantas, Sage, Samsung, SAP, Schneider Electric, Scribd, Securitas Direct, Siemens, Slack, Sony, SoundCloud, Spotify, Square Enix, Tata Motors, The Weather Company, Ticketmaster, Time Inc., Trainline, Ubisoft, UCAS, Unilever, US Department of State, USDA Food and Nutrition Service, UK Ministry of Justice, Vodafone Italy, WeTransfer, WIX, Xiaomi, Yelp, Zynga [1].
[1] https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws
Additional Info: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/when-amazon-web-servi...
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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.
This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.
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> 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…
Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. A few examples: - Recently had to purchase new servers, because of signed contracts the only servers we were allowed to purchase and put in the datacenter were four years old and technically EOF. - Firewall changes, AD changes, provisioning a VM, etc. are 48 hour turnaround. Purchasing new hardware requires 4-6 weeks. - Had an intermittent issue with their edge firewa…
> I don't think I'd ever choose managed datacenter over AWS/GCP/Azure/etc.
Who mentioned managed datacenters? I'm pretty sure people are talking about leasing space and doing everything else in-house.
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> 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…
Having done a bunch of bare metal, I can tell you the calculus isn't really that hard. Bare metal will save you money. Operating bare metal at scale requires talent that doesn't exist, not necessarily at an engineering level, but at all levels. As an example, I worked at a place that had a large bare metal deployment, i.e. >1MW worth of compute. It was woefully inefficient and costly to operate. The product that they…
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This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.
It doesn't own cars, doesnt employ drivers, doesnt own hardware, doesn't own compute or storage , doesnt develop software. What is lyft after all?
This is a little tongue in cheek, but: Lyft is an abstraction. It doesn't own anything or have any customers because it's a market maker.
Lyft is an efficiency mechanism for maximizing liquidity and minimizing bid-ask spreads in hyperlocal ride trading :)
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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 fo…