241–250 of 291 posts
Maybe because I'm outside the unicorn bubble I can't see the magic, but I find something very warped about a business strategy that combines stratospheric valuation, intentional regulatory non-compliance, perpetual capital injections, service misrepresentation, and unprofessional corporate behavior... and results in massive financial losses year after year. When I try to balance the elements, it frankly looks like an…
Maybe because I'm outside the unicorn bubble I can't see the magic, but I find something very warped about a business strategy that combines stratospheric valuation, intentional regulatory non-compliance, perpetual capital injections, service misrepresentation, and unprofessional corporate behavior... and results in massive financial losses year after year. When I try to balance the elements, it frankly looks like an…
The consumers won. Before Uber, traveling abroad in another country meant getting scammed by taxi drivers. After Uber, there is now a safe, trustworthy, and familiar mode of transportation when in a foreign place. Note: Lyft is only domestic.
Uber has revolutionized transport in all of the areas it has disrupted. Bad comes along with the good, but for consumers, the good outweighs the bad (at least for now while the prices are VC subsidized).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Maybe because I'm outside the unicorn bubble I can't see the magic, but I find something very warped about a business strategy that combines stratospheric valuation, intentional regulatory non-compliance, perpetual capital injections, service misrepresentation, and unprofessional corporate behavior... and results in massive financial losses year after year. >When I try to balance the elements, it frankly looks like…
> The taxi experience in cities other than NYC, Chicago, and SF got a million times better. It wouldn't be fair to NYC and Chicago to compare them to SF. In my mind, the completely horrible broken experience of the SF taxi system was what created Uber & friends. I've been living in SF pre-Uber and having moved from a big city, the taxi system just drove me nuts, I could not understand why it was that fucked up. If it…
Over the long run, at least in the U.S. it seems like Uber/Lyft are edging towards a comfortable duopoly. Usually their prices move in lockstep (each has insights into the other company's prices through email receipt intelligence, credit card intelligence, webscraping, etc.). And their services are fairly exchangeable. For either one to win there needs to be either a massive cost advantage or some sort of stickiness…
I would not call it comfortable since both are bleeding money every year. In addition, Waymo, Cruise etc. are all trying hard to put robot taxi's on the road. When that day comes, it will be interesting.
It's just as easy to rent a self-driving Camry from Toyota.
Oh and then there's the thing where Google and Apple and probably a hundred startup hopefuls scraping APIs will try to disintermediate them at the device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harder than it seems. AmericanExpress had outsized market share in the corporate travel market for about 30 years, even though it never struck me as a superior product to Visa-based cards. Not sure who they hypnotized to establish that edge, but it became strangely durable.
It always seemed very strange to me that it's legal for company-expensed credit card purchases to generate individual, personal rewards for the card holders. (And these awards aren't even taxed?) Something feels underhanded about it, though I can't put my finger on it.
So there's a pile of points growing, which must be accounted for in the balance sheet, but which are essentially worthless to the company. And being a trustee is a legal hassle nobody wants to deal with if they can avoid it.
So the companies just hand those points and rewards over to the employee contractually, which dissolves the trust (since the employee now beneficially owns and legally owns the points). Much easier. And you can spin it as benevolent generosity to boot.
(Of course, I am not a lawyer.)
What is Uber's long term moat/pricing power? To compete in a local market you just need to sign up 5000 or so drivers. At a $5 signup bonus that costs like $25,000. You can just be the third app, most drivers already swap between Lyft/Uber. You could even form a drivers cooperative and just give all the charges to drivers (like farmers do). Regulatory capture seems like the only real route to sustainable profits with…
For all the lip service that's paid to "free market capitalism" I chuckle that the first question always is "How quickly can we get to a moat so we don't have to compete with anyone." Whether it's a monolopy, vendor lockin, network effect, high customer leave burden or any of the other number of methods. And, I'm not knocking that that how business works, I just think we probably acknowledge that many businesses have…
Maybe because I'm outside the unicorn bubble I can't see the magic, but I find something very warped about a business strategy that combines stratospheric valuation, intentional regulatory non-compliance, perpetual capital injections, service misrepresentation, and unprofessional corporate behavior... and results in massive financial losses year after year. When I try to balance the elements, it frankly looks like an…
“desperately” Are you sure you’re outside the bubble? Because the taxi industry could have done with some improvement, but it didn’t “desperately” need “disruption”. People got from a to b just fine, and drivers got paid. The only thing that desperately needs disruption is the destructive influence SV has on societies that were doing just fine before its “disruption”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More accurate pickup times would really help. I've rushed outside numerous times after being given a 2 minute ETA. Pretty much every time I end up waiting outside for 5-10 more minutes after the ETA changes to a longer time. If I knew the ETA was accurate, I would be more vigilant about being roadside at the correct time.
I have never had an Uber arrive as fast as the estimate. Usually takes about twice as long as app displays when requesting the ride. Also, there is absolutely no recourse if a driver starts driving in the opposite direction of you. I had a 3 min estimate, then driver drove 15 mins away. Called driver and he had the audacity to ask me to cancel the trip (so I'd still be charged). Was 30 minutes late and had to contact…
I don't know what to say about this because as a lifelong value investor I cannot accept the valuation of Uber based on it's earnings. But the same logic held me back from investing in Facebook and Google, which did not make any sense to me at the moment of their IPO. How do I decide what Uber's earnings will be in five years?
at the moment of their IPO Is a case of Facebook, you were wise to not buy at the IPO, given that their share price dropped almost in half in the subsequent months.