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Uber Lays Off 400

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#241

Post by scarface74 »

MegaButts wrote: post #57
cj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, except I'd probably frame it a bit differently: > Need more users pre IPO to juice the growth story Or, "VCs tell us we need to spend their investment quickly in whatever areas will generate a hockey stick growth in valuation. We can always fix our business model when we're ready to." > Cut costs post IPO Or, "We no longer answer to our VCs. Now we answer to the public market who cares a lot more abou…

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think there is a more cynical take that Uber exemplifies. The VCs do everything they can to drive up the valuation, except make money. They then sell their shares to the public markets for an incredible profit and let them deal with the problem of actually making money. I fear venture capital (and Silicon Valley) is much more about value extraction than value creation t…

Facebook was already profitable pre-IPO and was forced to go public because of some security law involving the number of investors.

But the number of tech startups that go public is small. Only one YC backed company has ever gone public - Dropbox. And it seems to be proving Steve Jobs right. It was never a product, it was a feature. It still doesn’t have a clear road to sustainable profitability.

Even out of the few that have gone public within the last 10 years, most of the tech darlings still haven’t become profitable.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#242

Post by toast0 »

EpicEng wrote: post #60
davinic wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they care about self-driving if most of their drivers are making little more than the cost of operating their vehicle?

Economies of scale kick in when you own the fleet. I'm also not sure about the statement "most of their drivers are making little more than the cost of operating their vehicle".

If owning the fleet was valuable, there's not much (probably just labor law and some issues with the mythos) stopping Uber et al from owning the vehicles the drivers drive.

I think self-driving is the cold fusion of the 21st century, but the reason unlicensed taxi companies are pursuing it is because if, by some miracle, it comes to fruition, it might make their business viable, but it would be hard to compete with an automaker running autonomous taxis when you have to buy your autonomous taxis from the automaker you're competing with. If they can build it on top of existing cars, it makes it more possible to compete; and if they end up with an enabling patent, it means they'll probably survive in some form.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#243

Post by scarface74 »

mrnobody_67 wrote: post #177
dalbasal wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're talking about tech startup marketing budgets, it's a good time to reread http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more r…

40% of all invested VC dollars go to Facebook and Google in the form of customer acquisition costs

This is no different than what happened with Yahoo and AOL before the dot com bust.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#244

Post by BigJono »

duskwuff wrote: post #186
cortesoft wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me think of my days working on a facebook app in 2007-8... every single app had the same revenue stream - selling installs to other apps. The price per install was crazy high, and this was before Facebook started enforcing rules about shady practices, so every app would do things like "Install this other app, and we give you these perks in our app" It was ridiculous. There was no real money, just app developers…

The same thing has been true of mobile games for a while. A lot of the ad inventory displayed in free games is ads for more free games -- sure, there's some real revenue from in-app purchases, but there's also a lot of money getting passed from hand to hand for ads.

I think that 'some' real revenue probably dwarves most industries tenfold. Look at what something like Candy Crush makes in IAP, the top 5 players could probably support the entire ad industry themselves in perpetuity without breaking stride.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#245

Post by cm2012 »

scarface74 wrote: post #243
mrnobody_67 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40% of all invested VC dollars go to Facebook and Google in the form of customer acquisition costs

This is no different than what happened with Yahoo and AOL before the dot com bust.

Most modern ad spend is tracked to ROI. Yahoo and AOL was not.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#246

Post by Twirrim »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #206
Twirrim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that particular aspect require full time staff in-situ, though?

Where better to get expertise in a region's culture than the region?

By hiring a local business to do it, rather than hiring a set of full-time staff yourself?

For a company that's about the gig economy, they make some strange staffing choices.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#247

Post by askafriend »

paulcole wrote: post #149
bduerst wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really profitable though? Your article talks about how Pizza Hut is struggling as it switched to digital delivery. Also according your statista link, delivery only accounts for 30% of revenue in the pizza industry.

Your intuition is probably spot on. Dominos stock has been doing terribly and pizza delivery will likely cease to exist because it is a constant money loser.

This is...not correct at all. Dominoes stock has been on an absolute tear the past decade. I don't know what charts you're looking at...

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#248

Post by aserafini »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #100
smallgovt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand why every new market requires an operations team on the ground, but marketing ought to be centralized.

I'm not sure. There is a big billboard ad here in Sydney, which seems to be coordinated with a radio and online marketing campaign, around saying how 'safe' Uber is. Could campaigns like this all around the world be centralized into a smaller team?

I think it could be yes. We have the exact same campaign for Uber in Berlin right now (in German language of course). But the essence of the campaign is identical.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#249

Post by stevietopsiders »

resters wrote: post #164
aresant wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBER masks this real number across many of their general line items. EG they put ~$300,000,000 of the "Driver Incentive" cost into "Cost of Revenue" line item that represents: - "Any amount paid to a driver that exceeds the revenue earned by that driver (for instance, if a driver’s earnings from a trip exceed the fare for that trip). Excess driver incentives jumped by about $300 million in 2018 from the previous year…

I am not a shareholder, but I think market share is the short term goal. The incentives can be phased out as prices increase a bit after competition cools off.

A criticism of this "model" is that building a ridesharing app and cloud backend is now not that hard.

So some developers with VC money can develop an app, launch in a city, and force Uber to cut prices, because people will be happy to install a FastRyde app and get rides for $3 less than Lyft/Uber.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#250

Post by bduerst »

askafriend wrote: post #247
paulcole wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your intuition is probably spot on. Dominos stock has been doing terribly and pizza delivery will likely cease to exist because it is a constant money loser.

This is...not correct at all. Dominoes stock has been on an absolute tear the past decade. I don't know what charts you're looking at...

They've plateaued this past year with negative growth. Is what dominoes was doing a decade ago really relevant?
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