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

Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 516 posts

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#241

Post by eloff »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #196
eloff wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, it's better to do something as in a startup, than to complain about public policy. When your system is broken, try to fix it, when that fails, workaround it.

Startups, and specifically VC culture, do not have aligned incentives with fixing society; in the end, their aim is to make money, not improve society.

Yes. But most every company makes the world a better place in a way. People pay less for products and services than they get in value - otherwise they wouldn't pay. So everyone ends up better off. There are things like negative externalities that complicate the picture.

In the specific case of uber, people benefit hugely from the service over the old way of how taxis worked (I know, I live in a place where ride sharing is illegal.) Uber's drivers can be thought of as exploited, but they're all there willingly, so I don't buy that for the most part. I've met so many drivers doing it parttime, entrepreneurs, students, retirees. They're better off for having options in general. Nobody is putting a gun to their heads.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#242

Post by toasterlovin »

kickopotomus wrote: post #166
toasterlovin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, they don’t control the default map apps for the two major phone platforms. Competitors will be desperate to fork over money to Apple or Google to get placement when people are planning routes. And Apple and Google may also be in the ride sharing game at that point, since they’re both currently working on self driving cars.

I'm pretty positive that is Google's end goal. They even had (have?) and integration with Lyft/Uber at one point so that you could hail a ride from within the Google Maps app. My bet is that it was meant to be a proof-of-concept to see how hard it would be just to replace them with their own service.

Yeah, Apple has this feature, too.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#243

Post by burkaman »

kart23 wrote: post #207

I only like uber/lyft for one very important reason. Drinking. I truly believe its saved a ton of lives thanks to its ease of use. I'm in college right now, and I couldn't even imagine trying to get home without lyft or uber in many circumstances. Its made it so convenient to get a ride at any time, anywhere, that nobody even thinks about driving home anymore. Public transport simply isnt an option at 2am where I liv…

Evidence is mixed: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/business/uber-drunk-drivi...

Most people who drive drunk aren't doing it because they're desperate and have no other option, they're doing it because they're drunk assholes. They will still do it even when they could get a Lyft for $8. They're drunk.

> I couldn't even imagine trying to get home without lyft or uber in many circumstances.

Ok, but people must have managed it somehow 10 years ago, right? Your college and your city have not changed very much in that time. It truly is not that hard to take turns with your friends staying sober once in a while, or just stay over at a friend's place and then leave in the morning.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#244

Post by ilaksh »

coldtea wrote: post #95

Glad they're down, and hope the whole "gig economy" burns down too. Where gig economy = padding the loss of decent jobs by replacing the bottom end with desperate deals where "non employed" employees, without regular salary, benefits, company provided work tools, etc., make a pittance, while the organizing company gets a cut from millions of transactions. In some cases, no jobs is better than subsistence/dead-end/exp…

Not sure why I bother anymore because people don't appreciate these types of comments, but I am convinced the solution is to replace the monopoly companies with public decentralized protocols that will enable a large shared network of customers to be serviced by a competing field of service companies that plug into it.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#246

Post by adventured »

berberous wrote: post #36
umeshunni wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock based compensation doesn't affect cash flow. It's newly issued stock granted to employees. I'm not sure when the accounting laws changed to include SBC (probably post-financial crisis), but it's weird to include it in an income statement as if it was a cash expense. You can find articles from accounting experts arguing both ways if you are curious. e.g. http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2014/02/stock-based-em…

People disagree on this. Warren Buffet for example famously argues that SBC is a real expense even if non-cash, just like depreciation. More to the OPs point, I'm guessing Uber had FB-style RSUs that don't settle until an IPO or Change of Control. I'm not sure how this all gets accounted for, but given the recent IPO, it sounds like they booked a very large SBC charge this quarter to account for the immediate hit of…

> People disagree on this. Warren Buffet for example famously argues that SBC is a real expense even if non-cash, just like depreciation.

There isn't much to disagree about. It's a real cost against shareholders (that's what Buffett is talking about) and it is not an expense against the business operations such that it depletes your cash or harms cash flow (the point a parent comment was making).

Putting it broadly, stock compensation is primarily a hit against existing shareholder ownership. It debases their ownership of present or future profits.

Uber could simultaneously produce $5 billion in positive cash flow from operations and issue $20 billion in stock every year to employees. They'd have a profitable business at the operational level and be drowning shareholders in dilution.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#247

Post by ilaksh »

xster wrote: post #229
coldtea wrote: post #95

Glad they're down, and hope the whole "gig economy" burns down too. Where gig economy = padding the loss of decent jobs by replacing the bottom end with desperate deals where "non employed" employees, without regular salary, benefits, company provided work tools, etc., make a pittance, while the organizing company gets a cut from millions of transactions. In some cases, no jobs is better than subsistence/dead-end/exp…

I think this is what worries me about the "mainstream" debate that might be incorrectly framing the whole problem altogether. Here, the rise of the gig economy came from automation. Not in the caricature sense that there are robot automatons that serve your plates in a restaurant, but in a sense that scalable automated processes replaced human dispatchers that answers your phone calls at the taxi companies and radios…

The solution is to replace the monopoly companies with public decentralized protocols that will enable a large shared network of customers to be serviced by a competing field of companies that plug into it.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#248

Post by toasterlovin »

i_cant_speel wrote: post #92
toasterlovin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I don’t think self driving cars would have made them a good business. Once you no longer need drivers, all you’re doing is deploying a fleet of automobiles. We already have companies that do this: taxi services and auto rental companies. They’re shitty, low margin businesses with tons of competition. The promise of Uber was being a monopoly because they were first mover on a market with network effects. Much li…

You aren't going to rent a car to take a fifteen minute trip across town, so that isn't really comparable. And yes, they would be a taxi service. But they would be a taxi service with lower costs since they don't need pay for a driver.

Right, but they wouldn't have a monopoly on being a taxi service. And literally every other business where you're managing a fleet of equipment is not a particularly special business. Why would Uber be any different?

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#249

Post by kickopotomus »

jonknee wrote: post #159
kickopotomus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R&D is the only way that they survive in the long term. Uber's entire plan is just to keep hemorrhaging money until autonomous vehicles come online. They just did not expect that to be as hard of a problem as it has turned out to be.

The only way they survive as such a richly valued company perhaps, my point is they could provide the current level of service with vastly lower spending and be a sustainable company. The financial problems aren't they charge too little for rides, it's that they have thousands of people working on bullshit that brings in little to nothing.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. R&D is the life blood of a tech company. Some problems are hard. Hard problems take a lot of time and money to solve. If they spend $2B solving a problem that allows them to make $10B in revenue long term, I would say that is a worthwhile investment, wouldn't you?

Frankly, the R&D spend is the least of their worries. They recently trimmed some fat from their marketing department[1] but the subsidized rides problem continues to be the biggest issue they face financially.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/technology/uber-job-cuts....

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#250

Post by refurb »

ghaff wrote: post #113
boyadjian wrote: post #80

Uber will go into bankruptcy, and it will be the starting point of the next worldwide economic crisis.

What percentage of the US population do you think has taken an Uber in the past month? From January: "According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, just 36 percent of American adults say they have used ride-hailing services. Sixty-one percent say they have heard of the services but hadn’t taken a ride." https://www.wired.com/story/uber-lyft-ride-hail-stats-pew-re... Heck. I travel lots and it's probab…

I think the GP has a point though.

It's not as though UBER going under is going to tank the economy, but it will be a major unicorn going under, causing the entire silicon valley money-losing model to be questioned, leading to trouble raising money, layoffs which drag down the rest of the economy.

Similar to the 2000 crash.

Post reply on HN