51–60 of 141 posts
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> Sales growth in commodity product that is loosing money on ever sale? I'll never understand this. It's almost a standard by now: lose on every sale, make it up in volume. Joseph Heller had that one first I think.
Can you even call this a business?
Tesla is a good example of a company that did this.
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Seriously. We can double the size of a loss making business! We can lose money twice as fast! Actually it looks like losses relative to revenues are smaller than they were, but that's still not impressive. Especially when it's non-GAAP anyway. How much money do they have? How did they raise so much without giving any control away and not going to the public markets? I mean... a billion here, a billion there, sooner o…
They've raised $15bn in total and their last valuation was about $70bn. In total they've lost around $6bn, meaning that between cash and credit facilities they have around $8-9bn in the bank.
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I'm actually a DNN that can recognize social patterns based on sentiment analysis of text in the context of HN. ;) Seriously though, this is a super common thing that happens on HN all the time. This community is actively hostile to people who aren't winners and talk about why they should have won if only they were "given a chance" or did something differently. Pretty typical recipe for the bottom of the page. I'll n…
bye bye HN. going to get some work done.
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> Ubers bet is autonomous cars. Autonomous cars being generally available lowers the barrier to entry for competitors to Uber, and makes their position worse, not better. Uber's bet is Uber controlling the autonomous car market, which is a different and much harder thing.
> Autonomous cars being generally available lowers the barrier to entry for competitors to Uber, and makes their position worse, not better. Why do you think that's true? Uber is investing heavily in autonomous cars because they want to be very early to the market (hence "Uber's bet is autonomous cars"), and because when you have autonomous cars high utilisation is important, they are in food delivery, and interested…
> I think most reasonable people would be able to impute some sort of first mover or early mover advantage into what I was saying.
I think most reasonable people are deeply sceptical that Uber is going to win first-mover advantage against the likes of Google (who's been working on the autonomy tech for what, a decade, now?), traditional automakers (who have deep experience actually building vehicles), and Tesla (who've been working on the autonomy for at least as long, while also developing manufacturing experience, and have many more vehicles on the road gathering data). Let's not even bother quibbling about that nasty lawsuit.
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second post.. why can't I delete the whole tree?
I'm actually a DNN that can recognize social patterns based on sentiment analysis of text in the context of HN. ;) Seriously though, this is a super common thing that happens on HN all the time. This community is actively hostile to people who aren't winners and talk about why they should have won if only they were "given a chance" or did something differently. Pretty typical recipe for the bottom of the page. I'll n…
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> There is zero lock-in. If Lyft is cheaper this week, I'm riding Lyft. It makes sense, but I'm not sure it works out that way. Many web services have zero lock-in (not including those with a network effect such as Twitter and Facebook) and competitors are a URL away, yet the first ones to gain (mindshare? marketshare?) seem to keep it: Google search, Amazon, etc.
Google was the first search engine? Actually, the field was crowded when Google appeared.
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I'm actually a DNN that can recognize social patterns based on sentiment analysis of text in the context of HN. ;) Seriously though, this is a super common thing that happens on HN all the time. This community is actively hostile to people who aren't winners and talk about why they should have won if only they were "given a chance" or did something differently. Pretty typical recipe for the bottom of the page. I'll n…
bye bye HN. going to get some work done.
Why? Screw the downvotes, thanks for writing that.
It beats the crap out of all those so called 'success stories' that if you look at them closely merely amount to a half-assed hobby project that accidentally made some money.
FWIW: My partner Michael in 1999 suggested that besides live content we should find a way to easily host videos. I nixed the idea.
For an encore, a couple of years later when confronted with gamers using our service to live-stream their games I wrote a bot to block them.
Youtube and Twitch happened anyway :)
hackernews.. the place for uber quarterbacking.
> I'm 43 and would like to start a family. Don't wait for success or money if you want to start a family, there really never is a 'right' time.
That's pretty awesome that you guys thought of hosting videos. The idea escaped me, even after watching photo.net & then Flickr. I was working on an idea back then & the issue was the cost of bandwidth, right? Sure.. put videos on the Internet... but how would you ever pay for that much bandwidth? I guess that's why a Silicon valley crew did it. They could somehow see the decline in bandwidth pricing, understood how much extra fiber capacity there was.
We should have gotten together then. I owned the domain fullscreen.com (and I made nice websites!)
Software is hard! The winners show what it takes. Just put something out there! AirBNB ruby on rails! Facebook... PHP! Google... python!
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Can you even call this a business?
Well, there are some examples of such loss leaders becoming successful but not in a market like this. Tesla is a good example of a company that did this.
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Autonomous cars are not going arrive for 10 to 15 years. If Uber can't reduce costs by 20% or increase prices by 20% or some combination of the two, then they are making the wrong kind of bet's. Personally, I believe their bet is on not needing a large advertising budget once enough people know about their service.
> Autonomous cars are not going arrive for 10 to 15 years. Tesla believes its cars are already equipped with the necessary hardware and that the software, including Tesla Network (their announced autonomous Uber competitor), will be going live at the end of 2017. At this point five years seems like a long time horizon for autonomous cars being on the road.