Think about morale at Lyft. You have employees locked in who cant sell for first couple of months. They are seeing their networth plummet everyday.
Employees saw their share price go from $44 in June (private markets) to a range of $62-68 during the road show last month to an IPO at $72, to close today at $61. Again, in less than a year, rose from $44 to $61 with a brief uptick to $72 in the middle. How is that plummeting?
I'd like to point out that FB went through something similar within the first few weeks. And, the current day price is $177.
> soon can license the self driving tech My personal guess is that "soon" for fully autonomous cars is not any reasonable definition of soon. Even if you accept the tech is close to okay in Arizona (I wouldn't), think about the weather and driving conditions in most of the worlds' markets for these global companies.
I agree. The other day I was driving and thinking about this, and I started noticing "how many times during this drive have I looked another human (driver or pedestrian) in the eyes in order to determine their intentions?" It was a significant number even in a 15 minute drive. I was still thinking about it during my bike ride later in the day, and I noticed that more than a dozen times I exchanged looks and nods with…
This argument always seems a little strange to me. I think I can count on one hand the number of times, in 14 years, I've ever made eye contact with another driver while driving, or used some kind of hand signals. And in all of those cases, if the signaling had failed, the situation would have resolved itself just fine in less than a minute anyway. Most of the time, I can't even see the other drivers through reflections on their windshields. Sure, sometimes I'll stick an arm out the window to wave my thanks when somebody lets me merge, but that's not a critical communication.
> no VC will fund their rapid growth (small offerings will still find a niche, assuming they don't get gobbled up And yet Grab and Didi drove Uber out of South East Asia and China, Ola is giving Uber a run for its money in India and now GoJek in turn is challenging Grab. In my recent trip to Tokyo we were mostly advised to take regular cabs Vs Uber in contrast to a year ago. That's literally half the world where they…
They did not get "out competed" in china, a country where competition has nothing to do with success. Likewise in Russia. Grab is the only company to out compete Uber so far.
>> Likewise in Russia.
That's BS. Yandex is an incredibly strong player in Russia in the search space and Google is not outcompeting them either. It was the case way before Putin's political ambitions became relevant.
All in all, there are many reasons to blame Russia for it's government, but that's blatantly not one of them.
They did not get "out competed" in china, a country where competition has nothing to do with success. Likewise in Russia. Grab is the only company to out compete Uber so far.
>> Likewise in Russia. That's BS. Yandex is an incredibly strong player in Russia in the search space and Google is not outcompeting them either. It was the case way before Putin's political ambitions became relevant. All in all, there are many reasons to blame Russia for it's government, but that's blatantly not one of them.
Not much, it is like saying that Google outcompeted Apple in mobile world.
I'm... not sure you'd need a lot of network effects? I mean, you need a critical mass of drivers and riders, but they can be all in a small area and you can still provide a service. I mean, for the occasional user, sure, brand recognition matters; If I'm going from a strange airport to a hotel, I'm probably going to use the brand i know. But usually? I switch from uber to lyft on my daily commute based on saving a fe…
Sounds like Uber and Lyft are both subsidizing your rides - but for a new service to get off the ground would require even more subsidies. There’s a cost to idling and waiting for someone to come along and pay you for a ride. The higher the density of riders and drivers, the lower this cost and the less subsidy required for a given price level.
The network effects are key here because you can't have competitive ETAs without having a lot of supply density and without enough demand you can't build the supply density, so aside from the incentives you are seeing Lyft and Uber using now, there are even more subsidies to build the marketplace and you have to do that city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood in the case of larger markets like NYC. There are also heavy ops costs to get a driver through the funnel and to keep them on the platform. Not saying it couldn't be done but it is not so easy for someone to come in and take marketshare.
Here's a thought experiment: how hard is it for a billion dollar company to roll out a simple crud app? Easy, right? Now name a single major bank with an app that is better than "barely usable". Which is easier? A crud app or a ride hailing app?
All my banks have good apps on par with the fintech startup apps I use (and actually I trust them more because they aren't moving fast and breaking things).
I use a regional bank and their app is only usable for minor day to day things. For that it's fine. But I can't do anything "serious" in it: checking account transactions are limited to only the last 2 weeks; I can't search transactions for a specific amount or merchant or date; I can't view past payments I've made for bills, etc.
For any of the above, I have to use the desktop site. These are not technical limitations either and should all be in the app if we want full parity with mobile.
> no VC will fund their rapid growth (small offerings will still find a niche, assuming they don't get gobbled up And yet Grab and Didi drove Uber out of South East Asia and China, Ola is giving Uber a run for its money in India and now GoJek in turn is challenging Grab. In my recent trip to Tokyo we were mostly advised to take regular cabs Vs Uber in contrast to a year ago. That's literally half the world where they…
Go-Jek is not challenging Grab. They have a deeply inferior product, fail to catch up to Grab's breakneck innovation pace. Also, being an Indonesian company, Go-Jek has a disorganized company culture that is not conducive to competing with a lean, well-oiled machine run by Singaporeans like Grab.
Besides being racist this is factually incorrect.
Grabs two co-founders were born in Malaysia and the execs are from all over the world.
Both are very successful companies but from the innovation perspective Gojek is most definitely the leader. You need only look at their offering (dozens of products built in house) in comparison to everyone else outside of china. Their food business is now bigger than the ride sharing for example, and their rollout of this was exceptional. Light-years ahead strategy wise of the rest at the time (grab/uber).
The only thing I can think of that Grab has executed on better is international expansion and the initial grab-car service was at one stage far more popular than go-car.
Startups won't win this. Manufacturers will. They have brand, cars, and soon can license the self driving tech. How hard is it for a billion dollar company to roll out a ride hailing app? Think about where that leaves Uber. They have to buy the cars from said manufacturers. This already gives them a significantly larger cost base and let's face it, while they also have a brand it is no more powerful a draw than Merce…
Here's a thought experiment: how hard is it for a billion dollar company to roll out a simple crud app? Easy, right? Now name a single major bank with an app that is better than "barely usable". Which is easier? A crud app or a ride hailing app?
I would give the Bank of American app 4 out of 5 stars, it's better than, say, the Gmail app.