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Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

latimes.com

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Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#91

Post by p4wnc6 »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #86
p4wnc6 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This complaint makes no sense to me. You just call the taxi company further in advance of when you need the ride. If you know it's always around a 30 minute wait, just call 45 minutes ahead of time and tell them the time you need picked up. Phoenix & SLC are also not cities in which people are likely to rely on on-demand ride sharing. Most people own their own car especially if they care about being able to determine…

No, you are wrong. Uber is profitable in hundreds of cities. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-profitable-in-hundreds-o...

I do not believe the quotations about profitability in hundreds of cities from the article. When the books are opened and it can be verified, then I'll believe it. Until then, I choose to chalk it up to duplicitous accounting.

I openly acknowledge I could be wrong. But vague quotes like this effectively do not mean anything, one way or the other, to me. Companies say this kind of thing all the time when it's not actually true by accepted accounting standards.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#92

Post by p4wnc6 »

jpatokal wrote: post #88
p4wnc6 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just makes your comment lose all credibility to me, I'm afraid: > I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible. You don't know the number? Really? If you have a mobile device from which to use Lyft, then getting the number is completely and entirely trivial. While there is some v…

I remember trying to find a cab in suburban Silicon Valley on my first visit in the days before Uber. Then as now, if you Google for "taxi Mountain View" or similar, you get 2.5 million results. Should I call Yellow Cab or Yellow Taxi Cab or Bay Area Yellow Cab or Sky Cab? Which one is going to show up in a reasonable amount of time and not gouge me? Who the fuck knows! Not even my local coworkers did, because they a…

It's almost like there should be websites that give reviews and ratings for local businesses and services.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#93

Post by pigeons »

acchow wrote: post #9
rando18423 wrote: post #6

Wow, so the crown of the "fintech" movement is just as bad as the banks, and the two biggest Silicon Valley successes of the last decade, Uber and AirBnB, are really just cases of massively successful regulatory arbitrage. Nice innovation!

People have dreamt about on-demand car hailing for a long time, but it's always been a pipe dream - building the two-sided network is such too hard and too expensive, and a small network is just not worth using as a consumer. How is this not innovation?

> People have dreamt about on-demand car hailing for a long time

Taxis.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#94

Post by [deleted] »

kchoudhu wrote: post #55
thehashrocket wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, but unless you're in a city like New York (possibly a handful of others) the wait is FOREVER. In Phoenix it was routine to have to wait half an hour or more. Same in SLC. It's awful. Uber and Lyft reduced the wait to a fraction of the time with better, quicker and cheaper service.

I've spent plenty of time waiting for my Uber as well: lots of "your car is 5 minutes away for 15 minutes". Uber isn't as brilliant as they want us to believe they are.

[deleted]

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#95

Post by ycombobreaker »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #51
thehashrocket wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, but unless you're in a city like New York (possibly a handful of others) the wait is FOREVER. In Phoenix it was routine to have to wait half an hour or more. Same in SLC. It's awful. Uber and Lyft reduced the wait to a fraction of the time with better, quicker and cheaper service.

This complaint makes no sense to me. You just call the taxi company further in advance of when you need the ride. If you know it's always around a 30 minute wait, just call 45 minutes ahead of time and tell them the time you need picked up. Phoenix & SLC are also not cities in which people are likely to rely on on-demand ride sharing. Most people own their own car especially if they care about being able to determine…

> Further, in all of the non-mega [...] cities I've been in, apart from one single city (San Francisco), the wait time for Uber is on the order of the wait time for a taxi.

As a data point to the contrary, in Chicago we stopped calling taxi dispatchers to our apartment because they would arrive up to 30 minutes late. Even if we scheduled ahead of time, it didn't seem to matter; as if the dispatchers were holding our request until the last minute and then dispatching into the general queue (so why call ahead?)

With the Uber app, whenever we call a car (even a taxi) we get an ETA based on GPS coordinates of the driver, which is both accurate and updates live. There's a level of accountability that was never available with the existing taxi dispatch.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#96

Post by paulvs »

It's ludicrous that someone would risk their reputation and their company's future for a mere 32 more loans on the company growth report. I can't imagine how these loans made a significant difference to these reports. These revelations could be just a scapegoat for more serious fraud.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#97

Post by stormbrew »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #68
pyromine wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just logged in specifically to tell you that as a SLC resident without a car, I use lyft extensively. Similarly all my friends do as well, for the almost perfect example people use of preventing drunk driving. I'm already pretty strapped for cash, hence why I don't have a car but I utilize Uber & Lyft when I'm unable to get to my destination in a timely manner. I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't…

This just makes your comment lose all credibility to me, I'm afraid: > I would not however get a taxi simply because I don't know the number to call, I don't know when they'll arrive at my house, and simply the entire taxi experience is just horrible. You don't know the number? Really? If you have a mobile device from which to use Lyft, then getting the number is completely and entirely trivial. While there is some v…

Meanwhile, in drops in credibility, you say this:

> While there is some variability in taxi arrival time (just as there is with Lyft or Uber arrival time), taxis typically are no later or more difficult to estimate. You just tell them when the taxi should arrive and that's when it will be there.

A charitable interpretation of this is that you must live a charmed life. The only people I know who say things like this are people who have cars and don't tend to use much else or live in and exclusively travel in very large cities.

I have literally waited two hours for a taxi, on a normal friday night. Multiple times. My average wait for a taxi in the city I live in has usually been on the order of 30+ minutes, peak hours or off. Other cities have not been much better, unless they were cities like New York where normal hailing actually works.

Also, smaller cities don't get these wonderful taxi apps you're talking about until Uber comes into town and forces them to compete. Hell, in many cities reliably being able to pay with a credit card only becomes possible when a rideshare company comes to town, before that "the machine is broken!"

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#98

Post by ycombobreaker »

Zarel wrote: post #74
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a common way to "disrupt" a market is to find a loophole to call yourself something else so you can avoid all the laws everyone else is beholden to that were put in place for people's protection.

That sounds pretty legitimate if the laws don't actually protect people, and have been corrupted by wealthy interests, such as taxi medallion owners. Or if the laws are outdated. Ubers are consistently safer than taxis, provide better customer service, don't intentionally take long routes to scam you, actually take credit card instead of pretending their credit card reader is broken, don't refuse to drive you because…

> actually take credit card instead of pretending their credit card reader is broken

After you've arrived at your destination, have you really found any taxi driver who would rather take _no payment_ than a credit card? If all you have is plastic--and if the driver is required to accept that form of payment--then I guess I don't see the problem (for riders). I've had drivers take my credit card # on a carbon copy physical swipe. I've had drivers admit that the card reader actually _did_ work. Unfortunately for them, I've even had drivers accept underpayment in cash because they were legitimately unprepared.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#99

Post by discardorama »

paulvs wrote: post #96

It's ludicrous that someone would risk their reputation and their company's future for a mere 32 more loans on the company growth report. I can't imagine how these loans made a significant difference to these reports. These revelations could be just a scapegoat for more serious fraud.

Look at the date: they were made in 2009, when the company was barely a year old. At that time, an additional 730K in loans could have been a needle mover.

Re: Lending Club plans layoffs, discloses loans to former CEO and family members

#100

Post by discardorama »

phil21 wrote: post #60
amalcon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the innovation there was in the cell phone[1]. You've been able to order a car by phone in major metros for longer than those have been around. In fact, Uber started off as an app for using those very services. Props to Uber for execution, but all the pieces were there. [1]-edit: some in the smartphone, but most in the old "makes calls" cell phones

The older I get the more I realize execution is simply all that matters. A zillion people had the same basic idea for Uber. They made it a reality, and made it Not Suck(tm). The user experience prior to Uber for ordering a car via phone was absolutely horrific.

I've heard it said many times: ideas are a dime-a-dozen, execution is everything.
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