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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

Lyft and Uber, from a birds-eye view, do the exact same thing; and furthermore, neither is profitable, so the entire market is built upon potential future sales bases. Lyft is here valued at, generously, $7 billion. Meanwhile, Uber's valuation is reported variously, but a general Google search suggests its well in excess of $50 billion.

This exceeds any expectation of market craziness. Are these investors talking to each other? Are things so far gone that a vague promise of self-driving cars is worth almost a factor of ten valuation difference?

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Early stage private valuations tend to be focused on future potential, usually expressed in total addressable market figures.

Lyft was selling slow expansion (they're still a US-only operator, and even within the US operate in relatively few markets) and most likely positive cashflow.

Uber was selling rapid global expansion, where each new city could be scaled up via Uber playbooks. Then it started selling itself as "last-mile logistics provider" for things like food deliveries and clothing. Then as a leading developer of self-driving vehicles, later complemented by self-driving trucks, later complemented by self-elevating passenger-carrying robotic drones.

You have to give Uber credit, they do address a broader TAM, even if their underlying core business doesn't seem that different from Lyft or Gett or Wingz or Hailo or MyTaxi or Didi or GrabTaxi or Ola or Yandex.Taxi.

Oh wow, this is the first I'm hearing of it. Yandex, the search engine operates a Yandex.taxi? That's pretty interesting, all major Global search engines, Google, Yandex, Baidu have interests in developing self-driving cars as well.

https://yandex.com/company/press_center/press_releases/2011/...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/28/yandex-teams-on-self-dri...

Yandex.taxi existed for a long time. Initially it worked with various taxi companies, but now all the cars have uniform livery, so it's basically a regular taxi with an app. Ironically, it still doesn't operate in my home town (Perm), while Uber already does.

And? What's the difference between total coverage in 2018 versus total coverage in 2020? Uber can't lock Lyft out of the market- that was abundantly proved when a bit of ham-fisted PR made Lyft one of the most popular apps of January. And Lyft can just copy any of Uber's random X-delivery schemes that actually works. Self-driving cars might be a distinguishing factor, since as far as I know Lyft has no efforts in that direction, but that deficit could be entirely compensated for if Lyft winds up selling themselves to some company that does have that tech.

One of the most popular apps in the US. Not the world.

Here in Australia everyone uses Uber and the experience has been excellent. Which means that it's going to be that much harder for Lyft to get any traction.

Lyft took $500 million in financing from GM and is partnered with them to deliver self driving cars through the GM acquisition of Cruise Automation.

Lyft isn't doing their work in house but they are on a similar timeline to Uber for automation.

Since no one else has said it yet: It is obviously a massive fucking bubble. Helicopter money slushing around all over the place looking for something to buy. When the fed turns the tap, these companies without any way to make a profit will burn up in a few quarters, and their billion dollar 'value' will go "poof".

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