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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather work at Uber today than Uber of 2 years ago. (Uber of the first year or two would be better, of course) -- it's a challenge.

The real question to justify Uber's valuation is "will they build something with a real moat" -- I don't think "network of drivers" is that. They did the hard work on breaking open protected taxi mafia markets, and educating the public, but it's too easy for any local city to have a dominant "Uber for our city" which isn't Uber.

Self driving is the one way I think they can differentiate themselves, and the scary thing is a lot of the departures seem to be from there. If those people have lost confidence, they're fucked.

It wouldn't be hard to turn Uber into a solid $5-10b company, but due to how financings work, that wipe out a lot of people. The only winning outcome for most employees and most investors (weighted by $ invested) is the $50-100b+ "global transportation monopoly".

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Given the lawsuit with Google, if self driving cars is their bet on the future, they're in trouble.

It's much worse. Most Uber drivers I get also make trips on the two other available apps (one global, one local). By now driver apps are effectively price-takers.

Edit: not to mention that drivers in nicer cars often give you their card with their direct Whatsapp number so you can schedule whole-day services, guided tours for folks from abroad and so on.

That sounds like a good thing for all "users" of ride sharing apps. Drivers make sure they get rides --local companies probably pay a little better. And passengers win because they can hunt for the cheapest (e.g. most subsidized) rates.

This is a lot like the story of the kid who gets a horse.

The level of competition of driver apps right now is excellent for passenger-users, sure. But it makes Uber (and by extension all copycats) a much less solid proposition than it seemed to be a few years back.

While it's fashionable to shit on Uber right now, it was originally hailed as revolutionary for a reason: the "local" providers were entrenched monopolies who imposed artificial restrictions on supply to extract extraordinary rents. That's what we're going back to if the Uber business model proves to be unsustainable -- and there's rigorously no reason why "local companies" would do better, given high capital costs and a poor entrepreneurship environment nearly everywhere in the world.

In a way this is a more general problem with the "disruption model": it identifies inefficient monopolies that extract too much rent and muscles in with crazy unicorn capital powers to establish business models that extract fewer rents, which in turn have to produce ROI -- at which point the business model is global rent-seeking arbitrage. And then the unicorn capitalists have to ask themselves if investing on Uber being in Brazil is a better use of their money than direct investing in assorted (large, profitable) business opportunities in Brazil. Uber-likes are not technological silver bullets. Just potato.

> it's too easy for any local city to have a dominant "Uber for our city" which isn't Uber

I disagree. By virtue of being in the city, and only in the city, it would be too small to withstand pressure from local interests for long, and would end up like the local taxi monopolies. This will be especially true in countries "with lower GDP per capita".

Uber's international nature with its HQ in a country where corruption is relatively low, clearly enormous political and financial connections, track record in neighbouring countries or cities with clear and visible benefits to the customers (aka electorate), and willingness to fight (which is public knowledge, thus becoming signalling) allow it to scare off such pressure. Uber has more to fear from Apple than from Paris' UberX clones.

That's true if Uber didn't ever exist, or if uber ceased to exist. I think it would be relatively straightforward to have a "local competitor to Uber", perhaps propped up by some stupid local regulation, once the taxi mafia is broken. Austin sort of has this, but not really, now.

If you believe the 'taxi mafia' is caused by regulatory capture of local government by taxi operators, in the absence of Uber you might expect local regulation to hinder, rather than help a "local uber"

If Uber has done the hard work of lobbying away local taxi regulations, any local competitor can reap the benefits.

It is going to be much harder to take away ride sharing from consumers who are already using it than to keep it out of a third tier city which doesn't have it and where most of the potential users have never used it before. Austin is an outlier.

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