I haven't looked at the balance sheet, but it seems like, if their path to profitability were anywhere close to being as easy as that, then you wouldn't have Horan saying that there is, "nothing in the document that suggests how that could be fixed."
Not saying he's wrong, but I would take anything he says with a grain of salt. Especially considering it's pretty clear that Lyft is in a hyper-growth state, with huge revenues and their only major overhead is labor, hardware and the cost of entering a new market.
Two of those are not going to go away. And the cost of entering a new market should be relatively low for a company like Lyft. The nature of the business means they don't need to make any huge up-front investment in new real estate or equipment. It's mostly just running promotions to attract business and drivers in the new market.
Last year they lost $911M on $2,160M of revenue. If handing out incentives really represents over 30% of their costs, which is what would be implied by the "they'd be fine if not for trying to grow so quickly", that would be pretty worrisome. It would imply that they're in the business of selling dollar bills for $0.75. That's not the kind of business that becomes more profitable as you attract more customers.
One of the big subtexts here is that the standard tech "hyper-growth" business strategy is designed for businesses with very high fixed and very low incremental costs. Lyft has just the opposite: Low fixed and high incremental costs.
That's 100% incorrect. Entering new markets is insanely expensive, because they can't get drivers unless they guarantee income until the market is successfully built.
> The nature of the business means they don't need to make any huge up-front investment in new real estate or equipment. It's mostly just running promotions to attract business and drivers in the new market.
Again, you're missing the biggest expense in entering a new market: labor. Nobody is going to drive around in a Lyft with no customers. So Lyft guarantees them some degree of pay while they expand. That can take time and is addition to the promotional costs with entering a new market, particularly one already saturated by Uber.
> Last year they lost $911M on $2,160M of revenue. If handing out incentives really represents over 30% of their costs, which is what would be implied by the "they'd be fine if not for trying to grow so quickly", that would be pretty worrisome.
Worrisome? That would be ideal. Growth companies should be spending money quickly. We have a name for it (burn rate). I think a lot of people seem to be confused on what an IPO is. It's a funding round, unless the company is doing it because they have to (investor count is too high).
> It would imply that they're in the business of selling dollar bills for $0.75.
The implication is that when they go to a new city they are selling dollar bills for $0.05. What remains to be seen is whether a saturated market can be a profitable market.
> One of the big subtexts here is that the standard tech "hyper-growth" business strategy is designed for businesses with very high fixed and very low incremental costs. Lyft has just the opposite: Low fixed and high incremental costs.
They only have high incremental costs when they expand into a new region. What are their incremental costs when they've successfully saturated a market? Labor (which gets cheaper as a fixed cost over time, as your market size increases) and hardware, which does the same.
Again, I'm not suggesting they are going to be profitable, I'm suggesting that the idea that they should be making money while entering as many new markets as they are is a crazy position. In order to do that they would have to slow growth substantially, which is literally just dying to Uber.
What is different about Lyft is that they've structured things such that they don't have to pay their drivers much when business is really slow - they're guarantees like, "If you complete 5 rides in one day, we'll guarantee you earn at least $100 on those rides." When you consider that drivers have to pay for their own cars and fuel, that probably doesn't even come close to minimum wage where I live. Meaning that their initial labor costs are probably cheaper than McDonald's.
I stand by my claim: The cost of entering a new market should be relatively low for a company like Lyft.
Similarly for the rest: You're trying to think about Lyft as if it were a tech company, and that seems to be leading to a distorted view of how their business works. Lyft is not a tech company. It's a taxi company that happens to be based in San Francisco.
I also get the impression that the costs of rides are artificially low right now. Lyft is subsidizing them to encourage use. If the true cost of a Lyft is about the same as a cab, I can say personally I'd be more inclined to take public transit or a cab than I am now.
There are plenty of actually profitable companies that return decent dividends. There's no proof that profitability will result in an increase in share price.
If they're not profitable today, I don't think they'll ever be profitable. It's a signal from the marketplace that 'on demand ride services' business segment is over saturated for market demand. They are not meeting an unfulfilled niche in the market, they are losing money to trying to become a dominant player.
Unless the landscape drastically changes and people no longer actually have their own cars (which is their near-term pipe dream), they're going to lose a bunch of other people's money.
Why not also just hand wave that Lyft is a mere messaging app company that provides communication between people who need rides and drivers willing to give them?
You can criticize the company many ways, but whatever they're doing is working because they're making $2.2B in revenue and growing rapidly. They're positioning themselves as a demand-provider to service the upcoming self driving markets, which is smarter than vertically integrating like some other hype machines out there.
> Why not also just hand wave that Lyft is a mere messaging app company that provides communication between people who need rides and drivers willing to give them?
If this was their actual business model, they might actually be able to turn a buck. Drivers can pay a small monthly fee to be enrolled in the service, lyft takes a small cut + payment processing fee. Drivers paid weekly or after X amount of revenue, whichever comes second.
And very few can scale it to spend $0.50 to make $1.00. We aren't talking about a company selling a product for half what they pay. They are investing overwhelming amounts of money into growth.
> If this was their actual business model, they might actually be able to turn a buck.
Yes, just oversaturate the market with drivers and not enough passengers and you'll for sure make tons of money, constantly dealing with overages and shortages since you aren't managing supply in any way.
But I do expect you end up with pricing similar to taxis.
Definitionally, only a small chunk of the population can afford to hire other people to perform services for them. The miracle of industrialization was figuring out how to make physical goods with extreme efficiency. Part of that was by reducing the amount of materials used. But mostly it was about reducing the amount of labor that went into manufacturing an object. Henry Ford's autobiography is a revelation on this topic. But ride-sharing is fundamentally about utilizing 100% of another human being's time to take you from one place to another. That can work in several situations: 1) you're in the top several percent of earners, or 2) you only utilize it for occasional trips. But those situations don't come close to covering the vast majority of transportation that takes place.
Hence everyone pinning ride-sharing's hope on self driving cars. But, uh, then you're just an auto rental company. Last I checked, those were not great businesses. And they certainly don't enjoy network effects that can take hold when you control a two-sided market, which is what's driving the current ride-sharing marketshare death march. So it's this weird thing where the opportunity sucks until self driving cars are a reality, but then the opportunity transforms into a car rental company, where you're basically deploying and maintaining equipment in order to chase single digit margins.
Anyway, I'll end my rant there. As you can see, I'm not a fan of ride-sharing business models.
You do have to ask expensive relative to what though. I was at an event in SF a few weeks back and ended up staying with friends rather than staying at a hotel. Which saved something like $2K and was pretty easy given Lyft--and still would have been a bargain at 2x. (Local Muni was under construction.)
Other than medallion Lords and the city governments taking auction proceeds?
Citation needed on how this statement is applicable to lyft. At least go look at their financials to see how, again, their billion dollar revenue is growing much faster than their operating expenses.
And a subscription model charging the drivers is a terrible idea unless you're trying to squash growth. In two-sided markets you don't charge both.
That's not what they're doing. Their numbers for 2018 are spending $1 to earn $1.05. Of course, they also spent $0.80 to tell people about it and another $0.30 in R&D to develop new businesses which puts them firmly in the red. But there's at least a business there that is generating positive cash flow. It's an open question if they can cut R&D/Advertising and/or expand their revenue enough to become profitable.
So their numbers for 2018 aren't spending $1 to make $0.50, they're spending $1 + $0.30 + $.80 = $2.10 to make $1.05, which is, I believe: $1.00 to make $0.50.
This line of thinking is the reason a lot of people lose money investing. If investors are confident a company will one day be profitable, the price will trade at a value that is very close to what it will be when it hits those numbers. The market takes into account future cash flows.
In order to beat the market, you have to either know, or guess correctly, something that the rest of the market doesn't know. So, usually, you need luck or insider trading.
No it's not because the market takes this into account.
I simply don't see how Lyft can turn profitable without loosing marketshare when competing against a rival that has profitability it can reinvest from elsewhere.