Uber and Lyft’s new road: Fewer drivers, thrifty riders and jittery investors
wsj.com
wsj.com
~25% take rate on a ride ($15 average): $3.75 take
Payment processing: 2.5% + 30c = $0.68
Servers / datacenters: $0.20 (for a margin-sensitive business, you should be colo'ing your own servers, or using cheap alternatives like OVH/Hertzner)
Customer support: Automate as much as possible (auto refunds up to a certain point; for lost items, connect directly to driver); assume 1 in 50 rides require manual human support with a $3 cost = $0.06 support cost per ride
Fraud/refunds: Assume a 2% fraud rate that cannot be reclaimed; thus $0.30 cost for fraud. Refunds for things like driver purposefully took a longer route can be clawed from the driver.
Gross COGS: $1.24
Gross profit: $2.51
What am I missing?? Marketing? Fuck marketing when you can't turn a profit. Everyone knows about Uber or Lyft already, you need to turn a profit, not waste $30 per CAC.
I agree and am not quite sure where it's going (other than software).
Lyft only has 4500 employees
Best source I could find: https://www.themuse.com/profiles/uber/team/engineering
Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
Apparently a whole bunch of folks are trying to do just that.
I was going to provide just one example, but a web search[0] shows a whole bunch of these efforts in a variety of locales. As such, I just provided the web search results here.
[0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=ride%20share%20cooperativ...
NYC used to have Juno, but it went bankrupt in 2019. I feel like if you can't run a single-city rideshare app in NYC, you're gonna have a hard time doing it anywhere else.
Searching and installing a random app introduces a slight amount of friction, but I don't think payment necessarily has to be that much of a hassle. Just use apple/google pay.
Obviously this all could be easy, but it's amazing how many apps fail to make things easy to onboard. When I've just gotten done traveling for hours and just want to get to some place to relax, the last thing I want is to wrangle new account creation in some app where they're trying to be cheap and haven't hired any UX designers to smooth out the process because "you can rebuild Uber with 3 smart devs" as everyone on HN says.
I haven't used it (I always pay cash, as the drivers are charged ~3-5% per fare for "CC processing" when a card is used), but every NYC taxi has a feature where you can pair with the onboard system and pay with your phone.
Not sure what "pairing" requires, perhaps someone else has used this feature and can comment.
For most of Europe that means country level, for the US and other federal states, that probably means at the state level.
Last time I tried the Lyon app it was barebone and not really up to par with Uber by a large margin. But still.
And they're...okay. I think they all use the same white label technology to make their apps.
Yes, it means you won't get all the shiny quality of life services offered by cloud providers, but you're in a _margin sensitive business_. Deal with it. Optimize every cost.
Also, you don't need expensive engineers re-inventing the most basic things (I know Uber had a huge not-invented-here syndrome). Use the boring tools for the job. Only reinvent what is necessary. You don't need engineers practicing resume-driven-development.
Uber has an absurd amount of logging & analytics.
If the app was simply drop a pin, get a ride - it wouldn't be that crazy.
Uber has 3.9M drivers world wide. There's probably very rarely more than 1M drivers active at any time. Probably less than 300k people looking for a ride at the vast majority of times.
Assuming you can update the driver's location 1 time per minute - that's ~1.5B requests per day - less than 25k requests per second (including user bookings).
That's like ~2TB of bandwidth per day. That's less than $200 per day. Almost everyone spends more than 5% of their cloud bill on bandwidth. Meaning, the rest of a drastically simplified (but nearly equally useful) Uber could run for ~$4000 per day in server expenses.
That's a $1.4M / year data center. Uber has revenues of >$11B.
They could be making a lot of money. They just aren't because they're spending AT LEAST 50x more on servers and product engineering than they NEED to.
They paid for growth for a long time. They have a monopoly now. There's not a lot of growth left to get. At some point the axe will come down.
Lyft is even worse. They're ~1/3rd the size.
100x, bringing their opex to hundreds of millions on billions of revenue. They should still be able to cut the fat and actually turn a handy profit, but they won't.
Riders never see the driver's location before booking.
Uber doesn't need the exact location to get a decent match.
And anyway - they send the ride to several drivers and the lowest / first bidder wins.
They're in the business of saving gas. Not cruising around idly while they wait for a ride.
Sure - some drivers are finishing a trip nearby. But you know the route they are taking...
You also don't know for-sure what route they're taking. Almost every driver I've had was using Waze or some other mapping app that usually took a different reasonable route than whatever Lyft was showing when I booked it.
So I'm curious if you have any knowledge, or if what you are saying is "I don't need realtime", or perhaps more charitably, "I can't imagine realtime being valuable to users". I push back on the 2nd, and I strong push back on the idea that someone with can reach the conclusion that Uber is wasting money on things that don't drive user value.
Unless, of course, you work/worked there and worked on these projects, and saw firsthand that Uber decided to waste a bunch of money internally.
And it's clear they didn't employ anything like Uber massive work force to do that.
Multiply by 3 for redundancy & availability. Multiply by 3 for other endpoints. You're not even 10x...
And this was not Uber as it exists. This is a simplified version of Uber that gives the user a nearly equal experience.
Most people will say they’re going to get an Uber, even if they end up having to use Lyft, no? Ubers, as well as others’, expressed strategy has long been not only first mover, but also monopolization of all aspects of their space, expressly anti-competitive. Part of that is not only being the leader, first to mind, but also draining the enemy/competitor’s resources and undermining their efforts to even challenge you. It’s a total market domination strategy that shouldn’t even be allowed, but they’ve also paid off politicians and captured government in other ways too, so don’t expect anything from there either. There used to be other ride sharing services, I don’t even know if they exist anymore, but even before the Great Monopolization, aka COVID, they were barely scraping by on crumbs in a few local markets while the likes of Uber worked in basically every market, especially in the high spending business travel and entertainment segments.
Fortunately it haven't worked. But could it work assuming the VC investors would be able and willing to pour much more money into it?
Cost of revenue in just terms of infrastucture was measured in $/ride and minimizing it reliability is difficult, especially if you're a fast growing startup and on cloud providers. Unfortunately, if you're a fast growing startup you also don't usually run bare metal (even though I'm a fan of colo/OVH/Hetzner).
Don't forget that money used to free, with the way interest rates and investors were. It's far more difficult cutting down, than it is to throw money around, obviously.
You can have a fixed rate. Fraud detection is a problem that thousands of apps requiring in app payments solved it somehow.
You don't need to have 1 million features, you only need to have the features demanded by the people who will make you most of the money.
If someone does a mobile or desktop chat app (think Whatsapp or teams) he will use web technologies on the backend. But IRC is very old and still works like a charm without using web technologies.
Likewise, if email was invented today, it would be just calling some REST api instead of using SMTP.
When I worked as a game developer, the server side of our games was a slow and ineficient PHP crap becouse the founders were friends with a PHP programmer. I had to jump through many hoops to mask huge latencies from web server or even the web server not replying at all.
I think using web for anything can add a massive overhead.
I can see the advantage of the web, though. You don't need to implement a server, you just think in terms of HTTP requests and the framework will transform those for you in data and transform the data back into replies.
But if you need something real-time you have to use web sockets, and at that time the simplicity goes away and you can use OS sockets just as good.
I am arguing that using web frameworks for an app which won't have a web fronted adds almost the same kind of overhead as using Javascript for mobile and desktop apps. It's doable, yes. It's the best usage of resources, no.
Normally I should be the last one to complain since I architect and develop web apps for living.
But I do like efficiency, I think that sometimes many layers of virtulization, abstraction, indirection, protocol encapsulation are hurting both the performance and the speed of the development.
And I also know how to develop a server side app without using an HTTP server and a web framework.
I wonder if the root of the problem is that apart from the the people doing mobile apps, the rest are mainly learning a frontend or backend framework and they can't do or are not willing to do anything besides that. Or, even worse, new developers are just learning dynamic laguages such as Javascript or Python or PHP which catters mostly to the Web.
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When I had to design a tool to masquerade the real people data in our microservice based app, everyone from my team was amazed I wrote a console app instead of a Web based application. But since there it wasn't a need for that tool to be called through an API, why should I have made it a web app? Just to use curl instead of command line arguments?
And then there's Uber self-driving. Uber AI; Uber electric airplanes. Uber freight, Uber restaurant delivery, Uber grocery delivery, Uber this and Uber that. Oh, and Uber scooters.
Uber eats? Scooter integration? Mass transit support? Scheduled rides? Commuter cards? If you were building the app with 30 developers you'd simply not bother with those features.
Uber has 3x the headcount as eBay.
Uber has to market themselves which needs local expertise, if nothing else to liaise with a local PR firm. Then they need local legal expertise to actually operate in the country (eBay transactions happen online, and the transport agency hired by the seller figures out how to get the package to its destination). Uber then has to have maps for every country it operates in, as well as change their standards to match local expectations.
The eBay business requires no boots on the ground, Uber Eats does because they have to equip riders. And eBay has almost no market-specific laws/regulations which change every couple of months to worry about.
I think eBay doesn't process payments, that is outsourced to PayPal.
It looks like eBay is in about 25 markets, Uber is available in 85 countries.
Serious question: Why does eBay have so many employees? It's just a search engine for a user generated product catalog where users can place bids on the items. My guess is that most Uber employees aren't high-paid developers, it is more likely that they are in support roles.
I ignored the other stuff because I don't know WTF "pickup special cases" or "on-trip experience business logic" or "growth features" are. So I'm not informed enough to guarantee they aren't part of the core product offering - although you can probably guess my intuition on the matter.
The software that runs the world and gets actual work done day-in, day-out behind the scenes, is riddled with edge case handling. In really mature codebases impacting many stakeholders (not just direct users), the product team can categorize 1% or less of the stakeholder population by a tiny fraction of a commonly-used feature set they use. On that basis, the coding and maintenance effort for the edge cases can sometimes outweigh the sliver of features used by that sub-population of stakeholders.
We aren't talking about a web scraper or run of the mill DevOps here. Anytime you work with lots of business rules in multiple jurisdictions impacting the same processes, the edge case counts go up rapidly, and combinations of processes that you never thought would intersect but are forced to by specific jurisdictions also appear more frequently.
Here is how it works in most of my clients. Management is at the top of the heap. Business/sales/marketing comes next. Developers/engineering after them. Way down at the bottom of the heap, sits Operations. They're the "grunts".
The default dynamic is developers code up a system and toss it over the wall to Operations. When informed by operations of some edge case that comes up frequently on the sad path, developers roll their metaphorical eyes and tells Operations to "just" develop and follow some "SOP".
Cue "One Decade Later..." in French accent meme...
After enough of those edge cases over enough time, it isn't hard to see why all those manual intervention edge cases result in an operations-oriented staff bloat. These are especially challenging to address, because everyone is looking for a silver bullet and very few people in charge of writing checks will accept the reality that this is every bit as much technical debt as the code that runs on the systems, and working off that debt with interest is a slog of expensive unwinding.
Uber gets hit on multiple fronts with this dynamic. More jurisdictions, in an incumbent industry that has accreted more baroque government interfacing, that has simultaneously famously resisted making any of its relevant data available in any form whatsoever beyond paper and microfiche. Sometimes it will take more people than you can imagine.
There's legitimately a reasonable argument that Uber rides has a worse business case than Uber Eats. If I were in Uber's shoes I would be clinging onto both.
Logistics is a tough business so I’m bearish on Uber eats.
At least that’s what Uber recruiters would tell me when trying to recruit.
I reaaaaly wouldn’t assume its a profitable business unless you get some data from a few “normal” (i.e., not pandemic impacted) quarters.
Delivery is the first thing people will cut down on if we get a recession as well
[1]https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
That's after shitting on compliance for years as part of your business model.
McDonald's restaurants have handicap accessible ramps but they don't staff ESL speakers. Apps and web services are no different.
Clubhouse, for example, isn't accessible to the hearing impaired and that's ok.
Uber specifically would definitely fall under a "public transportation" service - accessibility is non-optional if someone decides to sue. [2]
[1] https://www.ada.gov/2010ADAstandards_index.htm
[2] https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10900-ada-website-requirem...
Firstly that is just plain incorrect in a lot of areas (of business) and jurisdictions. Secondly your outlook on accessibility is just ... SMH and walks away from keyboard.
Do you think complexity of Uber is comparable to that of Whatsapp?
There is a big difference here -- revenue. Real transactions. Financial reporting. Country-by-country regulations and reg reporting.
If you're looking to trim fat - surprisingly - there might be better opportunities outside of engineering.
- iOS rider app
- android rider app
- iOS driver app
- android driver app
- ride/driver matching
- routing/supply
- security/compliance
- fraud detection/prevention
- backend rides services
- backend user services
^ 10 teams of at least 10 people off the top of my head. Amazing how underestimated engineering resourcing needs are.
Wow that was easy.
That is because its very well supported on both platforms, and one of the few language ecosystems that can actually create native looking/acting applications on both.
Yes, the initial development may be a bit slower, but that is common with C++ because what the smart people are doing is usually creating an application specific "language" out of C++. Then once that core bit is done the actual development would probably outpace many of the other choices. I've done this a couple times with native development toolkits, the "customer" in one case was really questioning how much work was actually going on when 1/2 way through the contract it barely had a single "screen" in a data collection/reporting application working. But, then another few weeks went by, and literally in the space of about 2 days the application went from looking like it had just been started, to being basically feature complete. That is because the C++ engine was complete and it took ~12 hours to fill out the few 10s of thousands lines of boilerplate ui descriptions that actually formed the UI (in that case it was a custom textish/declaritive application description language, most of the c++ code was parsing it and doing layout/drawing in response. Super happy customer too, once they understood that their inhouse "IT" people could update/change the app with little more than a text editor against some fairly simple to understand rules).
And many of the functions the GP was asking about are the kinds of things one could contract out. Aka, why not just use google maps API for the routing/etc.
Frankly, given what I saw a couple years ago when I went poking around in the iphone app store, it seems just about every region taxi company had reimplemented large parts of the uber interface in their own apps. Maybe not always as slick, but the core parts were in many of them, and I doubt random regional taxi companies can afford the engineering effort uber apparently is spending on.
This comment is insane for any real app in the real world transacting in real dollars. There are a hundred countries with 100 regulations. Accounting/P&L/bookkeeping for the United States ALONE would take 30 developers for a revenue base this size.
Don’t forget about lawyers, compliance, lobbying, lawsuits, etc., etc. It’s also likely your assumptions are very wrong. Just think about what will happen when people figure out you auto-refund everything below a certain point.
> Fuck marketing
Possibly the bravest thing ever said on HN.
How else would they know which laws in which locales are most profitable to skirt.
I am sure AirBNB has one for the same reason.
Now this is not about self driving or whatever else, it's about a ride hailing app. The point is there is no reason ride hailing can't be profitable.
Now, using any company to prop up r&d and investor hype for a moonshot, that's a whole other idea...
Revenue 6854
Cost of Revenue 4026
Operations and Support 574
Sales and Marketing 1263
Research and Development 587
General and Administrative 632
Depreciation & Amortization 254
Total Costs 7336I would love to see the breakdown of drivers and their immigration status, because from what I can gather, what is happening here is not any different than in the past of America’s history where the whole business model relies on the exploitation of “immigrant” labor that knows no better and is easily exploited, aka their unrealized labor value is converted into profit, or better states, benefits and riches for the executives.
In fact I’ve had a lot of conversations with Uber and taxi drivers who started as taxi drivers, switched to Uber when the bonuses were lucrative, and then some of them switched back because they liked the predictability of a fixed shift and not being ordered around by a machine. Others felt exactly the opposite.
Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases. It's now viable to travel without renting a car in many US cities - you can see this by how rideshare affected rental car companies. That's what makes the rideshare business hard: the places where they didn't have existing competition, because that's where the matching is harder and the economics not as easy.
It's a similar story for food delivery: GrubHub/Seamless operated in core areas of cities like NYC for many years (since the 90s in NYC, I think). Uber Eats brings that service to far more places, and that's where the challenge comes from in that business.
You don't need rideshare for delivering service to large areas.
In my country we have a taxi app which can be used by any taxi driver. If you request a drive, your call can be seen by all drivers which are at a certain distance from you. That distance can be se by each driver.
One or more drivers will reply to your request and you get to pick the driver.
And you can either pay directly to the driver using cash or card or you can be charged through the app.
The fee for the drivers is very small so almost all drivers use it.
And the money are not subject to tax evasion, they stay in the local economy. Taxi drivers have wages, social insurance, health insurance and pension funds. They also have a valid license to transport people and are regularly checked to be able to hold that license.
No Uber needed.
They only need some occasional reminders that might be targeted at the few people that haven't used or heard of friends or family using an Uber before.
Conversely, I'm not going to take an Uber ride tomorrow because they showed me an ad today. When I need to get somewhere I'll look at my options and choose the best. So long as Uber meets the minimum level of me being aware of it then theyre good.
Marketing is as much about keeping your customers from going to rival providers as it is about finding new customers. If you don't want people to leave you need to remind them why you're better than the exciting new company that's spending VC money to take your market share.
It's a clever way to disguise their unit economics to look better.
Their marketing budget is mostly going to pay drivers.
Put another way - you could be saying - why not pay drivers EVEN less? Well, they're paying them the least they can already. You can be sure of that.
If they did actually paid the drivers more and not disguise it as marketing - then their unit economics wouldn't look good - and when the business as a whole doesn't look good either - that's not a good look.
It sounds like "developing the core product" falls entirely under this bucket, so with what others are saying about what falls under other buckets is right, then the one that looks most cuttable to me is actually "Research and Development". That sounds like the "experimental new stuff that may go nowhere" bucket, and if it's eliminated it would also put them just above break-even. Maybe they could focus on improving profits for their core product for a while before bringing that back.
Maybe there is necessary stuff included in it though, which I guess means that wouldn't be an option.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-of-revenue.asp
A quick look at Ubers annual report states they do not capitalise r&d costs and instead expense it as incurred.
If you look at their financials, they show gross bookings, which include both the full billed values for food and delivery, and transportation of people. Revenues only show their share of that total.
In regards to incentives, it looks like a complicated question, I found an interesting outline[2]
[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4293755-insurance-primary-b... [2] https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/rideshari...
Cost of Revenue goes a step further, and includes the next layer of costs that are necessary to cause sales to happen for a given product/service line in a reporting period. That includes things like sales and marketing, and distribution. Basically anything that would cause the revenue to stop coming in fairly immediately if it wasn't done.
Neither includes R&D to create the product/service in the first place, or general overhead.
You flipped the values. The driver is making a bunch, and that's per ride, not per hour
Competition. Part of Uber's biggest expenses is "driver and customer incentives" which is corporate speak for bribing people to stay on the app. We know from economics that competition drives down profits and rid hailing services are a dime a dozen.
And no, you can’t just automate support. Refunds are not the only issue.
A big chunk of that $15 goes to driver incentive promotions. Not the steady state cost, but the sign bonuses and what not. Given high driver churn, this is always a big line item.
Google first result says just 3% of drivers drive for them for more than a year.
Most of their markets are terrible markets.
Do you have an MBA or other similar business experience? Because you can’t “fuck marketing.” Without marketing you have no business. How are people going to find out about your product?
You can write a hugely popular app with great UX, and super scalable backend but if you don't align your marketing parameters you won't make ends meet.
And you are wondering that people who are in business to teach you something tell you how vital is what they are teaching you? All salesmen sell things that are vital for your success, health, well being if you trust what they are telling.
I think it was because they provided an unique service and word of mouth was enough.
I remember when Gmail was in beta. There was no marketing. I was fortunate to receive an invite and once I get 5 invites, friends were begging me to send them one.
I think if the tech investment bubble bursts (if it is a bubble) then this makes it easier for Uber in terms of competition as ride prices will tend towards the original "Taxi" prices and people will have to get used to that. And then Uber can make their profit (and also the drivers can make a reasonable living).
Take rate ~40% = $6
- payments -0.7 (correct)
- servers -0.2 (correct)
- refunds -1 (driver is indemnified, not in cabs)
- shared rides -1 (on avg, not in cabs)
- insurance -1 (drivers and riders get generous insurance, not in cabs)
now we have $2.5 per ride to pay fixed costs, not including marketing. in reality, they also give out generous marketing coupons to riders which cabs did not do. $1 per ride on avg discount drops us to $1.5 per ride.
it's probably true that 100 engineers could sustain uber in the US without any new features. 100 * 500k payroll cost = $50M/yr = 33M rides per year.
Lyft alone did >300M rides per year. Uber and lyft combined would be a solid company able to sustain and be profitable. This company would provide a way higher quality service (and safer, and more insured) than it replaced, without monopoly profits being captured by rich medallion holding families.
However, uber and lyft are still pouring money into product development. Shared rides as an example, still hold the potential to improve everything in cities massively. Lower cost than taxi, faster than bus, less congesting than private car.
Both also seem to be expanding outside of ride share, which should be viewed like amazon expanding to aws 15 years ago. if it works, there could be hugely positive impact. if it doesn't, then it's a massive waste of shareholder capital.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Then we'd have a(n) (inter)national tech monopoly. Soooo much better.
The kinds of decisions taken for granted by the hacker news thread/etc are the kinds of decisions that could sink a self funded company, starting with the fact that they are basically writing multiple copies of the application for each platform (ios vs android) and going from there. This is maybe the problem with VC funded companies (like government contracts) the money just keeps flowing independent of all the bad decisions being made. Also, having enough engineers that whole teams can be split off to rewrite the application for no appreciable benefit except to peoples resume's is itself an upper mgmt problem. If the goal was a single unified application I might see how something like that could be justified, but they choose technology stacks that are to native for that to work.
We have a couple of local companies in NY with their own ride-sharing apps. They aren't as polished as Uber, but they do work and the companies that built them have about 1% the staff of Uber.
I doubt NY is 1% of the phone-hailed taxi market globally.
If Uber has to staff up a hundred person office in every country they operate in, this is bad, and guarantees they won't ever be profitable!
The code is FEAST if anyone cares to try it. Probably expired by now. It doesn't seem to work on Uber Eats, only Postmates.com on desktop web.
- It's for delivery only
- Discount applies only to the food
- The service, delivery, "temporary local fee", and "temporary fuel surcharge" stay the same
To test this, I put together a $67 order of Thai food, which had $17.88 of fees added onto it, coming out to $84.88. With the coupon, it's $51.38. If I was to order it directly from the restaurant (so I'm only paying tax), it's $74.79.
So it's not horrible, $84.88 (no coupon) to $51.38 (with coupon) is a 39% discount. And 31% off compared to ordering directly from the restaurant.
Supposing such a thing existed, then drivers could simply offer their own driving services by themselves. Perhaps that's the next evolution here.
I used to drive a pretty boring, but predictable route in the morning and in the late afternoon. I would've loved to drive people who are near my destination both ways, but without anyway to trust them, no way.
Surely someone has tried to implement this before and failed and I just don't know?
Implementing a Chinese style societal "social credit" system is not a good thing. Even if it would make it a bit cheaper to undercut Uber. Making every action and interation you have in life tracked and rated is not a net plus. The constant visibility and permanance of everything is part of why middle school and high schoolers are having such trouble now. They can't develop as teenagers as they are already part way to living in '1984' with every action tracked via social media.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p...
> The Chinese Communist Party has been constructing a moral ranking system for years that will monitor the behavior of its enormous population — and rank them all based on their "social credit."
> But at the moment the system is piecemeal and voluntary, though the plan is for it to eventually be mandatory and unified across the nation, with each person given their own unique code used to measure their social credit score in real-time, per Wired.
> The exact methodology is a secret — but examples of infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games, and posting fake news online, specifically about terrorist attacks or airport security.
> Authorities banned people from purchasing flights 17.5 million times by the end of 2018, according to the National Public Credit Information Centre, as the Guardian reported.
> And in July of 2018, a Chinese university denied an incoming student his spot because the student's father had a bad social credit score for failing to repay a loan.
*Please* fellow tech people. Whether you work in ML, DS, or software for a random business or open source project please think through the societal impact and long-run end state of what you propose and produce. We really have to move past the days of "I'm just an engineer I'll only focus on the tech and ignore the impact of my work on society". Implementing China's societal wide social credit system is a bad path. And of course the argument will be, "well anyone who doesn't want to use it doesn't have to". And then that will turn into, "well most companies offer discounts if you use it." Then to "well most companies offer higher rates if you don't use it". Then "most companies won't serve you if you don't use it". Then it's universal in society just as if govt mandated, but people will consider it less horrific because it was slipery slope implemented vs via a mandate.
it's a terrible idea and Boiled Cabbage makes a very good point
It's certainly reasonable to think a system as massive and in-depth as what China is working on is too far, but the alternative in the far extreme is just looking at someone and going "do I trust this person", which isn't a great solution either, and is prone to the "you don't look like you're from around here" sorts of defaults.
As with most things, the question isn't "should this exist at all". There will always be some sort of explicit or implicit system of trust. The question is where do you draw the lines between something like China's system and randomly picking someone and hoping they don't have a history of serious crimes/don't even know how to do whatever you need them to do. There's plenty of existing systems I think go too far, but I also would want to know that the person picking me up for a car trip had a driver's license.
They don't. If you are willing to take risk to have sex with a stranger, why wouldn't you take a risk to share a ride with a stranger?
And trust can be easily established if you retain the data from both parties implied and if you make a rating system.
As a passenger, you schedule your approximate time to go to work (or from work, or both, depending on how you want to use it), and the app matches you with a driver for the next morning who is going to about the same area, but maybe a different building. So they pick you up, drop you off, and go along their merry way, and you are only out of about $5-7 or so (that was the rate for going from Seattle downtown to Redmond, which is about a factor of 6-8 cheaper than an uber/lyft was at the time).
I used it as both a driver (a few times) and as a passenger (many times). Feels like a pretty great idea that worked well. If I was driving, I didn't mind a 5 minute reroute to pick up or drop off someone nearby, and those $7 + (more importantly) HOV lane access were totally worth it. I estimated that the HOV lane access alone saved me significantly more time than I lost by going out of my way to pick up/drop off the passenger. And the fact that those people are guaranteed to not be randos, but either other MSFT employees or employees of other nearby companies made it much more trustworthy for me (the app required work email to sign up).
Obviously, this wasn't meant to be an uber/lyft alternative, as it is only useful for going to/from work and only during specific days/hours. And you gotta schedule/get matched with a driver the night before, you cannot just wake up and spontaneously get a ride. Which makes sense given the context, because people typically want to have their commute to work planned the night before.
> Sometimes
I garuntee you the reliability of the Uber network of drivers is higher than a single person who may be asleep when you need them.
I've lived in NYC and I've lived in < 2k person remote towns where business card drivers are more common than a Lyft. Trying to deal with the individuals in the small towns is always a nightmare
And if he's not available, I guess I just open the app and request a ride? Easier to just do that from the start?
Despite having thousands of people doing my same commute, I have never been able to to get anyone to drive me to/from work.
I also would love to hear your feedback. What do you think we should do to improve the experience of drivers and passengers, and to get more people to share their commute?
Thanks!
For me it was just the lack of available drivers.
I put my commute which is fairly common around here, yet for the many weeks I didn't find a match.
What you can do is set your commute and leave the app installed in the background. Others can send requests to you once they join or the app can eventually remind you that there are others along your route.
In Europe there is BlaBlaCar
Really such data is obtained only by service providers, credit bureaus being an edge case. And if I've built a service that acquires such data, why would I sell it rather than build more services to sell?
If AWS has half their customers disappear, what does that do to Amazon's bottom line?
Nah, they're not even 1% of AWS. Plus AWS is profitable AF.
AWS might be super high margins, but it does not exist in a vacuum. AWS cross subsidization powers AMZN retail to be able to run at a <1% margin.
>AWS cross subsidization powers AMZN retail to be able to run at a <1% margin.
I've never truly understood that number, how come they have such low margins where most of the products I see there have a 10-20% markup (at least) vs. the same product in classic "offline" retailers (costco, walmart, etc...)?
"But they send it to your home", yeah but they charge you for that too.
If I could save money by not shopping on Amazon it would be a no-brainer but it isn’t. Like I’m paying less for the conscience of having it shipped to me.
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-th...
> For example, internal AWS accounts are known as Isengard accounts, after the fortress in “The Lord of the Rings” eventually controlled by the corrupted wizard Saruman. When internal game development teams use Isengard accounts, they must pay (via internal accounting) the same rates for AWS compute cycles that outside retail customers pay, according to people close to the teams.
You will often here Disney talk about “transfer costs” to Disney Studios from Disney+ when talking about Disney+‘s content costs. This is similar.
b2b companies that coasted on free reign will struggle a ton
I believe Lyft is entirely on AWS but they are much smaller overall because they’re only in a limited number of markets.
Sorry, but you're not buying competitive talent with 72k/year salary. Uber can squeeze out tons of marginal efficiencies via better routing/matching, price discrimination, and surge algorithms. Implementing those algorithms means hiring good talent, especially in ML. Having a fancy frontend is only 10% of the picture if you want drivers to have good utilization.
to be fair depending on the exact implementation details you probably could do everything you need, including management using Spanner and BigTable.
People live in a city and take cabs in that city. Build a city-scale app. For extra credit, add federation APIs to interoperate with other city-scale worker-owned co-op apps.
Only a tiny 0.1% of people (including Uber's dumb investors) think that being able to use the same app in every city on earth is a killer feature.
I remember traveling to a city in Canada 4-5 years ago when they didn't have Uber or Lyft, and there was a local app that was vexing to try to use if you didn't already live there, and assumed you had a local address. There were a lot of places I just didn't end up going to because I couldn't work out the app, and couldn't find a normal taxi on the street that didn't require cash that I didn't have.
For a lot of people, the times you're calling a cab are a stressful experience already - you're in a new place, maybe with a new language, often under time pressure to get somewhere. There's definite advantage to using a familiar app in that use case.
- Unwilling to use public transport
- Unfamiliar with the city
- Don't carry any cash
- Don't speak the local language
- Unable to install/set up a new app
- Travelling alone, without a local who can help them
Are there enough of those people to justify Uber as a $100B business? I am very sceptical.
Also I think you're underestimating the difficulty of consistent hiring. You can definitely find a good dispatcher in NYC, but can you scale that level of skill to the entire US?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03050...
I am sorry, but there is not way a workers' cooperative can build a safe product for passenger and drivers. All of the leading rideshare companies have invested 10s if not 100s of millions into safety platforms that leverage the latest face recognition, fraud algorithms, and more to ensure that everyone can have a safe ride.
Both passengers and drivers robbed and murdered each before these investments were made to keep the bad guys off and the good guys safe.
And what you said is true, but it's also a vapid statement without looking at percentages and incentives. Individual bad examples exist everywhere, but a workers coop of drivers in a City has social incentives (if a driver from your coop robs someone who goes to the same church as you, you'll hear from it) and constraints (if your cooperative gets boycotted in your town, what will you do, move everyone next postcode?) which uber lacks (if there's a boycott in one town, bad for the drivers, but you just put out a press blurb, do a promotion and donate to a charity and wait until things die down)
The more drivers a co-op has means shorter wait times and higher geographic coverage for the passengers. If passengers have to wait too long, they will lose faith in the reliability of the co-op and be forced to use other forms of transit.
The more passengers a co-op has means drivers have to idle less or shorter (unpaid) distances to travel to pickup a passenger.
It is always better for the co-op to have more active drivers and more active passengers. The growth comes in the form of "let basically anyone join".
None of the co-ops listed have industry standard safety systems for telematics (unplanned stops, detour detection, or unsafe driving), face recognition, or audio recording.
Feel free to address the original point of how co-ops have the same incentives as Big Tech for letting anyone on the platform.
Uncreative distruction.
Somehow it seems wrong that people can make enough money to buy an island without actually making money.
Having apps solved all of the above problems. I would give 0% chance of any similar improvements under the monopolistic medallion system that exists in the old regime. Uber forced innovation that was so much better the politicians folded despite intense lobbying from the old hands.
However, my local cab company got an app, it’s a piece of shit, but it shows where the cab is in a map as it comes to you, which really was the killer feature for Uber/Lyft for me. So good riddance Uber, you served a purpose for a time, but normal cabs stepped up their game just a little bit, and I have basically negative loyalty to you.
Cost more, longer waits, cherry on top of a Lyft driver waiting five minutes on the other side of a long block away from pickup, and canceling the ride because I allegedly refused to show up. That I had to talk to CS to reverse the charge with.
I took taxis for the rest of my time in NYC, and I can't see any reason not to keep doing so.
See air travel in general.
> See air travel in general.
At least in Europe, currently having a provider get you from A to B as per your booking is the key, "premium" / "better level of service" is completely irrelevant.
I'm back to booking everything as cheap as possible. If it's all going to go wrong, I want to have paid peanuts for it so I can just walk away and not bother having to try and claim anything back.
We'll need a working definition of "better"...
Intra-Europe you're going to have to look long and hard to spot the difference between the "business class" seat at the front of the aircraft and the cheaper seats further back.
You will (probably) get an inch or two extra legroom, the middle seat next to you will likely be blocked so there's more personal space, and you'll get something to eat and drink.
Whether that's really worth spending a few hundred $$$/€€€/£££ extra is between you and your wallet.
I've got miles with both OneWorld and Star Alliance so can redeem on quite a lot of different airlines. At present, having a seat booked is not much of a guarantee of getting to your destination on time - or indeed at all.
On the one hand you've got legacy carriers struggling to operate their published schedules[0][1][2] and on the other major European hubs are also struggling, AMS halted ticket sales in order to avoid complete meltdown[3][4] due to lack of trained staff, and FRA is also chaotic due to staffing issues and strikes[5][6]
Low cost carriers such as Easyjet are also having to cancel hundreds of flights.[7][8]
To be frank, air travel in Europe is a total mess, it's seems like it's going to take a while for the operators to get a grip.
[0] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/05/21/is-it-time-to-giv... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/08a94781-42e7-4d0c-9e54-dc899c597... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/cancell...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/klm-caps-... [4] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/05/25/f...
[5] https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/frankfurter-flugh... [6] https://simpleflying.com/frankfurt-airport-closed-departures...
[7] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2022/05/29/more-easyjet-canc... [8] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10857739/EasyJet-le...
But most people still prefer taxis as they are cheaper and better regulated by laws.
Yes, now it's impossible to find a taxi anywhere unless you have a smartphone and an Uber/Lyft account. I miss the days when I didn't have to have a lifelong relationship with my cab.
Funny timing. I just attended a wedding where the hotel was in Annapolis, Maryland, and the venue was about 5 miles outside Annapolis. The couple had recommended using Lyft due to limited parking, and had even given everyone a voucher to offset the cost. Getting from hotel -> venue at 4pm was no problem at all.
We started trying to get a return ride at a few minutes before 10pm. First the app took about 4 minutes to match us to a driver, then rapidly cycled through a handful of drivers before ensuring us that our driver was 11 minutes away. For the next 20 minutes, that driver seemed to patrol up and down a street near downtown, with his ETA bouncing between 10-12 minutes. My guess is he accidentally accepted my "bad" (outside of downtown) ride and was hoping I'd cancel? I didn't, and he finally did.
The app spins for a few minutes and then tells us someone is 15 minutes away. This person calls me and asks where I'm going, specifically am I going to DC. I answer that I'm not, I'm headed to downtown Annapolis, and he says he'll be right there. He made 3-4 minutes of progress toward us, then the app abruptly cycled through two more drivers. After another few minutes, I guess another driver cancelled on us, leaving the app to spin for several minutes unsuccessfully.
At this point I cancelled the ride and was about to call a traditional cab. It was 10:45, the wedding had ended at 10:30, and it was starting to rain. Luckily, another couple at the wedding had correctly predicted that we wouldn't be able to get a ride back downtown. They had gotten a three-row SUV ("Lyft XL" or something) to get to the wedding, then gotten contact details from the driver so they could privately hail him after the wedding. Assuming we weren't too particular about obeying seatbelt laws, they had plenty of space for us.
I'm not sure why people think the ride-"sharing" services have solved so many problems. I hope to never have to do business with these apps again.
There are plenty of horror stories where minorities can’t get a cab in the middle of NYC.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-...
This is not a problem with Uber.
But I do not think that's the business we should be sad about disrupting - Lyft and especially Uber have been fighting hard against all sorts of public transit systems across the US because they view them as competitors. It's unclear how effective they have been, but I also have no love for their intention - which is to lock the public into their service.
The medallion ponzi scheme is dead. You now know more about your driver, I presume it has made things safer. It has allowed people to do rides as part of the commute they are doing anyway, so probably good for the environment. It has encouraged ride sharing. It may have made some people not buy a car where they would have before, which is probably good.
The rideshare is probably a good example of real value being added. A lot of pure "internet only" marketplaces are just seeking rent on some subset of ecommerce. At least Uber added a map, routing, automatic pricing and stuff.
That's just one example, but I've noticed this drastically increase in the last year. Whether I'm at the airport, a train station, or a bus depot, I've been seeing way more independent drivers.
What's stopping more drivers from doing this? If it's the "trust" aspect that comes from Uber, then surely there's some system that can meet us halfway that doesn't apparently need large sums of VC money and high fees but at least provides trust and safety for riders.
You didn't have to have a taxi medallion to be a black car driver and pick people up at locations upon request - which, originally, is what Uber was, exactly.
The whole point of a taxi medallion is to be able to pick people up off the street - which is what these independent drivers at the airport and train stops are doing.
If this is sarcasm it’s too subtle for me to recognize.
Black cars picked up people upon request. They weren't taxis. That was Uber's core business. It wasn't regulated.
They don't pick people up off the street. That's the taxi business. It's heavily regulated.
It was never clear Uber was an illegal business, and it's never been ruled that it is.
However, to pretend that Uber is now not a taxi company is difficult to comprehend. The original name was UberCab. The intent is clear.
This problem isn't restricted to startups however, even big tech has big expensive forays into questionable markets. Meta is building something for a few billion a year, Google has hundreds of strange an unprofitable businesses, and B2B SaaS is full of startups which may actually just be consultancies.
A 10-12% cost of capital means that you either need to have a real plan to turn profit in 3 years or investors won't care. Just breaking even means an opportunity cost of 30%.
Now, capital has become more expensive and labor is also more expensive. It's a perfect shitstorm for a lot of projects.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-history-of-interest-rat...
There is a separate book you can read that attempts to go back 2000 years. Interest rates have never been this low in recorded human history, and there's an obvious reason why. The point of interest rates is to compensate the lender for deferring consumption. In a world without government manipulation, it makes no logical sense for a lender to be willing to lend money and receive zero or even negative interest.
The US government is artificially keeping interest rates low because recessions have become politically untenable, and the wealthy have totally captured the mechanisms of government. The end result is monetary policy which inflates assets for the wealthy while impoverishing the poor and middle classes. Other countries have been forced to adopt the same policies to avoid their currencies appreciating.
Worse yet, government is implicitly and explicitly backstopping and even socializing industries owned by the wealthy through fiscal policy. This is where you get "green energy credits" and "privatizing space," both of which have served only to enrich a couple billionaires. It's the western version of Russian oligarchs.
Google burning cash in a moonshot division, dubiously betting that creating startups within Google is easier than outside of it.
Uber/Lyft subsidizing customers for a long while to take over the market, which... pretty much worked? Of the three "big bets" this seems most promising. Even if the market decreases, it's not going away, nor is it going back to regional taxi companies.
Of course, that may not have been what investors wanted to hear.
Pre-Uber I remember having to get Taxi drivers to write me a freehand paper receipt to expense.
The gasoline economics were far too compelling even before this round of gas price gouging.
Listen to the old Ben Thompson podcasts from when Uber was taking over life itself. Private cars, self driving, blah blah blah. Why go to a restaurant when Uber can fly one to you?
Any challenger is going to be ten years behind on market and platform development with no access to cheap capital for customer acquisition.
IMO, Taxis would have long since died as an industry if it weren’t for governments propping them up artificially.
Taxi downstairs was $40 and was waiting for me to get in. Didn’t smell like vomit. But if it did, I’d roll down the window and remember I’m saving $110 for a 20 minute ride.
If your taxi is a monopoly using old cars, where card readers are “broken” and who don’t have apps - it’s your taxi that is broken, not the concept of taxi. Many US and European cities have bad taxis, but many also have good taxis.
Also, we have a favorite taxi company we use to get to LAX. We make reservations a few days in advance, and they have always showed up on schedule.
Musicians have long complained that their share of record sales was negligible in the old system, at least until they became large and established acts. The money (such as it is) has always been in touring and merchandise.
10000/11/365 = 2.5 per day, is this your main means of transportation?
Uber has to maintain its servers and has a massive crew of white collar workers in expensive cities writing code, maintaining the servers, designing apps, marketing, lobbying, litigating, modeling potential business models, etc.
I really think, in all cases of online platforms, that laws requiring the platform to be transparent with all costs - including how much they keep as a platform, how much they give the actual driver, how much the restaurant gets (if doing delivery) etc. would be highly beneficial, if not necessary, to not only society but also to potential investors.
E.g. How sustainable are their prices, and are the billions invested simply subsidizing lower fares to outcompete based on price for a temporary time while fighting over to capture as much of a market (artificially and temporarily?) until the shareholders come knocking asking for the profit tap to get turned on?
They were always Ponzi schemes and retail investors who naively believed the hype were the “biggest fools”.
Arguably being transparent at the per-transaction level which allow everyone and their mother to then do simple math to understand that such a business model isn't sustainable - but they're not currently paying enough attention, just in a very shallow way - they see Uber or Lyft on the news plenty, maybe use the services themself - until it's too late.
All of this should be educating people giving their money to institutions or stockbrokers to make sure their money and whomever they're giving the power to dictate where it goes is aligned with long-term results, and arguably not at all on per-transaction buy/sell actions.
I think a lot of our problems today stem from there being such an abundance of wealth/riches that enough people could become lazy and relatively inattentive with their money, blindly trusting others without understanding the underlying mechanisms enough - and perhaps blindly believing government institutions like the SEC would protect them - instead perhaps trusting long-time existing brand names as some sort of measure of trust.
Bitcoin et al are the next evolution the VC-finance industrial complex has latched onto quite successfully, so far.
Only “qualified investors” are allowed to buy pre-IPO stock and they should know what they are doing. If they lost money, it’s on them.
Even if you did what you suggested, how should a company allocate fixed expenses? Allocate per mile?
I know a few taxi drivers who are medallion holders - which are now worthless - they of course have been put in a shit position, and the Cities don't particularly care anymore because whatever lobby structure that got the medallions in place to begin with basically no longer exists - they're not necessary to get today's lobbyist funded politicians into play, positions of power.
The taxi drivers follow local regulations, they have the proper permit to transport people (this requires checking), I don't see ridicoluos price surges and price hikes at rush hours, taxi companies don't evade local taxes like Uber does, the money remain in the local economy, drivers have wages, social insurance, health insurance and pension funds.
Operating every drive at a loss means the rider and drivers benefit and the person holding the bag is some VC who apparently has more money than they know what to do with. Given how many financial structures today seem to flow in the opposite direction and skim a little money from everyone to transfer it to the already-rich, it's nice seeing a system that (completely unintentionally) flows the other way.
VCs get rich, but they risk a lot of their own money doing so.
This is not the downside you think it is. So help me if I could snap my fingers and make this happen I just might do it.
If you remove the medallion system, let people drive their own cars, and coordinate with riders via an app, you have Uber.
- Lying about the debit/credit machine being broken in order to receive cash.
- Being unwilling to drive to/from certain neighborhoods.
- Not turning the meter on in order to take advantage of people not from the city/country.
- My (possibly incorrect) perception is that they are harder to hold to account. I do not always know the number of the taxi that picked me up and dropped me off.
- Calling a taxi dispatch does not guarantee one will arrive. If service is slow you end up in a strange limbo of "Is that taxi late or have I been abandoned at 2:30am?"
There's probably more but those are the ones that spring to mind based on my personal experiences with taxis. Even if Uber was only offered as a premium service I would still order one over a taxi.
Take Doordash for example, every delivery they do with is powered by VC money.
Uber drivers are doing way better than $0.11 per mile.
After a month or two I started having rides discounted to literally as low as $3.12
All I could think was that “somebody is definitely losing a lot of money here & it’s not me”
Was very interesting. I know the driver wouldn’t be doing that if he was making $3 for the trip.
Travis K is still out there. Doing things.
They just needed a (usually tiny) little office and 1 person to answer the phone.
That also makes for terrible ux. One of the things ridesharing apps got right was the ux, ie.
1. being able to hail a cab via app, and see its ETA in real time
2. being able to pay with credit card, without fear that the machine "broke"
3. a rating system to weed out bad drivers
4. after-ride support
Also many cab services have started leveraging apps like zTrip.
I'm kind of glad "Yo Taxi!" exists in some form now, what with the wheels (figuratively) falling off Uber and Lyft.
OTOH, I've taken a decent number of sketchy Lyft and Uber rides: ones where the driver was clearly not the person on the account (possibly a relative?), where the car didn't match, etc. All in medium to large US cities.
I recently had a taxi refuse to take me from the Vegas Strip to a friends house on the North side. It’s because they’ll have to drive back to the city center without a ride.
There’s a ton of hustles. Sometimes they’ll hang a bunch of phones in a tree near a strategic location to get gigs.
It gets to the real problem. If you get in an accident in an Uber and get hurt, there’s a high likelihood that you’re fucked.
1) Where you goin'?
2) How do you get there?
Which is... if you're new to the area or going someplace new, how do you answer that second one?
Plus, there’s a 50 year old woman making $19/hour to smoke cigarettes and dispatch cars, a mechanic, and a bookkeeper.
In their heyday, you’d drive around and find that 30-40% of cars on the road were Uber/Ola taxis (cabs here have different colored number plates). Now, its around 5-10%
I know that Vice is a meme these days, but I can't resist. Where do they think the money is going? Mostly to the fees that are paid to drivers. If those costs are baked in and they are still losing money, it's because they're paying the drivers more than they can afford. They were banking on not having to pay AV drivers wages, sick leave, pensions, have them go on strike, etc etc. Just provide customers a good service for an amount these companies could sustain.
Now, that was a wild bet for sure, but not a bad one for humanity to have tried.
I think there is a very literal and material sense in which it was a quite bad bet for us to have tried. How many tens thousands of people skipped medical procedures, lost birthdays and holidays with loved ones, and didn't live as well as they could have because of these companies' cynical abuse of their labor?
What was good about it? They could have worked with existing taxi companies to sell their technology to create a better market, that would have been a good bet. Betting on making everything worse and hoping to profit from it was a horrible bet.
If they continue what they are doing, I can't wait for them to crash and burn.
Fuck the "Gig economy".
It's not Uber that is paying the price so their product can be this convenient.
Can't count on it anymore - going back to manually calling taxis.
There is really way too much cheap and dumb money sloshing around the tech industry. Money that cheap can’t create long term value - it just creates zombie companies and bad operational habits.
An open source base for a riding/taxi app for which local companies can add their own modules for billing to comply with local regulations.
It would be the WordPress of ride sharing / taxi apps.
A seemingly boring business seems unviable.
For example, food is expensive, and we have to tip, but restaurant is tough business, and the servers don't make enough for living. Like why the heck is this not viable?
I'm in the Midwest and a server at a decent restaurant can pull in $300/night in tips.
If we don't tip, we are killing them.
Why do we tip 20% again? It seems like we can tip 5% and the servers would still make bank.
[surprisedpikachu.gif]
pearl clutching intensifies
it sure has been amusing to watch, however.
maybe we can pay for future uber and lyft rides in beenz and flooz
I do wonder in so many of these cases, how much is:
- Completely cynical fleece the suckers
- Irrational optimism that things will be different because self-driving or whatever
- Fake it till you make it (which is related but slightly different)
I am yet to board a Uber and have used taxis quite a lot in the last 30 years.
> Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the “sharing economy”).
> They don’t pay the cost of their capital.
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
> These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...
25.
Uber and Lyft Are Out of Ideas, Jacking Up Prices in Desperation for Profit (vice.com)
127 points by elsewhen 2 hours ago | flag | hide | 179 comments
Looks like the original VICE article has even been scrubbed from HN entirely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=vice.com
Below is the original article.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vmpb/uber-and-lyft-are-out...
There we go, the punch ...
"[...] a sensible business with an obvious if limited market and profit potential. It is also an idea that has already existed, once run by a plucky startup that focused exclusively on Black Car services from experienced, fully licensed and insured drivers paid a living wage. You may have heard of it. It was called Uber."
... and the knockout.