If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them.

Someone like Kalanick - who has run multiple startups to various exits - has been running startups all his professional life. His management style likely works very well at a startup, where failure is assumed so risk tolerance is high. At a startup, you need a field general leading the troops into battle.

But at a large, maturing company, you need a different skill set. Risk tolerance becomes a negative attribute once the company grows so large you can't control the risk anymore. Rather than a field general, you need a therapist capable of massaging the egos of the executive team and the board of directors. The job becomes more strategic and political -- execution is assumed, and failure is no longer an option.

I don't think Kalanick is that guy, and I think the board finally convinced him of that. But if I was an investor, I'd still be happy to listen to his next startup pitch...

And in Jobs' case, it took an absence from the company of more than 10 years…

Edit: Downvotes for simply stating a fact?

Edit: I imagine it's this interview at AllThingsD[1]. Ed jumps into this topic right off the bat.

1. https://youtu.be/U8kH5eZdIqA

He was an asshole of monumental proportions before and after. I am so far removed that I am a poor judge, what would be a good place to look into this.

More like "CEO of a growth startup" to "fixer who can pull an over-valued startup out of a nose dive." That's a much tougher leap.

I'd argue that a "mature CEO" is not a fit for Uber which needs to keep growing or die.

The valuation can be quite high if you assume that the value in the exponent is low.

But I personally think that the "autonomous vehicle revolution" is not going to pay off as well for Uber as they had hoped. It's becoming more clear that the market for autonomous vehicles isn't going to look like the market for human-driven ones -- and vehicle manufacturers are going to be looking to build their own self-driving auto services rather than sell self-driving vehicles directly to consumers.

Uber's biggest innovation was their app. Even complex apps like Uber are not hard to clone if you have any sort of budget. There's an assumption a lot of investors make about their brand value: it assumes that another, already strong brand does not enter the same market. Seeing as Tesla has made no secret of their intentions to compete directly with Uber in the ride-hailing space, I don't think that's a fair assumption. Would you rather call an Uber or a Tesla at this point?

And what does buying a Tesla in that scenario even look like? Do you buy a car and rent it out a la Airbnb when you're not using it? How much money do you get for that, and how much of a cut does Tesla get since it's their algorithms actually driving the car?

Don't get me wrong; the brand value is actually really high because hundreds of millions of wealthy customers worldwide know Uber. Even if the company fails spectacularly, someone will buy them for a few billion in a fire sale just for the brand.

You realize that nobody will care as much about most of the things they currently care about when buying a car. Performance? Mileage? Handling? Horsepower? Fucking irrelevant if I'm chilling in the back seat and my car is just getting me to where I need to go.

So what still matters? Price. Comfort. Amenities. The upsell becomes the main sell. At a certain point, Tesla isn't even selling "cars" so much as it's selling mobile offices to one segment, and mobile living rooms to another segment. I could also see Tesla finding a way to place the burden of price elsewhere and offer effectively "free" cars to consumers. For instance, leasing or selling fleets to employers. Or to cities. Or to Uber. Or to Amazon.

Uber, on the other hand, sees a world in which nobody owns a car, nobody drives a car, and everyone hails an automated car whenever and wherever. Like that scene in Minority Report.

Both of their strategies are banking on the idea that cars, as we currently understand and experience them, will eventually become pure commodities. The difference is that Tesla is seeking margin and Uber is seeking volume. The cliche that Tesla is Apple and Uber is Amazon is sort of true in that respect.

That's why ultimately, I feel Uber will end up being the Expedia/Priceline of the self-driving car industry. If you don't control the means of value production, you become a middleman. There's a reason they were working on their own self-driving tech rather than licensing from someone else -- everyone who is actually building this tech likely told them "go shove it, we can recreate what you do far easier than you can recreate what we do".

Sure in large walkable cities with constantly circulating fleets car ownership might go away. For those of us in the suburbs who HAVE to drive everywhere, not so much. Even waiting 5 extra minutes for every errand (optimistic, given that my most recent lyft took 10-15 minutes to arrive) adds up fast. Let alone going out into the rural areas where Uber/Lyft scarcely exist and the nearest human structure can be miles away.

I could, however easily see a model where people rent their self-driving car out to Uber/Lyft when they're not using it. Driver fees would be gone, and they could take a greater cut that might even put them towards profitability.

2) Configurability

Anyone who is price sensitive won't want to pay the hourly rate to have a car sit in their garage all day/night doing nothing. Nor will they want to pay the up front cost and/or interest to hold a controlling share in the vehicle.

And configurability means you can take a 2-seater when you are going to work, take a 4-seater to lunch with you coworkers, take a hatchback to the farmers market to pick up your groceries, and then an SUV to the mountains, preconfigured with a roof rack with your ski rentals already on it, sharpened and waxed, and then take a mobile office for the drive home so you can get some work done, and a mobile bedroom for your trip down to LA so you can catch up to sleep.

But yes, the wealthy will still own private cars because they can have it waiting, just like private planes. Also, cooties.

Driving is a day-to-day task. My time's already short, if I have to add an extra 5 minutes waiting for pickup every time I want to go anywhere (once again an optimistic estimate, it would likely be closer to 10), on a busy day that's a minimum extra hour a day of time I've lost just standing on the sidewalk. Margin matters, even an extra 15 minutes a day adds up to over 90 hours a year.

Also these rental services/configurations will hardly be free. So the cost of the car/maintenance isn't eliminated entirely. For my situation, given that I've been driving the same car for the last 11 years, and it was ~16k when I bought it, plus maybe an average $1200 a year in insurance, and maybe an average of $300 a year in maintenance that means I've spent an average of $2,954.54/year over the last 11 years on car ownership. And that number is only going to get smaller unless I buy another car.

But in this scenario I'm losing a minimum 90 hours per year on the margin. If those were work hours, then at my current take-home rate I can decrease that number down to around $1065/year going forward. Given that I'm likely going to make more money as the years go by, these continuous rental services are going to have to be awfully cheap to be worth it for my situation, and I don't think I'm too far from the average.

Now sure, if you're buying a new car every 4 years like some people do then it might be worth it. Or if the cost of insurance is prohibitively high in your given location. Or if your job sucks and you just can't afford a car. Or if you actually need a broad variety of vehicles on a regular basis. There are lots of factors that go into it, but for anyone who's middle class or better I don't think it'll supplant ownership entirely. Or maybe it will and I'll just be with the sour-grapes number-crunchers in the corner ranting about margin to anyone who'll listen. :)

Nope, but they will be commoditized. If you have a car that all you have to do is pass it an API key and a location, there's not much value a ride sharing service can add to that -- which means there will probably be a bunch of them. Which means that the price to the consumer should be something close to [ (marginal cost of ride) + (depreciation cost of ride) ] * 1.03. And the cost side of that will benefit from scale for the business, but not the consumer.

Basically, once it's commoditized, it will cost you more to do it yourself than to pay someone to do it for you. Just like with currently commoditized services like AWS, there can still be good reasons to do it yourself -- but those tend to be special cases rather than the norm.

> But in this scenario I'm losing a minimum 90 hours per year on the margin.

Err, I'll play along. If you were in an autonomous car (or even a current ride-share), you could just work while en route rather than drive. I'm willing to bet you spend more hours sitting in traffic today than you ever would waiting on a car to arrive.

As for the rest, keep in mind we're comparing renting an autonomous car vs owning an autonomous car, not renting an autonomous car vs driving. So the actual rides are equivalent. The time difference is me getting in my car and telling it where to go vs me hailing a car, waiting 5-10 minutes for it to arrive (where my capacity to do any meaningful work is basically nil) and then tell it where to go, a minimum of 3 times a day. Maybe up to 12 times a day on a busy day. That's not an insignificant time loss over the medium/long term.

Granted it's all hypothetical and the actual value of the time lost would be highly situational, but it would be one of those small daily time-sucking inefficiencies, like walking into the other room to get paper towels as opposed to just putting a roll in the kitchen. When you do them every day, those add up.

You'll notice a common thread throughout Elon Musk's "big bets" (Tesla, SpaceX, etc.) He is extremely conservative with operational spending, and all of these companies are very capital-intensive. Just look at the difference between a "Tesla Store" (small, maybe 3 or 4 employees, cars can be stored offsite wherever is cheap) and a normal auto dealership (huge, dozens of employees, majority of expensive real estate is used for parking cars). The Tesla store is very efficient compared to the auto dealer.

When you have high capex, it makes it easier to fund your company through debt rather than equity since those loans/bonds are backed by capital assets with a non-zero liquidation value.

Tesla has a brand value higher than any other car. It's not an app that can be easily replicated. The dynamics are not the same as Uber.

By definition rental is going to be more expensive than ownership.

I don't doubt that companies will have fleets of cars for their employees, etc, but personal vehicles are not going to go away.

> but personal vehicles are not going to go away.

For the vast majority of the population, yes, they will go away.

Look at the quality of the interior of the average cab and you will see why a lot of people would prefer to own.

young people, old people, and homeless people.

Everyone else needs a car frequently.

Mileage is a critical component of cost of operation, and of range without stopping, which are pretty much (along with capacity and comfort) the things that matter most if you aren't driving and the car is just taking you from A to B.

That's even true if you don't own it (even the cost factor, since that—assuming an efficient market—still controls what you'll pay to use it.)

Autonomous cars are a side bet. A few hundred millions in R&D that would also attract good talent and nice PR for Uber.

But I don't think investors were stupid enough to invest billions into Uber based on that bet. Specially considering the fact that anyone who gets that technology first can make it big and Google had a few years of head start.

What has he done besides Red Swoosh? btw, Red Swoosh was sold to Akamai and then later disassembled when they realized there was no "there" there.

Another is that the board could have threatened to sue Kalanick for violating the loyalty and duty obligations that corporate officers have to shareholders - e.g. for suppressing systemic sexual harassment, withholding details about the Otto acquisition, etc.

I also don't think the examples he cited are violations of those duties.

Suppressing systemic sexual harassment violates his duty to report management problems to the board. Same with any meetings with Otto's founder a week prior to them leaving Google and founding Otto.

http://www.businessinsider.com/sears-ceo-will-pay-40-million...

How does a company so big not make a profit/could possibly go bankrupt?

My current understanding is companies either focus on growth (at a loss) or choose to focus on profit (with the risk of competition overtaking them or decay over time).

But lets say they go bankrupt in 1 year, couldn't they just switch to "profit mode"?

If there is no "profit mode" ... then why are people investing in the first place?

They are thinking more along the lines of "how can we make 10 billion dollars per year, for the next 150 years." Think General Electric.

That's why they require huge amounts of money from investors, so they can aggressively grow to a size where other companies can't touch them.

The huge amount of capital is sort of like a moat.

When you're larger, you have something called economy of scale. Which means you have enough resources to do stuff the smaller guys can't do.

When you're larger, you also have something called a data advantage. Which means you know so much more about your customers, you can predict things and make decisions the smaller guys can't.

Consider Facebook and Google. Together they're worth over a trillion dollars. Now ask yourself: what's the combined net worth of the second-biggest search engine and the second-biggest social network? Nothing close.

In a business where being second or third place is pretty good, you can switch to profit mode as you please. But Uber's valuation only makes sense to me if it lets them dominate a market like Google or Facebook does, setting prices and terms for the industry. I think that if they switch to profit mode, people will start to value them like a normal business, which would mean a giant drop in valuation.

I presume that's why board members supported an aggressive jerk for so long: Kalanick has been undeniably good at seizing territory, and if one sets aside little things like morals and externalities and long-term consequences, one could argue that aggressive jerkiness is exactly what Uber has needed.

Honestly, this market never struck me as one where dominance was even possible, so the investors' theories never made sense to me. But that's my best guess as to why they've been allowed to keep burning money like this.

Well that they might have to try and do now. But usually it is hard to move to 'profit mode' - you upset your customers when you start to charge double. The idea is that before you do that you have either killed of the competition or your competition 'moat' is so big that everyone wants to keep using you because of $reason and so you can charge what you like.

>If there is no "profit mode" ... then why are people investing in the first place?

Nobody is ever sure if any startup will get to 'profit mode' you simply look at their market / numbers etc and if you decide to invest then you hope the startup can figure it out. This is the investing gamble.

Stay. Wait... wait.... go fetch!

Stop growing maybe, but going bankrupt and shutting down?

Uber's problem is taxi companies have lower overhead because among other thing their drivers sometimes get hailed by people at street level. Which means their either taxi prices are lower and people stop using Uber or they pay drivers more and drivers mostly stop working for Uber.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-revenue-profit-and-loss...

I would assume that would also depend on how much of their fixed costs they can shed in conjunction with that. Uber may not die quickly but it could still die slowly if they lose the ability to move forward because they had to cut too much of their R&D and sales infrastructure to get to that positive number.

Plus such a massive layoff would be a big red flag to customers too. By Uber's nature, a particular ride isn't a long-term commitment, but I think people would start looking for a stronger-looking horse even so. One of those differences between homo economus, who every time they need a ride rationally examines all their options regardless of the future and realizes that as long as Uber can complete this ride the internal state of Uber doesn't matter, and homo sapiens, who will take into account the fact that Uber doesn't seem to be doing well even if doesn't rationally matter at this particular point.

> someone is going to eat the valuation hit

Liquidation preferences mean earlier investors (and employees holding Common Stock) take the hit of a down round.

Let's say Company X has 9,000 shares of common stock outstanding. It raises $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation with a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Its cap table is thus 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common.

It then raises $10 million at a $50 million valuation with similar preference terms. Its cap table is now 2,500 shares of Series B preferred stock on top of 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common.

Let's contemplate a $100 million exit. Everyone converts to common at $100 million / 12,500 shares, or $8,000 per share. Series A bought at $1,000 and thus sees an 8x return; Series B bought at $4,000 and thus sees 2x.

Let's contemplate a $50 million exit. Everyone converts at $50 million / 12,500 shares, or $4,000 per share. Series A gets 4x; B comes out flat.

Let's contemplate a $25 million exit. Series B does not convert. Instead, it demands its 1x liquidation preference and gets $10 million. This leaves $15 million on the table, or $1,500 per share. Series A converts and sees its 1.5x return; B comes out flat.

Let's contemplate a $15 million exit. Series B does not convert and gets its $10 million. This leaves $5 million on the table, or $500 per share. Series A does not convert and demands its $1 million. Series A and B come out flat; common gets $4 million / 9,000 shares, or about $444.

Let's contemplate a $10 million exit. Series B gets its $10 million and comes out flat; everyone else gets screwed.

Let's contemplate a Theranos exit. Everyone gets screwed. Turtleneck doesn't go to jail.

TL; DR Later stages are least volatile. They get screwed last, but also see upside last. Lower rungs' returns pay for this safety.

> Can you walk me through the math. How does one arrive at 1K of Series A preferred from 9K of common stock? How is that being derived? I'm not following.

At time t=0 (probably at founding and when hiring its first few employees) Company X issued 9,000 shares of common stock. At time t=1 it decides to issue 1,000 shares in a series A offering (most likely to VCs and outside investors). They are separate events.

1000 shares x $1000/share = $1m raised for the company in the series A.

> Also what is meant by "post-money" valuation? I'm assuming there is a corresponding "pre-money"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-money_valuation

In this case, pre-money valuation of Company X = $10m - $1m = $9m

> Lastly by "coming out flat" you mean made whole again i.e recouped their initial investment? Thanks.

Yes.

>"Let's say Company X has 9,000 shares of common stock outstanding. It raises $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation with a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Its cap table is thus 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common."

Can you walk me through the math. How does one arrive at 1K of Series A preferred from 9K of common stock? How is that being derived? I'm not following.

Also what is meant by "post-money" valuation? I'm assuming there is a corresponding "pre-money"?

Lastly by "coming out flat" you mean made whole again i.e recouped their initial investment?

Thanks.

And there aren't too many NYCs in the world.

Uber is far more expensive in NYC than other cities such as Chicago.

Now that Uber has allowed tipping and since there is a rating system, everyone must now tip otherwise risk getting low ratings which effectively makes NYC rides even more expensive than they had been.

Most people don't own cars in Manhattan so that they either have to take mass transit or use Uber/Lyft/Taxi. There are many elderly on fixed incomes that have trouble ambulating (moving around) where lower cost taxi service is important.

In NYC at least, Uber doesn't need all of that corporate overhead and perhaps they should spin it off into some low-overhead operation.

- There is already a rating system for drivers, and riders, so this isn't a "will be" thing, right?

- The rating system is not currently blind, as far as I know. Certainly riders can see drivers rating, and I believe drivers can see riders rating as well.

Even if they cost more I have no idea how I'm going to get around when I travel. The other options are so disgusting I'm not going back to that.

I would use them even if prices went up 30%.

There are a few costs like background checks that may go down when they stop expanding, but fewer than you might think.

Uber demand is definitely elastic.

I don't understand why that would decrease overhead?

I also don't understand why the other aspects of overhead (dispatcher, offices, taxi lots) don't add up to more than Uber (whose only cost is servers and support)

More than a team of four can manage certainly.

It does not, however, take a constant number of engineers to maintain the infrastructure that lets a single engineer push a feature to millions of users. (P/I)AAS can help, but you still need people to monitor performance, find regressions and bugs, and track them down.

Uber only works if there are enough drivers so that I can always get a ride. If I get told that I have to wait 30 minutes for a ride more than a tiny handful of times I'm uninstalling the app. Growing organically in region would be very tough since it would take too long to get enough drivers in place that users could rely on the service and conversely drivers would be unwilling to sign up because not enough users where bothering to use the service.

Those 4 can handle everything backend related too?

There is always demand for Uber/Lyft just because there isn't a taxi cab nearby 24/7. How is that difficult to understand?

There's certainly a market for app/phone jailable cabs because there isn't one within street hail range at all times, but regular cabs have been phone hailable forever (it's the only way to get one outside of a few major urban cores) and are increasingly app hailable. Aside from regulatory supply restrictions (flouting which may not be sustainable) there's no real basis for a market for alt-taxis as anything but interchangeable competitors supplying the same substitutable commodity as regular taxis.

For me, this wasn't particularly true, especially in San Francisco. The dispatch was unreliable and slow.

Other areas, sure!

Now that the idea of phone-trackable dispatch has become commonplace, regular taxi companies are starting to do this too.

With Uber you also get know the fare upfront, the time of arrival, no need to tell them your address, there is a driver reputation filter, passenger insurance and it's safer than normal cabs in many countries.

Not the same thing as a phone call.

Turns out the car service business isn't very sticky at all (even the drivers work for multiple companies...). Drivers start to leave and the downward spiral begins. They just couldn't get to self driving vehicles fast enough - which may be why they were trying to borrow technology from Google.

When Uber started and raised its first investment rounds, self-driving cars were too far away to be part of a business plan. I doubt the latest investors take that view either - spending billions per year until self-driving cars happen is a way too expensive way to build up a fickle user base who will switch the moment a competitor offers 10% lower rates.

And when self-driving cars do arrive, there is no reason to believe that Uber will have exclusive access to them. Google and other software companies will be licensing the technology to anyone who pays for it, car manufacturers will be selling cars to anyone who pays for it.

It may kill taxi driver as a career, but there is no defensible advantage to Uber compared to Lyft, Hailo, Taxify, and so on.

Uber as a play on driverless cars is a smokescreen to distract people from the fact they have little advantage over other companies and can't for the life of them turn a profit.

At this point why doesn't Uber just lay off a HUGE portion of their staff and kill the R&D. It's hard to imagine if they downsized significantly and quit investing in self driving cars, that they couldn't tip the needle into profitability.

Isn't that a fairly common move for a startup? Burn money to get off the runway, then downsize to stabilize?

And when will that be exactly? This entire thread is overflowing with nothing but fantasies of Uber dying - basically raw emotional hatred - and little else.

Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now. The absolute last problem that Uber has right now, is money.

Except that there are no shortage of people who have maintained this view long before Uber's CEO was asked to resign and before Susan Fowler's blog post. Also there are also plenty of people who have commented here that believe Uber's prospect without Travis Kalanick as CEO are not good and also believe he should not have been removed.

>"Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now."

You might want to look up the term "irrational exuberance":

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/irrationalexuberance.asp

"drivers start to leave" where are they leaving to?

The thread link is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456973

Not even sure if I installed Uber last month when I got a new iPhone.

So yea when billionaires are paying your taxi fair to try and drive the local taxi firms out of business naturally they're everywhere.

But when that cash runs out the necessary price hike could just as easily drive them out of business. It's not like the drivers have any great loyalty.

We really need pro-competition legislation to stop this sort of predatory capitalism.

$5 per hour per driver goes to Uber

Assume 80,000 drivers (half of # U.S. Uber drivers) drive 8 hours a day, 7 days a week

52 weeks in a year

5x8x80000x7x52=$1,164,800,000

So about $1.1 billion just in the US. The only expenses are at headquarters (engineering, operations, design, legal, marketing, support) and the tiny field support offices they have in each city (local, entry-level employees).

That's a non-sequitur

This conclusion refers to the idea of VCs(billionaires) subsidizing rides in order to remove the entrenched player(taxis.) How is that a non-sequitur?

I think the confusion stems from saying pro-competition legislation will prevent competition.

As it is, Uber doesn't need to do too much to hit break even. Some central costs cut, and a slight rise on price.

That creates a bit of a puzzle for industries with very thin operating margins that want to make significant investments in R&D. Generally they don't do it. That is why innovation at the Grocery store or in Long Haul trucking is so slow. From an engineering point of view, they are ripe for disruption, until you bring in an accountant to tell you that the disruption doesn't pencil out. Uber, like everything else, said to hell with it we're going ahead anyway. So how can they make things pencil out?

One option is to raise unit revenue in the future, which in an industry that's currently competitive means driving out the competition. IMO Uber was originally targeting this. But it turns out -- and really anyone could have told you -- that what Uber is doing isn't technically difficult. The heavy lifting is smartphones, GPS and Maps, whose availability made Uber/Lyft possible. Uber doesn't own any of the key technologies that make Uber possible, nor do they have a track record of being able to tackle really hard technology problems. They've had huge problems scaling and when Uber started using its own maps, it was a disaster. Bad maps is the #1 problem with Uber. Lots of new competitors have sprung up already that give basically an equivalent user experience, so Uber is not going to get real pricing power.

The next option would be "Lower unit costs in the future", But so far, that means spinning tales about self-driving cars, which is way beyond their technical ability as well as decades out even for those that have the chops to pull it off. IMO this only works because the latter round investors are naive about technology and the current investment climate is conducive to reaching for yield.

So while it's perfectly possible for Uber to continue existing as a concern, I don't think it's possible to satisfy their investors, and this means, unfortunately, that Uber may not make it. Many companies engage in a lot of self-destructive acts to meet unrealistic profit or growth goals set by investors, but in this case, Uber has only themselves to blame for setting these expectations. This is a shame, because I prefer Uber to Lyft and think they've created enormous value for both riders and drivers.

Why "win"? There's no moat. I suppose there will be patents, but those expire or can be worked around.

More likely is that whoever gets there first will make all the mistakes that others can learn from. Every major car company has a self-drive effort now. Apparently Tesla, GM, Ford, and BMW are pretty far along. Lyft has a few partnerships here. It's only a matter of time before most cars drive themselves to some degree.

self driving hardware+software is much more complex than just writing some software... a non player can't trivially get into the game just because someone else have higher advancement

No mass produced self driving appliances that any dumb human can use improperly. The industry won't take that chance of a poor impression and destroy public's confidence all together.

In urban/high density locations, a ride hail company leveraging driverless vehicles can make a killing.

It's not actually dying and it's not going to die.

Routinely skeptics here will point out that Uber is selling a $1 service for $0.75 (or a similar invented sum). Said skeptics then intentionally, comically ignore that Lyft is and has been doing the exact same thing and has radically less capital & valuation to play that game with. The name of the game is: last company standing; that's going to be Uber because they can afford to be and Lyft can't. It's that simple.

The downside of this approach is that Lyft doesn't have anywhere near the upside potential that Uber has. If Uber pulls off all of its ambitions it will be larger than Lyft could ever dream of being. The upside for Lyft's more humble goals is that it's chance of reaching them are much larger.

Unless Uber is willing to change its DNA and scale back its ambition, give up on its long term goals, and stay just a basic ride dispatching service then your analysis is incomplete. However perhaps this scaling back is what the CEO change is fundamentally about.

If internal, I gusss that's true. But we don't hear much about Lyft's internal workings. We don't know the morale of workers or how productive the company is.

About controlling costs - that's why I mentioned losses. Lyft is only in the US yet its losses are worse than Uber. It makes Lyft looks worse to me. Has Lyft said it is profitable anywhere or even break even?

But then Uber's insane valuation is not helping itself. I guess both companies are in bad positions, hard to say which is worse. And I agree it will be interesting to see how Uber does over the next year with new top executives.

Has Lyft said it is profitable anywhere or even break even?

The CEO said in a recent Forbes interview that their losses are currently coming in "under budget" and that they have a definite path to profitability. Make of that what you will.

And yeah agree with Kalanick and Uber by extension seem to be only content with winning everything. They only gave up on China after spending a ton of money and clearly not being able to win. Luckily they were able to get a decent stake in Didi from the merger and leaving China.

The drivers certainly care.

Travis offended and insulted the drivers, while Lyft is chugging along quietly. As long as people have brand loyalty to them (which they sure do), they'll win the ridesharing battle as it's looking like Uber is teetering

Yeah... that's why they have so much investment from car companies... ;-)

I'm blown away that you have to read more than half way down all the comments to get to this observation. It should be an automatic reply every time someone echoes the fantasy that Uber runs out of money and Lyft is magically left to take over. I don't understand the mental gymnastics and contortions one needs to make to arrive at this absurd idea.

Not sure what "its" is, but characterizing Lyft as a lifestyle business seems absurd. It's not as highly leveraged s Uber is, but that's one of the few companies I can think of that one might consider more aggressive.

Well, if you're spending more than your revenue, that is the eventual outcome if money stream from investors dries up.

Uber doesn't really have many physical assets that could be liquidated. Their value is entirely based on profitability. Which is currently negative.

In some cases this lack of maturity is particularly striking.

I think it's far to say you don't have a sustainable business model yet if you're dependent on future investment.

Even a company that is fully owned, with a sustainable and profitable business model, needs to ask the question "can I lose all this?" every day.

If the metric for "you don't have a real company" is you could potentially lose it, then nobody has a real company.

Would wait to see what'll happen to his equity before take a bet, but gonna guess will be sold high and eventually rebought after the crack when K will try to step back in at a better condition, with less stakes and more hard cash.

If there's a next round, it will probably involve a big haircut for the early-stage investors.

No, they could be crammed out by later investors' liquidation preferences. Depends on how down the down is.

Though these two types of events are obviously correlated (a down round makes a smaller exit more likely) they are not the same and should not be confused. A financing at a valuation that is a billion dollars less than the last round would be a down round, but a sale of the company at that same valuation would still far exceed the liquidation overhang.

– Dune, Frank Herbert

- God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert (a prescient book on social feedback loops, my favourite in the series)

-- Erich Fromm ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=1m34s )

> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.

-- Konrad Zuse

And when Picasso said that computers are useless because they only provide answers, was he just being witty, or pointing at an abyss, knowingly or not?

It is what we mean when we claim someone is "incapable of <x>" such as murder. It does not mean they do not physically possess the means, but rather that they lack the psychological impetus to do so.

More relevantly, a person who is both capable and willing to restrict your freedoms, potentially even unto death, has more control over you than a person who doesn't.

This isn't abstract theory. This is a description of "government". Would you pay any attention to the people claiming to be "the government" if they didn't have credible mechanisms for backing up their demands?

It is preferable that government not be solely founded on this power relation. It shouldn't be considered "sufficient" for good government. But it is certainly "necessary".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

It's why "non-coercive government" is an oxymoron.

Say you can kill a man, but irregardless of the threat to their life said man would refuse any and all of your orders, who can then be said to have 'control'?

In the end control means the ability to influence outcomes. There are many metrics, and for some choice of metric the capability of destruction is control.

They could smell the liquidity ...

I think they made a huge mistake in pushing Kalanick out, but I'm an outsider. There is surely something dark at play here, that we don't know about.

https://aleph.vc/hidden-cap-table-secrets-bd6c4e9e780e