If you mean the same as running a Taxi, you're ignoring the higher prices caused by the artificial scarcity imposed by the medallion system, and ignoring the cost / fee for of the medallion itself. Uber could absolutely return some of that to the user in the form of lower prices than traditional taxis; and keep some for itself, of course.
(To be fair, this was the eastern panhandle, which has the capital and the tourist attractions.)
The medallion system had its issues, but there were reasons it existed. City after city decided it didn't want infinite unregulated taxis in circulation.
The app is much smoother than the 2011-era cab experience — call a phone dispatcher, hope a cab shows up eventually. (Of course, Lyft provides exactly the same experience for consumers and even taxi companies are attempting to provide an app nowadays.)
A company that pays 50$ less to get an employee can reduce fairs on the order of 1 cent or make an extra 1 cent per ride. It's possible Uber might add a few cents per ride this way, but it's not particularly significant even assuming the average driver does not last that long.
In the UK when I call my normal cab company it knows where my phone is and asks you to press 1 to book a cab to my location - I then get a SMS confirming the booking another when the cab is dispatched and one when it arrives
It loses money on all its other research and investment schemes.
I don't know if there are any actual facts out?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-profitability/true-p...
They do a lot of things like driver incentives (for being logged on a certain amount of time etc, or for signing up in the first place - a lot of this is during market setup for a given city), complete discounted rides based on new signups for riders, etc. You can assume as their penetration into the market saturates for both drivers and riders that both of these costs will diminish.
A lot of people on Hacker News being US based also ignore the fact that Uber is highly international. I use it almost everywhere I travel for work, I think Malta was one of the few places they weren't. Lyft and similar competitors are mostly either US-specific or even city-specific. There is a lot of different economies in other regions to look at.
I work at Uber. We have publicly released financial statements each quarter. For q4 last year, our rides business was contribution margin positive (aka, it makes money). What loses money for us is R + D, and growth in new products (freight, eats, etc)
41% is such a ludicrously large way from 110% you need some real data to back it up. Further pretending the start date is means the data is a full year older is silly. At best you can have 2 more years of fiscal data.
If I pay $10 for a ride, $7 goes to the driver, which covers all the cost for the car, gas, his wage etc.
$3 goes to Uber. What marginal costs do the have for my ride that are anywhere close to that?
Global facilities and infrastructure.
Numerous exploratory business ventures, like Uber Eats.
What you're saying is that you've never built a $10 billion sales, global corporation before. Which is very understandable, few have.
This is my original point!
It's the same reason Google is invulnerable in web search.
Self-driving cars definitely don't have a network effect. They also don't have the came kind of economy of scale as Google. A person who learns to drive in one, specific part of the US is able to drive, with minor additional learning, in any part of the US. Yes, there's some minimum size necessary to get the data for self-driving cars. But unlike with search, where the minimum size is generally "the whole web", the minimum size for self-driving cars is much smaller. That's why we're seeing many different companies work on it.
But yes, Google also has scale economies.
s/b
More users -> more labeled data -> better product -> more users
ML systems need lots of labeled data, not just lots of data. This is one of the primary why game playing AI's have had such great successes, tons of labeled data are relatively cheap. Great discourse on this and other related issues here:
https://medium.com/@karpathy/alphago-in-context-c47718cb95a5
"Airbnb is just a fancy ebay CRUD app for rooms, anybody can code that!"
As a rider, it's great to use it while you can, but there is no actual business there.
Airbnb on the there hand has all the advantages people like to see in a business.