Nobody holds an allegiance to Lyft or Uber - they pick whichever is currently a better deal for both driving and riding. Uber's recent loyalty program is the first thing that slightly moves this in favor of continuing to use Uber, but it's only a little incentive. Large swings in price still favor switching.

Their only moat comes from being able to undercut competitors with VC money in any market they appear in until the competitor is dead and Uber can then raise prices to be profitable.

It's probably a winner take all market. A SDC competitor would be a threat, but I'd be both impressed and surprised if Google could pull that off.

If you're a business traveler, you can Uber out of most airports without having to install the local application, and business customers are less price sensitive than local customers in general.

Definitely agree with your point about nobody having an allegiance for local rides, and it's not clear if Uber can defend against hyper local upstarts at scale.

That's not exactly true: I use Lyft exclusively because have anti-loyalty against Uber because of their greater level of past unscrupulous behavior and scandals.

Keybase could be this.

The main way to get people in would be a focus on event scheduling relying on twilio and sms for including users that don’t have accounts.

Make it cheap but not free ($1/month for people with more than 25 contacts) and advertise no ads or tracking ever.

Also having up to date contacts to stay in touch. Phone numbers and addresses change and it’s hard to know when that happens (and currently most people don’t put this on FB).

I’d want something simple.

what did you mean?

Not setting up your own locally hosted diaspora node.

FWIW I deleted fb 3 years ago.

I heard the same from drivers. It's the ultimate replaceable commodity. Drivers jump ship on an instant and so do I as user. I don't care if it's Lyft, Uber or anybody else.

I just don't see how Uber can maintain said network on the long run and still be profitable, not something I'd put my money in.

What Uber is doing would generally be described as predatory pricing on other sectors. On sufficiently unregulated markets such is Uber's it's extremely risky, no anti-trust legislation is needed to trump it, just a continuously low entry barrier, including lax regulation. For a more concrete, though only related example (rather than speculation as to Uber's future) see Dow's history.

It absolutely takes tremendous capital expenditure to build the network. Uber has an accumulated deficit of $20 billion precisely because they subsidized both drivers and riders to build the two-sided network.

It doesn't have to be winner-take-all. A duopoly in most medium to large cities is perfectly viable. But you won't see dozens of competitors because the drivers and riders would wait too long for a match in a sparse network.

Unless the ride-share commodity can be differentiated some other way, it would take large subsidies for a long time to make much of a dent in Uber.

It's like breaking trail: It's a whole lot of work for the person in front, but it's damn easy for everyone else.

Uber, being first mover, had to spend great heaping piles of money convincing people to become rideshare drivers in the first place. Because they had to sell people on the idea of driving folks for a living, and then get them to buy new cars that meet their standards, and then train them on how to be a rideshare driver, and all that fun stuff.

Everyone else just needs to convince a group of people who have already bought the car and learned how to drive it that it's in their interest to hedge their bets. Which, given how Uber has historically treated its drivers, is something that requires approximately zero convincing.

I always think some Uber drivers shall copy Uber and run a non-profit version of Uber to compete on pricing. What can prevent this?

Besides, companies only pay taxes on profits, so loss making companies don't pay any tax either. (And usually have some kind of ability to carry forward losses to reduce future tax bills)

Why would anyone work voluntarily for what would essentially just be a company that gave all it's profits to the drivers but expected them to work for free. Volunteers tend to work for causes they believe in for some ethical or moral reason, and while I sympathize with the drivers like I'm sure many do I doubt many would work for free so someone else can earn more.

Why would some people work for free so that drivers can earn more or riders could pay less?

Uber racked up a $20 billion cumulative deficit by subsidizing both drivers and riders.

Even if you cloned the Uber app and had people volunteer to do customer support, you'd still wind up with a service where riders pay more, or drivers earn less, or both.

That works for BlaBlaCar [0] that's true carpooling, without drivers trying to make a living on the platform. Riders pay less and drivers get paid less.

But if Uber is losing $4 billion a year at the current prices, it's hard to see how there would be a sustainable market where drivers make more and riders pay less.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlaBlaCar

100B pump/dump is a scam. Think about all the indices-tracking-ETFs/Funds that will pick up this overpriced stock(our hard earned 401ks). Sigh. Silicon Valley should not have pumped up what was originally a good idea. This has a high chance of ending badly

The point of investing is deciding what you believe in (financially speaking)! If you don’t like Uber, make some money on it! You can’t short in an IRA, or sell naked options, but you can sell futures or buy put options. All of these would express a bearish sentiment on Uber. So don’t feel like you sre being screwed, go make some alpha!

For the record I agree with you, and will short Uber the day it IPOs. I’ve already made some good money on shorting Lyft and expect I’ll do well on the same strat with Uber.

For the riders, Uber Rewards and Uber Cash (that actually forces you to reload if you have below whatever your current ride costs) also make the product quite sticky and make the rider less inclined to take other options on margin.

Small economic tools like these that exploit our psychological biases (e.g. loss aversion, gamification) may go a long way in protecting the moat in this commoditized, competitive environment, and Uber seems to be ahead so far.

(Of course, whichever player comes out with SDCs wins the whole pie)

But how many have they _stopped_ driving for?

If Lyft and Uber are so easily exchangeable, why is Lyft is still a minority in the US while spending more money?

There's something more interesting here.

So unless the incentives are massive, a driver will always look for the next ride by any means necessary. It's nearly never worth it to "wait for a better option".